Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I just saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966).  I knew that it was written by gay playwright Edward Albee, that it starred gay ally Elizabeth Taylor, and that some people said that her character, Martha, could be read as a drag queen living incognito with sullen college professor George (Richard Burton).

It actually works better with Martha and George both as bisexual, or rather sexual opportunists, willing to have sex with whomever will further their goals.

They invite a newly hired professor and his wife over, ostensibly "for drinks" at 2:00 am -- a little late even for the Swinging Sixties -- but with the real goal of seeing which one they can destroy first.  They'll do whatever it takes -- seduction, dredging up traumatic memories, revealing secrets.  Apparently they make a regular game of it.

The couple arrive -- tall, hunky Nick (George Segal), and his mousy wife Honey (Sandy Davis).

First Martha seduces Honey.

Honey needs to use the bathroom, so Martha escorts her upstairs.  She takes an extraordinarily long time, and returns with a dazed expression.  Other people use the downstairs bathroom, and are back in a few minutes.  What exactly was she doing up there?  "Oh...um, Martha gave me a tour of the house."  Where's Martha?  "Oh...um, she's changing clothes."

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what was going on up there.

Honey spends the rest of the evening drunk, barely aware of what's going on.

Meanwhile George starts on Nick.  He decides that the best tactic will be to convince Nick that he's gay, either through seduction or innuendo.  So he refers to Nick as handsome and muscular, puts his arm around him, puts his hand on Nick's knee, literally puts his hand on Nick's crotch.  Meanwhile he interrogates Nick about why they have no children -- could it be because he doesn't care for sex with women?  -- and why they married in the first place -- could it be because he needed a screen?

Later they go out into the back yard, and George tells a story about a beautiful, cherubic boy he knew 30 years ago, in the military -- obviously a confession of homoerotic desire meant to parallel George's real or pretend attraction to Nick.  After more implications that Nick has a "secret," they lie side by side, their faces so close that they are almost kissing, and confess that they don't care for their wives, they prefer the company of men.

But that's as far as it goes.  Nick goes back into the house, not quite convinced that he's gay.

The second half is tedious, overacted, and not nearly as much fun.  Seeing that George failed at his destruction attempt, Martha takes over -- seducing Nick in full view of his wife should do the trick!

Apparently this isn't in the rules.  Martha got to destroy Honey, so George should get Nick!  George is livid, and decides to change the game plan by destroying Martha.

They have a son, a beautiful boy, now a rowdy sixteen-year old.  Except he's fictional, make-believe, a folie-a-deux created out of their despair at not being able to have a child of their own (here Martha as drag queen makes sense).  So George "kills" the boy.  Martha is devastated.

Why didn't Nick and Honey just leave when things got weird?  Maybe on some level they were enjoying the game.  Maybe they wanted to be destroyed. They realize that they hate each other as they walk out into the daylight.

The game over, George and Martha go upstairs to bed.  

If it ended as Nick goes back into the house, it would be one of my favorite movies, a camp classic. As it is, you just get really tired of these people and their make-believe tragedies.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

British radio personality Arthur Dent is having a bad day. First he must lie down in the mud in his bathrobe to keep his house from being bulldozed, and then his friend Ford Prefect pops round to tell him that the Earth is going to be destroyed. Soon. In a few minutes.

 Still in a muddy bathrobe, he allows Ford to teleport them both to a passing Vogon cruiser and escape. The Vogons, who hate stowaways, torture them with bad poetry and then eject them into space. 

 But not to worry: in a staggering improbability, another spaceship happens to be zipping by at that precise moment, and they are rescued in the moment before they suffocate. 

 In another staggering improbability, their rescuers turn out to be Ford’s cousin, a two-headed hipster named Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Trillian, a ditzy blonde with a Ph.D. in astrophysics. In another staggering improbability, Arthur knows Trilian: he had been chatting her up at a party in Islington six months before when  she left with Zaphod. . . .

And so on. Douglas Adam’s anarchic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a 1977 radio series, then became a 1981 television series (which I saw during the 1980s British invasion that also included The Prisoner, The Tomorrow People, and Monty Python's Flying Circus) and a five-part novel series (1979-92),. It sent Ford and Arthur to a restaurant at the end of the universe, a prehistoric Earth settled by advertising executives, an Earth that is really a giant computer manned by rats, and many more wildly improbable worlds. 

In the radio/tv series and the first two books, the two are inseparable companions. Never in the course of their adventures do they suggest that they might find amenable planets and part company, nor do they ever exhibit a romantic interest in anyone else. 

 In later books, Arthur becomes increasingly insistent about heterosexual practice -- he even goes at it with a girlfriend while floating in midair -- and he grows to despise Ford, parting company with him as often as feasible. But Ford (on television the androgynous, purple-eyed Elf David Dixon, Ariel in BBC’s The Tempest) does not engage in heterosexual practice at all.  

