Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to be Gay on Screen

and Pretending to be Gay on Screen

Gilad Padva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000057676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen examines cinematic depictions of pretending-to-be-gay, assessing performances that not only reflect heteronormative and explicitly homophobic attitudes, but also offer depictions of gay selfhood with more nuanced multidirectional identifications.

The case of straight protagonists pretending to be gay on screen is the ideal context in which to study unanticipated progressivity and dissidence in regard to cultural construction of human sexualities in the face of theatricalized epistemological collapse. Teasing apart the dynamics of depictions of both sexual stability and fluidity in cinematic images of men pretending to be gay offers new insights into such salient issues as sexual vulnerability and dynamics and long-term queer visibility in a politically complicated mass culture which is mostly produced in a heteronormative and even hostile cultural environment. Additionally, this book initially examines queer uses of sexuality masquerade in Alternate Gay World Cinema that allegorically features a world pretending to be gay, in which straights are harassed and persecuted, in order to expose the tragic consequences of sexual intolerance. Films and TV series examined as part of the analysis include The Gay Deceivers, Victor/Victoria, Happy Texas, William Friedkin's Cruising and many other straight and gay screens.

This is a fascinating and important study relevant to students and researchers in Film Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sexuality Studies, Communication Studies and Cultural Studies.

1 Staging effeminacy

Screening the perilous pleasures of pretending to be a sissy

In the straight mind, and in some masculinist gay men’s minds too, the sissy is still synonymous with defenseless maleness (baby, crybaby, mamma’s boy), negative characteristics (cuckold, coward, namby-pamby, milksop, pushover, wimp, wuss, yellow-belly, softy, milquetoast, pussy whipped, prissy, dopey, wisecracker), fragile animals (chicken, jellyfish, fraidy-cat), festive animals (peacock, gold fish, puddle, hoopoe, angora kitten), delicate flowers (daisy), delightful foods (cream puff), girly first names (Nelly, Chrissy, Trixie, Roxie, Tillie, Josie, Suzy, Gertie, Dotty, Dolly, Britney, Madonna, Celine, Joanie, Loretta, Maggie, Margo, Molly, Velma) and, unsurprisingly, iconic faggotry (pansy, pantywaist, half ass, queenie).

Yet sissyness plays a significant role in queer culture, anticipated by historic dandyism, decadent flamboyancy, and camp subculture and its glamorous drag performances and spectacular outfits. “Lavender boys,” commonly associated with neatness, stylishness, festivity, indulgence, aestheticism and obsessive interest in opera, classic music, ballet, art and design, were at the forefront of gay scenes around the world for decades, arguably for centuries.

Mark Simpson contends that

The persecution of sissies is a necessary inducement to other boys not to give up their own struggle toward manhood by showing them what happens to those who fail […] In such a culture, regardless of their actual sexual preference, all sissies are de facto ‘faggots’. And all faggots, regardless of their actual level of masculinization, are de facto sissies.¹

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointedly considers the pathologizing and consequent attempts to “cure” or masculinize effeminate boys as an attack against homosexuality. Sedgwick criticizes the psychiatry of the late 20th century for its renaturalization and enforcement of gender assignments and for its incapacity to offer even the slightest resistance to the wish endemic in the culture surrounding and supporting it that gay people not exist.² Further, most bodies of the state enforce heteronormativity all but unquestioningly, even in the face of violence.

As David Plummer notes, initially young boys are prone to attracting homophobia if they are too close to girls. “Later,” he explains, “from puberty onwards, boys who do not associate with girls enough or who do not objectify women are vulnerable to homophobic criticism.”³ Given the omnipresent and unrelenting pressure on gay youth, as Kittiwut Jod Taywaditep notes, it is not surprising that gender-nonconforming boys attempt to defeminize and conform to gender-role expectations. “Also unsurprising,” he adds, “are the findings that those who do not or cannot defeminize appear to pay a price for their persistent gender nonconformity.”⁴ Richard Dyer notes that the androgyne, or the in-between type, is a prevalent representation of the gays in popular culture. Queens and dykes represent homosexuals based on gender assumptions – that is, queens and dykes are in between the two genders of masculinity and femininity. Thus, dykes are mannish and queens are effeminate. The advancement of the notion of “real men” in particular has led to the unavoidable production of the sissy as an inferior type.⁵

Male adolescents are neglected and persecuted in bigoted environments, particularly if they are effeminate boys who are particularly suspected of being gays because of their overt look, behavior, speech, cultural identification and aforementioned untraditional fields of interest. In my book Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture, I suggest that for those boys, femininostalgia – nostalgic, recuperating memories of their initial coming to terms with their transgressive masculinity and flamboyant effeminacy – can be highly valuable. Recognizing and respecting one’s effeminate nostalgia can be a healing process that reflects a gradual coming to terms with one’s early transgression. It is an intimate realization of one’s otherness, which retrospectively precedes the subject’s (homo)sexuality.⁶ Femininostalgia is therapeutic because it reconsiders the gay man’s effeminacy and enables him to regard this character not as a stigma, but rather as an inner, integral and intimate part of his personality and self-recognition. Yet staging (and restaging) effeminacy is a complicated, irritating and stunning (counter)cultural assignment with its own perilous risks and pleasures.⁷

If feminine expression can be regarded, according to Deborah Tannen, as “genderlect,” then I suggest that effeminate expression is about “­genderialect.” Language socialization has a major influence on how males and females use language.⁸ Girls for example learn to be more careful in their speech, while boys tend to show their strength and power through language.⁹ Tannen¹⁰ and Jennifer Coates¹¹ support this claim by declaring that language and gender are inextricably linked and both our gender and language are developed through our participation in everyday social practice. Yet I suggest that the distinction between feminine and masculine is a dichotomous gendered division while effeminacy and masculinity are gender traits, qualities, mannerisms and behaviors. Although effeminacy derives from the fundamental gender division, it is a distinct (sub)cultural phenomenon.

