Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis became filmdom’s most famous cross-dressing duo as straight guys evading mobsters in “Some Like It Hot” (1959). Fatty Arbuckle donned sausage curls to avoid his wife in “Coney Island” (1917). (It’s complicated.) Since the silent era, with overt depictions of gay men verboten, drag was often just a comedic device straight men used to get away with something. Screen drag has a problematic past, raising questions about sexism, sexual identity and ownership of gay culture. As the gay film historian Vito Russo noted in his landmark book, “The Celluloid Closet,” “The history of the portrayal of lesbians and gay men in mainstream cinema is politically indefensible and aesthetically revolting.” Pansy, killer, nympho, coward: film comedy is littered with ugly and painful stereotypes that emasculated, infantilized and diabolized gay men. Since the silent era, gay culture and gay men in particular have been laughed at on screen. “Nobody wants to watch model gay fare all the time.” “Comedy must be irreverent or it wouldn’t be funny,” Mr.
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Josh Collins, the director of the new film “Fags in the Fast Lane,” an Australian gaysploitation comedy in the spirit of sci-fi sex spoofs like “Flesh Gordon,” wants the gay community to stop taking itself so seriously.
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“Sometimes anything can be a source of humor,” the statement continued, “but the lives of 20 million Americans are not a joke.”Įxcept when they are.
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That was the first of the “Guiding Principles for Motion Picture and Television Treatment of Homosexuality” released in 1973 by activists fed up with Hollywood’s habit of playing gay people for laughs.