Mirror, mirror

I'm betting that The Celluloid Closet is going to break Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's winning streak. The co-directors won an Oscar for 1989's AIDS documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; Epstein had won earlier for The Times of Harvey Milk, about the martyred gay politician. The Celluloid Closet may be their most entertaining and accessible film yet, but it will rub a sore spot with Academy voters, as its subject is the often shameful history of the way gays and lesbians have been depicted in Hollywood movies.

Based on Vito Russo's groundbreaking 1982 study of the same name, Closet is impressive for the comprehensiveness of its decade-by-decade survey. The format is straightforward: voiceover narration by Lily Tomlin, a wealth of both famous and rare clips, and valuable explanation of their resonance by a big-name roster of stars who've played gay parts -- Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Shirley MacLaine, Tony Curtis -- and such writers and directors as Gore Vidal, Armistead Maupin (who wrote Tomlin's narration), Paul Rudnick, Jay Presson Allen, Susie Bright, and John Schlesinger. Think of it as a gay and lesbian That's Entertainment!

The major lesson the movie takes from Russo's book (as well as from such previous documentaries as Mark Rappaport's Rock Hudson's Home Movies) is one that will be familiar to gay and lesbian moviegoers, though perhaps eye-opening to straights: that gay content has been in movies since Edison (one of the inventor's early reels shows a male couple dancing), if one knew how to read it. The images were surprisingly daring and overt in the years before the Production Code was imposed in 1934 (there's the famous clip of a tuxedo-clad Marlene Dietrich kissing a woman in Morocco). In the code years, if one took the hints, it was still possible to find gay characters: swishy villains (The Maltese Falcon), comic sissies (Edward Everett Horton, Tony Randall), butch cowgirls (Johnny Guitar), and sensitive nonconformists (Rebel Without a Cause). Homosexuality finally dared speak its name in the '60s, but gay and lesbians were invariably depicted as self-loathing and suicidal. Only in the years since The Boys in the Band (1970) have more balanced portrayals begun to emerge, and progress has been unsteady and incomplete.

The film's only weak spot is the its diffuse take on the present day. Epstein and Friedman can't seem to decide whether the current situation is an improvement or a backslide, though that's not really their fault. For one thing, Russo died in 1990, so his analysis of recent trends is sadly unavailable. Moreover, recent gay images don't lend themselves to pigeonholing or easy evaluations. Was Philadelphia, with its saintly, seemingly sexless gay hero, a breakthrough or a sellout? There are more openly gay characters now than ever before, but their cumulative effect is hard to gauge. It's not just well-rounded gay characters that are missing from the screen; it's a well-rounded group of gay characters. Most gays in Hollywood movies are still middle-class white men; there are few lesbians and even fewer gays of color.

There is an increasingly well-rounded group of gay characters in independent and foreign movies, and though Closet shows clips from The Living End and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it glosses over the fact that these are not Hollywood movies, and that the most interesting gay content is coming from films made outside the studios (or, for that matter, from cable and network TV). Given that most of the writers and directors interviewed here are gay, it's odd that the movie also completely ignores the issue of what influence gay filmmakers and executives (open or closeted) have had, not only on sneaking gay images into movies, but also on keeping them out so as to avoid drawing attention to themselves or offending the perceived sensibilities of the heartland. As Shirley MacLaine points out, discussing the timid version of The Children's Hour she starred in 35 years ago, "The public is always ahead of us, as far as what they're ready for."

The reason the issue of positive and negative images of gays is important, as Closet points out, is that Hollywood is the myth maker that has "taught straight people what to think about gay people and gay people what to think about themselves." But as Harvey Fierstein notes here, even negative images of gays and lesbians are better than no images. For gays and lesbians, for all moviegoers, he says, "The greatest need is the mirror of our own experiences."