And The Band Played On: Revisiting A Part Of The Gay Canon and AIDS History

Randy Shilts was a pioneer of journalism, serving as a gay beat reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. His biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, was a sort of bildungsroman of the gay community located in 1970's California. He followed the book with what is now considered his standing achievement, And The Band Played On, a chronicle of the first eight years of the modern AIDS epidemic.

In 1993, the book was adapted into a two hour HBO film starring Matthew Modine as Dr. Don Francis, spearhead of the CDC's research against mounting budget cuts, and Alan Alda, playing into his Hawkeye persona with a sadistic twist of greed as Dr. Robert Gallo, a nearly-megalomaniac lead in the field of retrovirology who cannot fathom not being part of the biggest outbreak in modern history.  The clip below illustrates the film's treatment of Dr. Francis as a David standing up to a Goliath of medical bureaucracy.

Yeah. Let me just say that Aaron '90210' Spelling produced this one. Now do you get the picture?

For it's time, the film was breaking some ground by being honest (but certainly NOT graphic by any stretch), showing blatant gay sexuality and not apologizing for it.

But what exactly is the sexuality that they highlight? Take a moment and consider the now-debunked myth of 'Patient Zero', Gaetan Dugas. Shilts focuses one of the main points of his book on the sort of homo-boogieman who hops from city to city as a flight attendant, frequenting the nation's bath houses, practicing unsafe sex, and infecting anything he can with AIDS. The film features his wispy rebuttal/denial that maybe he could be the reason so many are dying, and shows him bouncing around still even after he has been told he has a deadly STD (see clip below).

This is contrasted with the monogamous Ian McKellan as Bill Krauss, a gay political liaison to Washington DC, who nearly survives the plague before finding a KS lesion in the film's final act. On his death bed, he is tended to by a former lover and visited by former co-workers, serving as the most personal of the film's hundreds of deaths.

The issue here is the absolute polarization we see of the gay community that borders on ridiculous, with one side which wants to close the bath houses of San Franciscio staged as avenging angels, and the other end of the spectrum that wants to keeps the tubs open shown as a group of narcissistic sheep blindly led to the slaughter. The baths are shown in an early scene (see below) as seedy havens for promiscuous nitrous poppers. The film essentially highlights all the bad of the baths without exploring any of the reasons why people ever went to the tubs in the first place.

It is important to remember, the public baths, just as much as a park, river bank, or restroom, were coded, safe places where men who otherwise lived closeted lives went to find intimate contact with other men. By the time Shilts begins his account in 1980, San Francisco has only been a gay-friendly metropolis for a few years, Harvey Milk having been killed just two years before, and gays were far from loved as they are these days, so some chose to remain closeted and just sneak downtown once in a while for a quick liaison.

What has to be taken into account also now is Shilts's timeline. He opens the book with a prologue in 1976 during the American Bicentennial celebrations on July 4th, alleging this was when the HIV virus entered the US population. Dugas is visibly ill with telltale KS lesions in 1980, and dies in 1984 of liver failure. So according to Shilts, Dugas infects basically all of San Francisco, most of Fire Island, and part of Manhattan in less than eight years and seeds death with all those men who are dead by the end of the book.  Below is a segment from '60 MINUTES', divided in two parts, wherein Shilts explains his book and its theories.

Except this is absolutely impossible.  The HIV virus takes years to eliminate the T-Cells that are needed to keep the body's immune system going. Even unprotected and unmedicated, an infected patient takes years to even become symptomatic, let alone advance from HIV to full-on AIDS, when they begin to exhibit KS lesions. Dugas simply couldn't have infected the first people that died of AIDS as the film shows, even if he was infectious as of 1976. The entire theory is based upon a timeline which is too compact for the biology of the virus. Expand the timeline, perhaps by several years, and the first group of infected patients could not have included Dugas, as he only became sexually active in 1972.  Andrew R. Moss, Ph.D, at the time a member of the Department of Epidemiology and International Health at the University of California, San Francisco, repudiated Shilts in a 1988 letter to The New York Review of Books following the publication of Dugas's name, wherein he said "Mr. Shilts and Dr. Darrow [an epidemiologist featured in the book] should both repudiate the “patient zero” story." (Click here for full text).

