hold on for one more day

"Take off your makeup, you look like a slut."

Anyone who knows me will tell you that no Sunday at my house is complete without enjoying a Mark Wahlberg film. This Sunday, I was sitting back with my coffee and stuffed dog, Mariah, when along came something remarkably uncharacteristic of my Mark Wahlberg stories. A gay person!

The 1990s was a murky period for visibility of the queer man. You couldn’t throw a clog without hitting a lesbian thanks to Sharon Stone and the country’s innate enjoyment of girl on girl action. RuPaul and To Wong Foo... moved mountains for the drag community, but if you wanted to see two men living happily ever after, you were shit out of luck. 

We gay kids of the '90s did have the Bravo network to keep us warm. I owe my sexual awakening to Bravo for their repeated airings of My Own Private Idaho (not to mention the hours of Twin Peaks reruns, Sondheim musicals and SRO Patti LuPone concerts). 

There was a flickering moment of gay representation in My So Called Life, the short-lived but nonetheless iconic and perfect ABC series that featured an art fag named Rickie Vasquez coming to terms with life in the ‘90s as an “other,” but I wasn’t ready to receive it.  I had far too much internalized homophobia in my teens and only saw myself in Claire Danes, not in Rickie. That took years for me to get over. 

Growing up, I didn’t want to be a persecuted minority, I wanted to be a gay vampire – or at least Michael Stipe.

I was the pretentious white kid going to Julianna Hatfield/Jeff Buckley concerts with my best girls. I was the sensitive kid spending my lunch hours in the darkroom developing pictures and listening to Tori Amos on the walkman I’d steal from momma’s workout bag.  I wore vintage suspenders with Gap pants and tucked my hair behind my ears when I was just too overcome with feelings. 

I was the gay kid from Fear (1996).

Before she was Elle Woods, Reese Witherspoon was a little soup dumpling who wore suede jackets and liked getting fingered by bad boys on roller coasters. 

Like all successful women of the nineties, she has two best friends: a slut (Alyssa Milano playing Alyssa Milano) and a gay (we know that he is gay because the writers named him Gary).

When not trolling coffee shops and listening to the latest Bush single, Reese finds ample time to makeout with Marky Mark all over Seattle. She doesn’t mind if Mark hits her or hooks up with Alyssa “on the down low” or that he beats up her best gay because the sex is real good. Girl, we've all been there.

Unlike all the women in Fear, Gay Gary is immune to Marky Mark’s abs and wooden delivery. He seems to be the only one countering this film’s central thesis that women want men who beat them up and treat them like meat. He questions that Marky Mark should still be a box office draw despite having blinded an Asian man in the 80s.  Therefore, Gary has to die. 

The fact that he’s gay makes it alright for him to be the sole casualty in the film. He chose his lifestyle, right? Ugh. 

Fear continues in a long line of horror movies (Bride of Chucky, Savage Weekend) progressive enough to have a gay companion to its final girl, but regressive in its ultimate treatment of said gay. The family is far more distraught over the death of their dog than they are over the death of Gary. 

Gays die, their best friends move on almost instantly. No big.

Without Gay Gary, Fear would be just another Lifetime made-for-TV movie about a teenage girl in peril learning to love her dad. I'm still alive today because, unlike Gary, I knew when to stay out of my girlfriend’s business! If my girl was hauling her friends across town to get finger banged by some guy from Southie, I said I had “rehearsal” which was code for going home alone and acting out my one-man production of a teenage gay boy pretending to be Bernadette Peter’s doing a British dialect in Song&Dance in my bedroom.

Let this be a lesson, boys. Take care of yourselves! She’ll keep going back to him and you’ll wind up dead in the woods some place.

(Horror Nerd Alert: Gary is played by Todd Caldecott who was shirtless and speared through the chest in the beginning of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Holla!)

A Remarkable Woman

"I bought a gorgeous new lucite frame for one of your most famous pictures."

When I played the titular role of Pippin in a Boston production of Pippin, I had a fan. A diminutive Fraggle of a girl would leave me poems at the stage door every night. First, she wrote a sonnet about my radiance, which soon turned to a limerick on how I was an icy glacier that she was trying to climb but the sun kept melting her down, and finally a haiku about how she was going to cut off my head and use the blood to write the next poem. I got a restraining order and never made eye contact with anyone at the stage door again. 

You see, once upon a time, there was a thing called a Broadway Star - women who lit up the great white way, entertaining packed houses and holding court at Sardi’s night after night! Despite having a three-note vocal range and fighting a losing battle with her addiction to Virginia Slims, Lauren Bacall was the most glamorous star ever to grace the Broadway stage. The Fan (1981) presents the relatable story of Lauren learning to deal with a stalker on her terms while clawing her way back to the top in a Marvin Hamlisch musical.  Something for everyone!