Popularity breeds contempt: extravagant homosexuality and its perilous effeminate pleasures

One of the most dominant heterocentric imperatives is an idealization of a strict distinction between ultra-virile manhood and girly womanhood. In contrast, queerness is often perceived by the heteronormative society and its powerful popular culture (and parts of the LGBTQ community itself) as hybridized, somewhat “in-between” androgyny based on interwoven female and male physical and behavioral traits, gaits, gestures and mannerisms.

Richard Dyer considers the “in-between” type as one of the most known and prevalent patterns in the representation of homosexuality in the 20th century (this tendency also exists, to a certain extent, in 21st-century popular culture). The queen and the dyke both represent homosexuality through what is assumed to be a gender correlation – that is, both are represented as if their sexuality means that they are in between the two genders of masculinity and femininity.¹² Thus dykes are mannish and queens are effeminate. The heterosexual notion that a Real Man does exist had led to the unavoidable production of the sissy as an inferior type whose existence proves the superiority of the Real Man.¹³ Nevertheless, feminine gays do exist, of course, and concealing or excluding them from the screen is also problematic.

Vito Russo contends in his book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies that stereotypes are based on a grain of truth, and he does not see any reason why there should not be any representations of feminine gays if these are fair representations.¹⁴ Dyer suggests that iconography is a kind of short-hand – it places a character quickly and economically. This is particularly useful for gay characters, for, “short of showing physical gayness or having elaborate dialogue to establish it in the first few minutes, some means of communicating immediately that a character is gay has to be used.”¹⁵ Moreover, Dyer notes that by recognizing the gayness of the character during his first emergence, all the character’s following actions and words can be understood, explained or explained away, as those of a gay person.

Effeminizing or “in-betweening” gay men is deeply rooted in the history of Western effeminacy. Peter Hennen agrees in his book Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine that effeminacies currently circulating in the industrialized West reflect a high degree of gender polarity, a minoritizing perspective that nevertheless operates as a nearly universal disciplinary mechanism exacting an impressive level of gender conformity among most men because of effeminacies’ strong association with homosexuality.¹⁶

Notwithstanding, Alan Sinfield emphasizes that the association of effeminacy and homosexuality advanced as necessary and natural by much of our contemporary culture is indeed a relatively new social phenomenon. His research of literature of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries indicates that the meaning of the word “effeminate” has been radically transformed in the past 400 years. Initially, the word depicts a superfluity of feminine emotionality and overdramatic sentimentality.¹⁷ The object of the effeminate man’s desire could be either male or female; this had no bearing on his gender status. The critical feature was the fact that he was womanly in his melodramatic expressive attachment. Certain iconic characters appearing in the European plays written in this period – the dandy, the beau, and the fop or the poseur – were mostly perceived by the public as both heterosexual and effeminate and flamboyantly campy.

Camp is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “Affected, theatrically exaggerated; effeminate; homosexual.”¹⁸ Camp has been categorically defined by Susan Sontag in “Notes on Camp” as a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style:

It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off”, of things-being-what-they-are-not… The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility… What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.¹⁹

Jack Babuscio identified camp with queer subculture based on gay sensibility:

As a creative energy reflecting a consciousness that is different from the mainstream; a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that spring from the fact of social oppression; in short, a perception of the world which is colored, shaped, directed, and defined by the fact of one’s gayness.²⁰

According to Daniel Harris, camp subculture is typically identified with drag shows, worship of fabulous divas, attraction to disco and platform shoes, emphasized artificiality, kitsch and decadence.²¹ Camp subculture, however, is also political as it criticizes the arbitrariness and non-naturalness of heteronormative sexual definitions, and offers freer and more liberated lifestyles. In its theatricality, camp subculture is a mode of productive, lived experience. It is a journey into the imaginary, a free-spirited way to reevaluate feelings about mythic urban gay life in metropolitan cities, now and then. Drag performances, as explicit embodiments of camp subculture, expose how (artificially) constructed – rather than biological –the gender identifications are: heavy make-up, flamboyant frocks, inflated wigs and glittering jewels. Judith Butler suggests that if gender itself is drag, and if it is an imitation that regularly produces the ideal it attempts to approximate, then gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or a psychic gender core.²²

The gay deceivers enjoying a slice of festive life

Effeminate, festive gayness is flamboyantly performed by The Gay Deceivers (see Figure 1.1),²³ a late 1960s low-budget sex comedy that focuses on two young men who pretend to be gay when they are required to join the Army. Danny (Kevin Coughlin) and his friend Elliot (Larry Casey) act the part and camp it up in front of Army officer Dixon (Jack Starrett), who doesn’t buy it. When the two return to their apartment to celebrate with their girlfriends, they are surveil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fabricated screens: sexual authenticity, flamboyant masquerade and the queer epistemology of pretending-to-be-gay films
• 1 Staging effeminacy: Screening the perilous pleasures of pretending to be a sissy
• 2 Take it like a man: Cruising machismo in Leatherland
• 3 Pretending to be allies?: Straight women, their pretending-to-be-gay admirers and sexual authentication
• 4 Odd couples, queer partnerships and gay marriages in pretending-to-be-gay films
• 5 Screening compulsory homosexuality: The perilous pleasures of parodying heteronormativity and fantasizing a topsy-turvy martyrdom
• Afterword: When gay masks gaze at the deceiver’s straight skin: the grotesque screening of deceptive horrors and delights
• References
• Filmography
• Index