The problem is that the paradigm is based on extremes. Dugas is the personification of promiscuous sex, Krauss as gay love. We see the entire film based around what was called a 'gay cancer' told from the heterosexual viewpoint of Matthew Modine. There isn't even any mention of Larry Kramer and ACT-UP or other issues which led to the full-on formation of an epidemic. We merely see it in terms of greed and bigotry simplified into a very polarized view of not just homosexuality but general humanity.  This is the sad flaw of this important record.

Pacino's Grasp at Redemption in Roy Cohn

To be forward, I will admit that I firmly believe that Brokeback Mountain is by no means the great American gay epic of this decade. It's a good story, it's pretty, but it is a love story told against the background of a boring run-down part of the country. Instead, give credit where it is due and let HBO take the prize with Angels in America.

Seriously, it has an all-star cast, it's based on one of the most acclaimed plays written in the 1990's, and it deals with closet mentality, marriage, AIDS AND politics before people, way more than Mr. Ang Lee did.

This is Tony Kushner's testament to everything he lived through and saw as the gay community changed from a party to a mass funeral. Plenty has been written about the characters, including the vicious Roy Cohn, a closeted McCarthyite haunted by Ethel Rosenberg's ghost as he dies of AIDS. In the final moments of the play, Cohn grasps salvation as he accepts himself and bequeaths AZT to untold needy patients.

It's an interesting casting choice with Al Pacino, because he was the star of one of the most anti-gay film of the 1980's, Cruising. Vito Russo was a central figure in protesting this blatantly homophobic story of a cop sent undercover to find a gay serial killer, and in turn realizes his latent homosexual and murderous tendencies.

Pacino refuses to this day to discuss the film. It has in recent years it has gained the oddity status reserved for Plan 9. Does Pacino bring a specific nuance to the role, searching for his own redemption from those he offended two decades ago?

Roy Cohn was a prominent McCarthyist lawyer who lived a closeted life while searching for "inverts and warped personnel". He later prosecuted both Rosenbergs to the fullest extent of the law. He died in the closet of AIDS in 1986, insisting he had liver cancer.

What is Cohn in Kusher's eyes? He is the personification and agent of the power-hungry apathy which is allowing AIDS to spread as "the gay cancer". He finds true harmony at juggling phones as he does in the opening scene featuring his first offer to transfer Joe to DC. He lives on status, clout, bullying tactics, and being a good gossip hound. He cares more for status as opposed to happiness, because only one guarantees power. Only in his final moments does he reveal his true emotions, his true lusts, his true motivations. In the end he's just a smarmy bastard who won't get outdone by his rival, finally making Ethel Rosenberg sing.

The figure of Cohn is the figure of the closet incarnate, bitter, manipulative, and vengeful. He represents the passing of an era with the beginning of drug availability he portrays, but also an ending the the closeted era of the 1950's that spawned him.

representation of the God who abandoned Heaven on the day of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. The cinematic Cohn has a much more optimistic end than his theatrical counterpart, who is last seen on-stage soliciting his services as a defense attorney to the Hebrew letter aleph, the play'sCohn instead exits in the salvation and acceptance of the gay community with the recitation of the kaddish dictated by Ethel Rosenberg, representing the embrace of his native Jewish faith. And it seems Pacino is also.

Kenneth Anger F*cks Around With Mickey Mouse

Kenneth Anger is a lot of things to many people. Some call him a revolutionary for making the blatantly gay Fireworks in a 1950's landscape that would not look too kindly on his cinematic wet dream of being raped by sailors. Others call him a scandal monger, having published the infamous Hollywood Babylon books, accounts of some of the most wicked days and nights in the early history of Tinseltown. However, he is not accorded the title he has most earned these days: elderly director. Having disappeared for several decades, Anger has returned in the last few years, utilizing modern filming equipment but still as obsessed with avant-garde as ever.

Some have written off his 2004 Mouse Heaven as a minor work, but I feel it deserves a second look. A ten minute montage of antiquated Disney memorabilia, Anger comments on a lot of different concepts that are linked to the idea of the Mouse House as an American icon and mainstay in popular culture.

The first is the blatant fetish America has for buying toys of this particular rodent. One of the most interesting sequences is when a figurine with hinged arms is manipulated to the tune of "Teddy Bear Picnic" as if it were masturbating, with each pause in between lyrical lines accented with a squirting sound that obviously stands for ejaculation. We as Americans can not find relief until we buy more of these toys. One figure becomes two, and the song continues as Mickey Mouse jerks off. The sexual impulse to buy breeds more impulses, multiplying into more useless merchandise.

