GLR May-June 2024

ESSAY Queer Ghosts on Oscar Night A NDREW W HITE

H OW HAVE LGBT people been represented in Oscar-honored films to date, and might it have been otherwise? The first actor to win an Academy Award for playing a character who was indisputably gay was William Hurt, for the doomed (and morally inscrutable) Luis Molina in Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman , in 1985. To be sure, there had been queer-coded characters in Best Picture-winning films before that— Lawrence of Arabia and Midnight Cowboy spring to mind—but, with Hurt’s Spider Woman win, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences betrayed a pattern of hostile prejudice toward LGBT people that would play itself out in the years to come. That LGBT people in film are disproportionately repre sented as killers or as killed (or both) is not breaking news. Ac tive and passive homophobia in Hollywood was sweepingly chronicled by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet and by sub sequent film historians. Here my focus—and grievance—is with

Oscar-winning films killed off cisgender and straight charac ters at a similar rate to queer ones, we would be sorely mistaken. Since the Spider Woman offered Molina her Kiss, 25 or more straight and cisgender characters have survived slavery, the Old West, World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, homelessness, and Hannibal Lector in Academy Award winning movies. Only thirteen straight characters have died in Oscar-winning roles or as leads in Best Picture winners since 1985—giving heterosexual and cisgender characters a three in four chance of survival and LGBT characters approximately the same odds of perishing before the credits roll. That’s entertainment, so they say. Oscar-surviving, cine matically out LGBT people of the last four decades have in cluded Queen Anne of England, Don Shirley (in GreenBook ), and Truman Capote, along with the gay youth Chiron in Moon light (2016) and the bundle of stereotypes that Penelope Cruz portrayed in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) — and that’s about it . Adding insult to injury, the odds that a Best Actor playing a gay character will be straight and an Oscar win ner playing a transgender character will be cis and op posite sex are 100 percent. Setting aside the then-closeted winners Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey, the number of out queer actors who have won a Best Actor since 1985 is zero. While straight actors who take queer roles may appear to obstruct the development of LGBT careers at cinema’s highest tiers, readers will rejoice to learn that ostensibly heterosexual actors Stanley Tucci—lauded for multiple gay roles—and Benedict Cumberbatch—Oscar nominated for two—seem to suffer no pangs of guilt for the gayface roles they accept. Tucci marshaled unnamed “gay men” who conveniently confirmed that he “did it the right way” when asked by the BBC how he responds to criticism for playing gay . Asked a parallel question by IndieWire about playing a gay role in Power of the Dog, Cumberbatch protested: “Is this a thing where our dance card has to be public? Do we have to explain all our private mo ments in our sexual history?” Well, no need to explain. Identity theft has been a grand tradition in Hollywood at least since the 1930s, when Warner Oland—born in Sweden—starred in sixteen films as the Asian detective Charlie Chan. How did we get here? Stonewall stormed the closet in 1969, the American Psychiatric Association pulled heterosexuality from its pedestal (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ) in 1973, and—notwithstanding David Bowie’s best efforts to ex ploit bisexuality as edgy and iconoclastic—queerness became almost banal in early 1980s popular culture. Movies released during Reagan’s first term might cast us as murderers (1980’s Cruising and Dressed to Kill ), victims (1984’s Mike’s Murder ), or both (1982’s Deathtrap ). On the other hand, Victor/Victoria

William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman , 1985.

Oscar-winning films and roles after 1985 in which LGBT peo ple perish or come to a bad end. Briefly stated, the past four decades form an era in which the major studios have finally ac knowledged the existence of gay people even as they have per sisted in punishing gay characters for daring to exist. Since Kiss of the Spider Woman , fourteen more Oscars have been bestowed for roles or films in which explicitly queer lead characters die by suicide (four), gunshot wounds (three), beat ings (two), AIDS (two), poisoning (one), lethal injection (one), and gender-affirming surgery (one), making the Academy a wax museum of cinematic LGBT deaths. If we were to assume that Andrew White, based in Philadelphia, works in libraries, museums, and sometimes at the zoo. Now and then he publishes a short story.

May–June 2024

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