MovieChat Forums > The Celluloid Closet (1996) Discussion > Cut the crap! United States didn't have ...

Cut the crap! United States didn't have a Joseph Goebbels in the 1950s.


I have seen The Celluloid Closet. It is available to anyone for free viewing on You Tube in multiple parts. I disagree with some of its innuendo. How do we know the gay people featured in soundbite interviews speak for all or even a majority of LGBT people from back in the day? Read some of the work of Gertrude Stein. She loved many movies, books and plays even if they had no lesbian characters with whom she could identify. She was on record as loving The Great Gatsby. (She did not write it.)

The Celluloid Closet gives me the false impression that every single person who ever performed a same - sex act had the same emotional reaction to sitting through a movie that alluded to opposite sex relationships exclusively during its 90 minutes, two hours or four hours (i.e. Gone With The Wind). The documentary insinuates that all these categorized people, including everyone who has been labeled a closeted gay by some gay historians (and who committed suicide like Hemingway), secretly longed to sit through a movie starring a sympathetic "gay" character. Supposedly, they would have loved to see and hear James Baldwin's David from the 1956 book Giovanni's Room or to see and hear Gertrude Stein's persona ... but no !! Hollywood studio moguls like Jack Warner forced them to think that heterosexuality was normal (even if it was a one - night stand?) and that homosexuality (people? acts?) was twisted.

The studio executives in Hollywood forced millions of these poor emotionally suffering people to watch a lot of "heterosexual" characters and a few twisted "homosexual" ones. The moviegoers' inner turmoil increased until some committed suicide (Hemingway has been labeled gay -- I'm not kidding -- by Zelda Fitzgerald and many years later by others who claim to be sane) and other moviegoers' became nasty, hateful queens like Perez Hilton.

I don't buy any of this. For one thing, what about the millions of supporting characters in movies whose sexuality never was alluded to ? Like the characters Tony Randall played in several Rock Hudson films. What about Gig Young?

What about Eve Arden? She was a star of a 1950s television sitcom who had an occasional boyfriend there, but in movies she was a supporting character who rarely, if ever, paired with the leading man in the end. Does that mean she was supposed to be gay as Selma Blair's character of Vivian allegedly was (not verified) in Legally Blonde?

That's right, as late as 2000 (after many people had outed themselves on Oprah), bloggers started saying Vivian was gay even though the film's two screenwriters never said she was.

So there's one major problem with The Celluloid Closet and its fans. They describe a post - World War 2 Joseph Goebbels - like campaign to vilify a certain "minority" of Americans (but didn't Gore Vidal say a majority of people have tried gay acts?), and they never address the character actors like Randall, Arden, George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Another problem with the portrayal of a 1950s / 1960s Goebbels - driven American holocaust has to do with the popularity of reading books in that era. Can anyone pronounce the name James Baldwin? People who were annoyed by a lot of movies in the 1950s and 1960s were being told by their parents and schoolteachers to read books, instead. James Baldwin created "David" for millions of people to enjoy in 1956. There was no Internet to distract you from reading.

I know some friendly, tolerant older gay men (when I met them they used the word gay before I did) who were perfectly happy to identify with "heterosexual" characters -- especially female ones like Dolly Levi -- throughout decades of movie watching.

Many lesbians have been known to savor any movie or book whose protagonist is female. "Women are women," said Gloria Steinem in the early 1970s when Rita Mae Brown asked her if lesbians might ruin the women's liberation movement. Then you have the Civil War reenactment lesbians, mostly on the East Coast. (You can't call me homophobic on that one. Ellen DeGeneres devoted an episode of her sitcom to them.) They never say the reason for Mary Lincoln's issues was that she was a closeted lesbian. They don't care what she did in private. They want to talk about the soldiers. Soldiers in battle don't have private lives.

For the reasons listed above people should take The Celluloid Closet with a grain of salt. It's trying to prove that millions of LGBT people felt this way or that in movie theaters during the evil 1950s and 1960s. That's very speculative.

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Well I can't speak for every gay and lesbian out there in the world; but I sure know that I feel a bit like that a lot of the time.

I personally find it very difficult to identify with the multitude of heterosexual sub-plots found in just every major film out there, especially those that manage to make it to the big screen.

Perhaps I'm just being greedy. The homosexual identity is, after all, a minority compared to the heterosexual one. Yet it frustrates me that the lack of direct portrayal of homosexual characters defy even the the most 'conservative' of statistics relating to the number of homosexuals out there!

There's a reason why film-makers include heterosexual romantic sub-plots in their films... and that is because they understand that doing so will attract a larger audience and thus earn bigger bucks. But don't blame me if such inclusions do little attract to me, and especially don't be surprised if I can't identify with any of it. No, while I have nothing against heterosexual relationships, something inside me burns for a love-story which I can actually relate to. As time goes on, I find it more and more difficult to cope with Hollywood's suggestion that homosexual characters need not or must not be entitled to lead roles.


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I don't have a problem watching movies with heterosexual couples. I can often relate to their stories. That's not the issue, and certainly not the issue I felt The Celluloid Closet was getting at. For example, when I was younger and watched Fried Green Tomatoes, I could sense that there was more to the story of the two women, who were indeed lesbians in the book. It's just something you pick up on sometimes (whether it's intended or not). But in this case it was. And in those cases, it's extremely frustrating. In today's world, it's equally as frustrating with all of the homosexual characters in television and on film who are overly flamboyant caricatures. I can't relate to them, and it's different than watching heterosexual characters, because I am a homosexual, but I'm watching someone that is supposed to be "me" and is absolutely not. Maybe if I was heterosexual I'd have the same problem watching heterosexual characters, but that's another story. I always say I wish there was a show like The Cosby Show for homosexuals, where sexuality is not the focus - it just is.

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