When confronted with his "mate", it is a pretty androgynous Minnie Mouse the audience meets, as if Mickey were merely courting a cross-dressing doppelgänger of himself. He serenades his twin with an old swing time tune of confessing a secret to a lover. Obviously something queer be afoot here.

The puppet sequence again returns to the question of who buys who when purchasing Mickey toys, the consumer or the corporation, who has children across the world spellbound by the figurines. Who is whose addict? Who needs who? "I'm your puppet" the song cries out, but it never says who is pulling the strings, Disney or us? An almost S&M gas mask for Mickey flashes by in a panorama of increasingly bizarre renditions of Mickey as the singer begs "make me do right, or make me do wrong". More ghastly looking figures flash over the scene of the carousel losing control in the homoerotic Strangers on a Train. The circus, full of manipulated freaks, is falling apart.

The figures dance as the song now proclaims how "I'm not gonna talk about it". No one will want to address the problems because the show is just so cute, who would possibly want to spoil the fun? A 1940's automoton flashes. We as consumers are the robot, praying to the gilded god of Mickey. Multi-dimensional, he is a universal icon among the stars, and we are forever encased in his cage, Made in China labeled on the bars.

This is no simple Logo TV short, obviously, but no one ever said Kenneth Anger was simple. This movie seems like the missing chapter of one of his notorious books, an account of a lurid affair between two manipulative forces, engaged in a snake-eating-it's-tail motif until destroying themselves. Sadly for us, we, our culture, our children, are engaged in a struggle with our favorite figure of luxury. And Disney World is just still growing.

Platonic Love?: The Homoerotic Nature of Plato in Rebel Without a Cause

"In the cinema of adolescence, one of the crucial determinants is not simply what we see but what we choose not to see. Evans describes a screen-ager that did indeed exist and in some ways still survives. But the suggestion remains implicit in his description that this is the ultimate, overriding, and dominant image. It is an observation that, among other things, totally ignores the presence of the female adolescent in motion pictures, and one which indicates the necessity for a thorough and exhaustive analysis of the depiction of adolescence in cinema." (Cinema of Adolescence, 10)

Rebel Without a Cause features Sal Mineo in the supporting role of the timid, lost, and ultimately doomed Plato. It has been a well-established point that Mineo's characterization can easily be read as homosexual. However, I would challenge that the understanding of the depth of the homoerotic element has been underscored, and in fact there are multiple layers of specifically homosexual male relationship philosophies from multiple periods written into the character.



The film's trailer opens with a title card announcing the film's intention to address one of the most controversial of the day, juvenile delinquency, in a script based on facts taken from surveys of the youth generation of 1950's America. As "Cinema of Adolescence" describes above, the understanding of this portrayal is projected as a wholly patriarchal proving ground. Female characters are relegated to sideline positions, and real men are forced to prove virility in a death match. This contest is explicitly sexual, and as such, a Freudian reading informs its portrayal in Rebel. Freud explains in History of an Infantile Neurosis that typical male leather fetish, as openly displayed by all of Jim Stark's greaser antagonists, is usually a resulting by-product of the castration complex. When a young boy sees his mother's genitalia for the first time, he encounters the gender difference of male and female bodies, and realizes the phallus can be removed. This in turn generates an inherent fear in the child that he himself could be castrated. The youth looks down in fear and sees his shoes. This early memory has such an impact that it becomes intrinsically linked into the boy to man's sexual drive. Leather itself becomes a symbol of having more virility. The toughest looking gang members have the most refined leather interiors in their cars and the most gaudy leather jacket, with a female attached to each. The inherent link between leather and sexual prowess continues.

This all is important because Plato is blatantly not included in these activities, relegated to the sidelines or into the role of victim, a role similar to the female members of the group. He is not one of the guys. Furthermore, his fawning looks and soliloquy of imaginary fishing trips and tutelage identify Jim as a sort of mentor figure. At this point, consider the implications of naming the character Plato. The philosopher's understanding of male love was that of a semi-sexual mentor relationship. where the much more beautiful youth would learn from the wiser elder in exchange for company and pleasure. His homoerotic vision of sharing knowledge, including carnal knowledge, in a nearly super-natural bond was held in higher esteem than the much more "common" heterosexual ones. Hence Plato's outrage at Jim's abandonment by consummating his relationship with Judy (Natalie Wood). His vision of the idyllic situation ordained by a heavenly power is destroyed when he realizes Jim is not gay.