And his attachment to Arthur (Simon Jones), his insistence that they remain together, never seems to diminish. Indeed, he seems to engineer hassles just so Arthur will have to depend upon his intergalactic expertise. And one must wonder how the whole chain of events began in the first place: 

Before the Vogons arrived, Ford spent fifteen years on Earth, researching an entry for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a sort of hip interplanetary encyclopedia (his entry consisted of two words: “Mostly harmless”) . No doubt he acquired many friends, associates, and lovers. One morning he discovered that the Earth would be destroyed. He then devoted valuable escape time to seeking out Arthur, explaining the situation as best he could, and bringing him along. Why did he choose Arthur? Why not a famous physicist, or another friend, or some girl from Chelmsford? 

 For that matter, why anyone at all? Why not transport himself directly onto the nearby Vogon cruiser, and escape? No explanation is ever given, but for the gay teenagers of the 1980s, a simple one came to mind: Ford is in love with him.

Billy Gray: The Hunk of "Father Knows Best"

Of the teenage boys who populated 1950s sitcoms -- Jeff (Paul Petersen) on The Donna Reed Show, Wally (Tony Dow) on Leave It to Beaver, and so on, Bud (Billy Gray) on Father Knows Best (1954-1960) was the most assiduously coded as gay.  He was shy, quiet, frequently called a "sissy", and full of secrets; he spent a lot of time hiding in the basement or even in "the closet."  He had no interest in sports, and his mother overprotected him (a 1950s signifier of gayness).  He had a series of best buddies, but not a girl -- he recorded a song with the line "I'd rather have a pal than a gal -- anytime."

His parents didn't try to jump-start his girl-craziness, but told him to play the game, to pretend to be heterosexual regardless of what he may feel.

In "Bud The Snob" (1955), the family learns that Bud never talks to girls at school.  This "problem" could have two explanations: he may like girls so much that he gets tongue-tied around them, or he may not like girls.  The family's solution is to force him.  Sister Betty tries to get him to talk to a girl on the telephone, but he runs for the closet. "You can't keep running away!" she yells.

In "The Matchmaker" (1955), Bud declares that he never intends to marry, arguing that he will be perfectly happy living with his buddies.  Dad scoffs: "You haven't got a chance!  If a man wanders around unmarried, every woman in the world takes it as a personal insult!"  That is, you don't need to experience heterosexual desire; you will marry a woman, regardless.

In "Bud the Wallflower" (1956), the 18-year old declares that he doesn't like girls, and plans a camping trip with his buddies to avoid a Sadie Hawkins dance.  But one by one his friends get dates and drop out.  When his best friend Kippy (Paul Wallace) accepts a date right in front of him, Bud is heartbroken.

But he can't hold out forever; he has to learn to play the game.  By the fourth season, Bud has become adept at ogling girls, pretending to have crushes, going out on dates.  By the time of "Bud the Romeo" (1959), he has become so effective at wooing girls that he must turn down dates, and they get even by going on an "anti-Bud" strike.  He has become heterosexually adept.  He has arrived.

Years later, Billy Gray revealed that he knew it was all a hoax, that Father Knows Best was misleading people into imprisoning themselves and lying to their children, but he could hardly state his concerns at the time: he was a teenager, and an outsider.  About a year after the show ended, he spent three months in jail for marijuana possession, and no one from the show came to visit except the prop man.  Today, after a long career in music and motorcycling, and many starring roles in movies (including The Explosive Generation), Billy Gray barely mentions Father Knows Best on his website.

See also: Beefcake Dads of 1950s Sitcoms

Matt Dillon

Androgyny was in during the  late 1970s and  early 1980s -- there was Peter Barton, Michael Gray, John Stamos -- but no one encapsulated raw androgynous erotic energy more than Matt Dillon.  Born in 1964, Matt got his start playing a surly high schooler in Over the Edge (1979).

Edgy roles followed.  He became famous, in a sleazy, controversial way, for Little Darlings (1980), in which he helps some underaged summer-camp girls lose their virginity.  But much more often, the main relationship in his movies was with a brother --  Jim Metzler in Tex (1982), Mickey Rourke in Rumble Fish (1983) -- or a buddy, as in the The Outsiders (1983) and The Flamingo Kid (1984).  Sometimes the buddy-bonding was even domestic.

Never a teen magazine fave rave, but a favorite of gay teens, Matt bulked up, filled out, and moved seamlessly from the world of serious films about troubled teenagers to serious films about troubled adults: a professional gambler, a heroin addict, an ordinary guy caught up in a murder plot, a neo-noir antihero.

And non-troubled adults.  In the comedy In and Out (1997), Matt plays a movie star who accidentally "outs" his old high school teacher (Kevin Kline) during an Oscar award speech -- except his teacher isn' really gay.  Except he is.







Matt remains a reliable presence in Hollywood, nonchalantly recognizing his gay fans, and regularly starring in movies that they enjoy seeing, well-written, well-acted, and with just as much buddy-bonding as boy-meets-girl fade-out kisses.