GLR November-December 2024

Thiel side of the party seem to care only about money and an implausible detachment from society. They’re not interested in issues much further afield than taxes and economic freedom. These crypto-libertarians are shown in Young’s book to have scorned what they called the “liberals” within the Log Cabin and GOProud complex. Some of these latter Republicans have goals that overlap with those of the Human Rights Campaign, but who can’t stomach the broader liberal social agenda of the HRC. The author explores the huge world of gay politics in Cali fornia, staying focused on what Republicans more broadly were doing. In the Bay Area, many gay Republicans, emphasizing personal freedom, were leaders in the fight against bathhouse closings. Harvey Milk is hardly mentioned in the book, as he does not greatly affect the Republican story. Milk’s successor Harry Britt, who once slept in my bed (I wasn’t in it at the time), is mentioned, though his narrow loss to Nancy Pelosi in a U.S. House primary is not. Journalist Randy Shilts also makes a few cameo appearances as local battles take place. The gay Republican organizational splits of the 1990s and especially the 2000s appear to be rooted in different attitudes toward the need for various protections and positive support for gay people, versus simply the desire to be left alone. Gay mar riage has never had universal support within the gay commu

complicated when Peter starts dating an older girl (Sandra) and Doug’s long-time girlfriend suspects that he is more interested in Peter than in her, which Doug denies. The film’s climax occurs when Doug as saults Peter after learning that he’s had sex with Sandra. Doug returns to the library and rereads The Waste Land , which he had tried to read but “couldn’t make sense of it.” In an epiphany, he finally begins to “make sense” of his true feel ings for Peter and of his own sexuality. Despite a budget of only $8,000 Canadian and a number of technical weaknesses, the film enjoyed early success. In April 1965, three months before shooting concluded, Secter got a let ter from the Commonwealth Film Festival in Cardiff, Wales, inviting him to submit the film. Early in 1966 it began a six week run at the Pace Theatre in Winnipeg, followed by two weeks at Toronto’s Elektra Theatre, and during that run Secter learned that the National Film Board (the largest film-produc tion entity in Canada) had selected it as Canada’s entry in the Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique , where Secter got to mingle with celebrities and dine with Sophia Loren, who was that year’s Jury Prize president. Back in Canada, the film was screened at the Montreal International Film Festival in 1966, where it received a Special Jury prize “in recognition of its ambitious young film-maker, and for his great sensibility and lack of pretentiousness.” In late 1967, it found a distributor, New York’s fledgling Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which secured a six-week run at the New Cinema Playhouse. Screening in New York and later in L.A. helped to generate critical attention to Coming Out Republican ends with a brief vignette about Donald Trump’s lack of more than a pro forma interest in the anti-gay agenda. There is little conservative about Mr. Trump, whose blaring, elephantine ruckus conserves nothing and dam ages institutions as old as the nation. We are left wondering whether most of today’s Republicans are in fact conservative. In some states where they were once strong, they are now, on paper, a fairly small piece of the electorate while unaffiliated voters steadily increase. Whether the current period of political churning produces a meaningful realignment or division of par ties remains to be seen, but, for now, gay Republicans have lit tle opportunity to affect their chosen party’s direction. And many gay conservatives still don’t inhale. nity, and Republicans were split on that issue as well, though commentator Andrew Sullivan (not a Republican) made a case that marriage is inherently conservative. Today, assigning words like “conservative” and “liberal” to candidates, parties, and groups has developed unexpected complexities. As the author notes, by the 2000s, even the Log Cabin Republicans, of which I was a member in the 1990s before going independent, had begun a fissiparous period based on questions not only of tac tics, which had always been debated, but real disagreement on fundamental issues such as abortion.

A Film of Its Time, or Way Ahead of It

W HEN the Canadian film Winter Kept Us Warm was released in 1965, no one, in cluding the director and producer David Secter, a 22-year-old Eng lish major at the University of Toronto with no prior filmmaking experience, believed it would become Canada’s first successful independent film. But despite its critical

N ILS C LAUSSON

WINTER KEPT US WARM by Chris Dupuis McGill Queen’s Univ. Press 124 pages, $19.95

success, within a decade the film had been all but forgotten. Chris Dupuis’ important book, the latest volume in McGill Queen’s Queer Film Classics series, attempts to answer the question: “How does a film so radical in its approach, so lauded upon its release, and so important to the history of queer and Canadian cinema, virtually disappear?” The film’s plot is autobiographical, inspired by Secter’s own brief friendship with—and unrequited crush on—a younger stu dent at the University of Toronto. It tells the story of the rela tionship between Doug (a popular senior) and Peter (a freshman) at the university over the course of the school year. The two stu dents first meet at a hazing in the dormitory cafeteria. Later, in the library, where Peter is borrowing a copy of T. S. Eliot’s The WasteLand (from which Secter takes his title), Doug apologizes for his earlier conduct, and the two begin a friendship that cul minates in an erotically charged romp in the first snowfall and, after the winter carnival, a shower scene in which they soap up each other’s backs. But after Christmas break, things become Nils Clausson is emeritus professor of English at the University of Regina in Manitoba, Canada. 36

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