Lauren Bacall is playing Sally Ross and Sally Ross is going through it. She’s feeling old and alone. She has two friends and both are on her payroll: her assistant and her maid. Sally's love life is stale (James Garner, stale). She has countless devoted fans, but she can’t take a fan home to bed with her because everyone knows that when you do, they invariably want to skin you alive. 

Normally, Lauren Bacall’s midlife crisis coupled with some fabulously atonal musical numbers would be enough to make this movie a gay camp classic, but The Fan has a trick up its sleeve: Michael Biehn (pre-Aliens)…playing a home of sexual! A home of sexual obsessed with Lauren Bacall!

Michael is unlike most real life stalkers in that he is gorgeous. He dresses impeccably (if not a bit preppy), but, like a lot of Queens in the ‘70s and ‘80s, he hates himself for being gay and is deluded into believing that he has a relationship with Lauren Bacall (like when Richard Simmons asked Barbra Streisand to marry him a few years back, only Michael sends Lauren pictures of his ding-dong instead of a diamond ring). 

Meanwhile, in rehearsals for her new show, Sally Ross/Lauren Bacall who, like a lot of stars, has a real hang-up around being alone, becomes fast friends with the dance captain of her musical (indicated to be gay by his hand gestures, big toothy smiles, and preternatural thinness). Soon enough, she is flaunting her new gay all over town, the ultimate accessory to the aging diva. But it’s exhausting keeping Sally Ross/Lauren Bacall propped up all the time and her gay needs to sometimes go off to the bathhouse to let off some steam. Michael Biehn is jealous, so he gets half naked, grabs the nearest box-cutter and slashes his rival right there in the pool! Gay on gay crime is bad news, Michael means business.

"There's some fruitcake out there who, apparently, wants to kill me!"

With her best friends dropping like flies at the hand of a homicidal homosexual, Sally runs off to her Hamptons beach house to pontificate on her own mortality. She stops taking Michael's calls and he gets real down, running straight to the local gay bar for some companionship. Sally's rejection gives Michael the nerve to finally take a guy up to the roof for a quick blowie. If he didn't have this tiresome angst around his sexuality, this could be the starting point for a lovely romantic comedy - but no such luck for the other guy! The Fan (1981) understands that no third act is complete without a gay being sliced at the throat and set on fire on a Manhattan rooftop.  Flamer indeed!

I'm sorry. I know how offensive it can be to have gay characters ALWAYS be the vengeful maniacs or the tragic martyrs serving to advance a story for the heroine...but this movie is a riot. Lock me up because I think The Fan is compulsively watchable. It's got fake blood, old women being chased in sequins and musical numbers involving leather S&M gear and neon lights! If anyone wants to adapt this as a Broadway show (or, even better - a show for high school kids and regional theatres), I'm available - just don't expect me to do meet and greets at the stage door.

le petit mort (aka: Gay With the Wind)

"We must be powerful, beautiful, and without regret"

Once upon a time in America, David Geffen was a former boyfriend of Cher turned gay music producer turned billionare media mogul and Malibu real estate owner who could do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m gay.  Being gay, I went to see a Rita Wilson concert at his theatre in Westwood (he has a theatre in Westwood) and he was there and Rita Wilson sang “I Can’t Make You Love Me if You Don’t” to him and that made me incredibly uncomfortable. He was seated next to Steven Spielberg and Kirsten Chenoweth.  That’s power.  

In his heyday, David Geffen did a lot of good.  He gave ACT-UP the money to put that giant condom on white-supremacist bigot, Jesse Helms’s house in 1991. He produced Dreamgirls.  He brought Little Shop of Horrors to the big screen with the most state-of-the-art visual effects money could buy - singing plants and Ellen Greene in tact (to this day, it amuses me to no end that she claims to be the only actress to have recreated her Broadway role on film). But, more importantly to our cause, David Geffen produced the most expensive, most lavish coming-out horror movie of all time: Interview with the Vampire.

Before God-fearing, Mormon vampires in the Pacific Northwest were all the rage, we had to read between the lines of our stories to find subtext in the slightest ellipses and the most delicate of expressions.  Growing up in the 1990s, Anne Rice was to little gay boys what Judy Blume had been to teenage girls. She got us! But a decade before Brokeback Mountain brought sodomy into the mainstream, studio movies had to bend over backwards NOT to be gay. Fox had tried to do a mainstream gay love story/coming-out movie in 1982 with Making Love and it was a notorious flop.  Lisa Rinna’s husband accused it of ruining his burgeoning career (rude - also homophobic - also not true). David Geffen wasn’t going to make that mistake. By casting Tom Cruise as the lead and implying that Brad Pitt’s character was, at one point, in a consensual relationship with a woman (conveniently dead), Interview with the Vampire wound up becoming the definitive not-gay gay movie.

