All last year gays were knocked, from black lesbian witches in the Star Wars series The Acolyte to Gov. Tim Walz, a mincing Cub Scout leader who helped sink the Democratic Party’s election chances.
There was Luigi Mangione—a trust-funded, Ivy-educated, homicidal psychotic—killing a father of two because he disapproved of the industry that employed his victim. Some say Luigi had a thing for purchasing sex and companionship from black gay men with expensive gifts. Don Lemon lost his job at CNN. Ellen DeGeneres decamped to the Cotswolds, where immediately her new home was flooded. The Democrats ran pencil-necked fabulist Adam Schiff for the Senate; he won his seat, but the Dems lost the Senate. Schiff, who represents California while owning a home in Potomac, Maryland, where his wife works and his children attend school, replaced Laphonza Butler, the only black lesbian Senator. And in the last few days of the year, the monstrous Zulock couple who adopted two special needs boys and then raped them for profit as pay per view porn were sentenced to prison terms. (Though better categorized as pedophiles than gays, the Zulocks decorated their house with gay rights paraphernalia.)
Given how much bad luck famous and connected gays had, maybe it’s not surprising that they were once again depicted as miserable creatures in 2024’s gay movies. The International Movie Database reports there were at least 10 gay movies out this year, worldwide, and perusing them there’s a number of lighthearted or upbeat offerings featuring first loves or couples adopting or having children. But they aren’t U.S. or Anglo-American (Canadian, Australian) films. Our local Hollywood (and Hollywood adjacent) product fits closer to Jack Paar’s 1962 warning about the gays, in his book My Saber Is Bent. In a chapter titled "Fairies and Communists" Paar wrote: "There used to be a time when it looked like the Communists were taking over show business. Now it's fairies. They operate a lot alike, actually; both have a tendency to colonize. Just as there used to be no such thing as one Communist in a play or movie, now there is no such thing as one fairy. Where you find one, you usually find a baker's dozen swishing around… When I hear that some fairy is producing or directing or acting in a play, I can often name some of the rest of the cast, even if I've never heard it... The poor darlings, as they sometimes call themselves, are everywhere in show business. The theater is infested with them and it's beginning to show the effects. 'The New York theater is dying,' the late Ernie Kovacs complained recently, 'Killed by limp wrists.'"
IMDB’s top 10 are mainly foreign films, and almost none can be found on Netflix or Amazon yet. The two you can see in the U.S., at least if you live in a large city with a gay population and make an effort, are Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel, starring Daniel Craig (it actually made IMDB’s list) and Midas Man, a biopic of Brian Epstein, the gay British Jew who plucked four Liverpool lads from obscurity and made them The Beatles. They are both wretched stories, almost as sad as early gay theater and films like The Boys in the Band (1970, remade in 2020) or Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1969) about alcoholic, self-hating, bitchy gays.
Queer was the first novel Burroughs wrote, from 1951-1953, but it wasn’t published until 1985 (which seems cowardly since Truman Capote and Gore Vidal each published gay novels in 1948), when the gay rights movement was going and there were the beginning of queer studies in Ivy English Departments and gay (non-porn) bookstores in major cities. His books are reportedly autobiographical. Craig plays an aging and independently wealthy American living in Mexico City dive (though with beautiful views), who spends his time drinking in various mainly gay-oriented bars and trying to pick up younger men, including young Mexican men who may or may not (he makes wrong assumptions) be prostitutes. An obese Jason Schwartzman plays his comical friend, apparently not young and thin enough to be his lover, who meets him every night to tell him about his conquest from the night before, who invariably steals something, a watch, a typewriter, boots. Eventually he meets, becomes obsessed with, and “keeps” a young Eugene Allerton (actor Drew Starkey).
Though to two women, Burroughs was gay, and met his first wife, a White Russian aristocrat who’d become a radical leftist, in the degenerate, sexually liberated Berlin of the 1930s (the same scene where W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood started as young gay writers). His second wife, Barnard co-ed Joan Vollmer, Burroughs killed at a party in 1951 in Mexico City, supposedly shooting her in the forehead by accident while playing a William Tell type game with a shot glass balanced on her head. Burroughs then fled to the United States to avoid prosecution in Mexico, and started writing Queer.
Lee takes Allerton on an all-paid trip through South America, ending up in the Amazon, searching for a plant whose extracts supposedly heightens telepathic potential, according to an article in a popular magazine. Lee’s hoping that such an elixir will enable him to be closer to Allerton and experience real love. Along the way he tells everyone, eventually a kookie doctor (actress Lesley Manville) “doing research” and taking drugs in the rain forest, that the “Russians and the Americans” are studying this plant. Burroughs had sought, like many Ivy-educated and upper-class men, to join the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, but was never hired, whether for drug use, homosexuality, or some other reason. Queer dissolves into drug-induced fantasy sequences and when Lee ends up back in Mexico City with his old friends years later it is unclear if Allerton is dead or travelling with another wealthy older man.
Midas Man is likewise a sad story, though perhaps a better film. It’s not released in the U.S. until January 22, though there have been preview screenings (I saw it at the D.C. Jewish community center). Another biopic, its protagonist, Brian Epstein, is more admirable, a middle-class boy who becomes through hard work and entrepreneurial intelligence, the wealthy promoter of the Beatles. Epstein eventually becomes ensnared by drugs and dies young, though he manages not to look a fool like the gays in Queer, or kill anyone. Instead he seems to be heartbroken over a failed romance with an extremely hot American would-be actor, played by (heterosexual) British actor Ed Speleers. I was happy to see this movie just for the biography, and though not a stinker it pales beside big budget films about rock stars like Freddy Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody $52 million budget) or Brian Wilson (Love and Mercy $10 million budget).