Plato's homosexuality can be further analysed in light of the absence of his father. Pop psychology of course said at the time homosexuality was due to a lack of paternal presence in the life of the young boy. As such, while it is a typical heterosexist view, it is a viable subtext to mention. According to this view, the lack of a male presence and over-caring by a surrogate mother figure such as the maid, whose hired role is protector rather than nurturing paternal presence, prevents the boy from developing masculinity and understanding of sex roles. This ineffectual father syndrome can be attributed to what would be termed, in the modern context, post-traumatic stress. Russo quotes screenwriter Stewart Stern and how he "drew on his own military experience to create parallels between gang behavior and the all-male dynamic that was present in wartime...The choice of a buddy was as or more critical than that of a bride. You'd be living in a kind of physical intimacy which was unlike any other. The classic David Duncan photos of buddies consoling each other, those who had lost their buddies, was very expressive of this. And what greater love song in those days than "My Buddy"? Men were having the experience of never having been so close to other men, and there was something of that love operating within the structure of the teenage gang whose members had left home, where there wasn't much love, to fight each other in the streets." (Russo 109) The effeminate elder Stark prancing around the halls is coded hidden sissyhood which unmasks itself in the dark reaches of the night, and Jim revulsion at his father cleaning a spill on the rug can be read not at the anger of having become a domesticated manservant to his mother but because he is perhaps terrified of the mirroring of homoerotic motifs Plato and Mr. Stark share. Is there coincidence that Plato meets Mr. Stark when he ventures to Jim's house at night? There is a mirroring emotion present in the sequence. Furthermore, is it that far fetched that the elder Stark is himself gay, perhaps a mourning war veteran, and Jim's emotional crisis involves his realization of lacking a "traditional" male heterosexual role model, as accorded by the film's pop psychology? His father suggests dishonorably eschewing responsibility and hiding his guilt in the chicken race, an "un-manly" thing to do. Jim cannot find masculine guidance from the sissified Dad. The nuclear family which should nurture him rather rejects him, and as a result he experiences an identity crisis, which can only be salvaged by a return to the heterosexual norm with Mr. Stark picking Jim off the ground while Judy takes her post as a doting and supportive bride-to-be figure, silent and relegated to the background with Mrs. Stark. It is within this order that the radical element, gay Plato, cannot exist, and as such he is eliminated before the formation of the final order. He cannot be relieved of his delinquency, and so is unable to exist in society.

This film, on a surface level, is admittedly pretty outdated, and it is only because of James Dean's macho image combined with untimely death that he became the first great pop image of the second half of the century, epitomized by the poster for this film (which ironically misrepresented the film itself, as Dean never wears a leather jacket and is significantly less tough than the image portrays him). Would this film still be what it is if Dean had survived? Regardless of speculation, the reality of the homoerotic mentality in this film does offer room for alternative reading which go much deeper than those for other teen films.

Mode of Thought

It is almost standard fare these days to encounter some sort of themed criticism page, whether it be QueerViews, 3 Black Chicks, Ain't It Cool News, or even Roger Ebert. Each of these reviewers bases their formula around the specific audience they cater to. However, one thing these pages share is the type of criticism they engage in, journalistic. I intend to enage in more academic criticism, utilizing various theoretical positions to define the structures created in the film. However, I think that certain modes of academic criticism, however vital, have become somewhat outdated by contemporary history. Does Marxist ideology still offer a valid perspective when Marxism blatantly failed as a vaid alternative governing system in the years since Vito Russo first published his works? Certainly Althusser's concepts of state apparatuses are valid ideas, but his blatantly atheist ideology does little to help engage the theological arguments over the validity of homosexuality as a type of emotional and physical love. Furthermore, queer theory itself has certain aspects which could use modification. Is it necesary to borrow so many feminist theories and apply them to theorizing about gay men? AIDS has ceased being a gay epidemic and become a global pandemic. As such, does the debate over AIDS treatment need to be intrinsically linked to the abortion debate? In twenty years, things have changed, not necesarily for good or bad, but they have changed, and perhaps a shift in the paradigm is necesary also. The issue of gay marriage itself shifts from moral to legal implications. The gay rights movement is changing, but the queer theory movement is static. Do we need a change, now that film is much more out of the closet?