"“My invitation was open to anyone, but it was a vampire that accepted.”

You ever fall in love with a straight or questioning guy?  It’s not fun. The only time I ever did was in high school.  I’m choosing to believe it was because there simply weren’t any other gay kids at my school, but I really loved this kid.  A lot. But much like Rita Wilson singing to David Geffen, I couldn’t make him love me if he didn’t and he didn’t. He just liked attention.  That’s what happens in Interview with the Vampire.

When we first meet Louis (Brad Pitt), he’s an idle twentysomething. He’s always depressed. He has no direction. He drinks away his feelings. The kind of sad-sack guy you can’t help but want to “fix” so he’ll love you forever, but trust me - stay away.  Tom Cruise learns that the hard way.

One night Louis wanders off to some shady dockside and hooks up with Lestat (Tom Cruise), who happens to be a vampire. As we do in our twenties, the sexual chemistry is so good that Louis and Lestat find themselves trying to make a relationship work despite their fucked up power dynamic.   They even adopt a child to try to band-aid their broken relationship, but it only makes matters worse. Louis allows himself to love their daughter, Claudia, in a way he never let himself love Lestat, which causes the rift between them to grow even wider. 

It's hard enough to let yourself hook up with a bro for the first time, it’s harder still to be okay with it. Interview with a Vampire is ultimately about Louis coming to terms with who he is and what he wants. 

Lestat has been around for a while.  Like most old queens, he is much more sensitive than he ever lets on and, when wounded, he lashes out venomously at the people closest to him. Lots of gays do this, myself included. There’s a whole book about it called The Velvet Rage.  It’s scary to admit that you need someone, especially when you’re a vampire and the object of your affection is clearly growing more apathetic towards you every day.  

Let me tell you, new gays are a mess.  Stay away - they need a moment to figure it all out.  While he’s framed as the protagonist, Louis is by no means blameless - he's constantly playing the victim and setting things ablaze whenever he doesn’t get his way! Soon enough, the inevitable happens and he abandons Lestat and running off to live with a pretentious underground theatre troupe in Paris where he has an all-consuming affair with Antonio Bandaras (who may be the only actor who understands that he’s playing a gay character but who also doesn’t seem to understand or speak a word of coherent English in this film). Poor Claudia is left while Louis is galavanting the town with Antonio and winds up burned alive with a lady from the nearby doll shoppe. These things are always worst on the women.

After a few messy decades, Louis finds himself alone at last and finally on the path to self-acceptance. He moves to San Francisco, he swears off toxic relationships and one night stands, and he finally (200years later) starts therapy. In a surprisingly touching scene, we find Lestat cowering like the shipwrecked heroine of a Douglas Sirk melodrama wearing a shawl and staring out an open window. Louis is finally able to admit that what went on between them was real and meant something to him, thus allowing Lestat to also move on. Happily ever after.

Despite there being many books about Lestat and Louis, Hollywood never made another one and that’s a shame.  Interview with the Vampire made money, but it may have been too precious to live.  Neil Jordan was at the height of his powers as a director in 1994.  Every shot by Phillipe Rousselot looks super expensive. Elliot Goldenthal never wrote a better score and Academy Award winner Sandy Powell's best costume work is on full display for all the world to see in every ruffled shirt. Stan Winston himself did the makeup effects.  This film is lavish. Opulence, as the children say nowadays. So, why didn’t this catch on - even among gay people?

When I was in musicals, the straight boys and I would invariably compete to see who could jump the highest and sing the loudest. Our performances were no longer about the scene at hand, rather who could outperform who. This movie has that energy, only it's who can be less gay than who. River Phoenix was originally cast and set to play the interviewer (Christian Slater); he surely would have added a softer and more delicate hand to the proceedings. Maybe it was the Tom Cruise agenda? Neil Jordan manages to get a wonderful performance out of Tom most of the time. The petulant scenes and Lestat's rages are perfectly on pitch, but Cruise seems to be working overtime to play against the gay. On paper and in action, Lestat wants nothing more than a male companion to share in his bloodlust and shopping sprees but this element is all but missing from the finished film without using our gay viewfinders. More importantly, maybe it was AIDS.   America was still fresh off the heels of a ten year global pandemic that is all but forgotten about in mainstream media today! Vampires weren't sexy vessels of teenage angst and unrequited sexual desires as much as they were the ultimate metaphor for blood diseases and the misery of AIDS. In this vein, maybe it's better that Interview with a Vampire remain a musuem piece, left with Rope and Psycho back in the days where a gay character had to die tragically to learn his lesson. 

One of the last times I spent with my high school crush was when I was in college.  He came to visit me for a midnight screening of Interview with the Vampire.  We got pumpkin pancakes afterward and I finally saw him clearly.  He wasn’t my boyfriend and that was okay.