"The Queen's Gambit": Eight Minutes to the First Homophobic Slur

When I popped into Netflix this morning, it burst out with The Queen's Gambit, a tv series about a chess prodigy.  I'm sort of interested in chess, so I started watching:

Scene 1: A young woman with carrot-red hair wakes up in a French hotel room, late for something.  She rushes to dress (no nude scene, thankfully), runs to an elevator (where she stares at a little girl who is staring at her -- it's not rude in France) -- and rushes past reporters and photographers  to start an important chess match with a glowering older man.  

Scene 2: Someplace rural and antiquated.  A pile-up of old-fashioned cars, and a little girl standing by herself on a bridge.  

Scene 3: A matron tells her that her mother has "passed away" and drives her to a children's home.  No Dickensian orphanage, it's well-appointed and quite comfortable.  She meets the headmaster,  the etiquette teacher and Mr. Ferguson (Akemnji Ndifornyen).  We don't hear what he does at the home.  

Suddenly a resident yells "You're all a bunch of fucking cocksuckers!"

A homophobic slur? 

Mr. Ferguson goes to tell her to shut up, and she yells "You fucking cocksucker!"

Another homophobic slur?   I'm out.

Ok, it's the 1950s, and the unnamed character might not necessarily be a good guy, but still, a homophobic slur is unnecessary and offensive.

In their review, the AV Club calls this a "humorous scene."  Would they think it was humorous if the girl was bandying around the n-word?  It's the same thing.

I understand from the review that there's a blink-and-you-miss it gay character later on, and there are a lot of hunks in the cast, like Matthew Dennis Lewis (top photo) and his twin brother Russell Dennis Lewis; Jacob Fortune (left).

Elvis Nowatzki

And let's not forget big bear Bill Camp, who teaches the girl how to play chess.  

Yes, she calls him a "cocksucker."

I'm definitely not watching this.

13 Writers and Artists of the Romantic Era That You Didn't Know Were Gay

When I was studying for my M.A. in English I had to select two adjacent historical eras for my Comprehensive Exams.  The problem is, gay content seems to go up and down, a homophobic wasteland (Medieval, Restoration-Augustan, early Victorian) followed by a period of homoerotic exuberance (Renaissance, Romantic, late Victorian).

For my first period, I chose the Victorian Era (1830-1910), mostly because the professor of my graduate seminar, was gay-- or at least we thought he was.  For my second period, I chose the Romantic Era (1770-1830), because the poets were young and cute, and their lives seemed informed by homosocial and homoerotic bonds.  Later I discovered that several were gay in real life. 

The top 13 gay or gay-subtext literary figures:

1. Hugh Walpole  (1717-1797), who built a pseudo-Medieval castle, Strawberry Hill, to entertain the A-list gays of the early Romantic era.

 2. and 3. The Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Charlotte Butler (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831), who eloped, set up housekeeping, and entertained many of the artistic and literary greats of the era.

4. Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who forged a series of Medieval poems during his teens, and upset over his lack of recognition, committed suicide.  Many of the other Romantic poets revered him as a beautiful youth martyred by an uncomprehending world. He has only appeared on screen once, in a 1970 German movie, played by Ulrich Faulhaber.

 5. William Blake (1757-1822), who advocated for "free love" and illustrated his poetry with lovingly-detailed, super-muscular male nudes

 6. William Beckford  (1760-1844), who built his own pseudo-Medieval castle, Lansdowne Tower, where he kept his huge art collection. 

7. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who roomed together and walked across England together (in the company of William's sister Dorothy).In Pandaemonium (2000), they are played by John Hannah and Linus Roach.

9. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), who hung out with attractive men, especially Greeks and Italians, and shared a house in Rome with fellow poet Percy Shelley. I hadn't yet read Byron and Greek Love (1985), but I thought Manfred highly homoerotic.  In Gothic (1986), Byron was played by Gabriel Byrne (seen here holding hands with Shelley, played by Julian Sand).

10. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), who cohabitated with Byron and wrote Adonais to mourn the death of the beautiful young poet John Keats (check out the beefcake in the Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais". Besides, his wife, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein.  In Frankenstein Unbound (1990), a scientist goes back in time to meet Shelley (gay performer Michael Hutchence, top photo) and the real Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia).

11. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who introduced the gay-coded Dandy to England.

12. John Keats (1795-1821), whose love for Charles Armitage Brown overwhelmed his love for Fanny Brawne (which was never consummated), and wrote of pure beauty much more often than the beauty of women.  In Bright Star (2009), which makes the romantic triangle overt, Keats is played by gay actor Ben Whishaw (left), and Brown by Paul Schneider.

13. Gay artist Henry Fuseli.

Frankenstein, vampires, gay subtexts, and beefcake.  It beats boring, 800-page long Victorian novels about who is in love with whom.

Dracula: Dead and Homophobic

 

Dracula (2020), on Netflix, is advertised as a tv series, but it's actually three feature-length films revising the Bram Stoker classic.

Film #1:  At a convent in Transylvania, the extremely elderly, grotesque, fly-eating, and dead Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan) is being interviewed by Sister Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells).  Six months ago, a young, strong, handsome lawyer, he came to Transylvania to help Count Dracula (Claes Bang, left) sell off his properties in preparation for a move to England. 

I'm sorry, I know they don't realize who he is, but everytime he says "I am...Count Dracula," I laugh.

Count Dracula is extremely elderly and grotesque, but as the two spend time together, he becomes younger, stronger, and more handsome, while Harker grows older and weaker.  Obviously draining his life essence.

"Did you have sexual intercourse?" Sister Agatha asks.

Yes.  And when Harker finally turns into a vampire, Dracula asks him to stay on as "one of my brides."  But it wasn't consensual.  This was an abusive, predaotry gay relationship, a stark contrast to the  heterosexual "true love" of Harker and his fiancee Mina.

Surprise!  Mina is in the interview room -- she came looking for him.  And she still loves him, in spite of his grotesque looks and being undead, yada yada yada.

Film 2:  Dracula and  his slave/lover.nemesis Sister Agatha book passage on a Russian ship headed for England.  The other passengers are a microcosm of diversity:

1.-2. Dr. Sharma (Sacha Dhawan), who is traveling with a deaf-and-mute girl.

3.-5. Lord Ruthven (Patrick Walse-McBride) is gay, newly married as a screen, and travenling with his lover (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), who is pretending to be his valet.  It's all done very subtly; a "blink and you'll miss it" half-scene here and there.

6. The elderly Duchess Valeria, whom Dracula danced with on her  18th birthday 60 years ago.

Dracula seduces and kills or just kills them all, and most of the crew as well.  The same-sex seduction/murders are handled cautiously, a hand on the knee, an off-camera neck-bite, whereas the heterosexual seduction/murders are done in full-fledged "We are meant to be together!" mode.

In the end the only survivors are comic relief pair Olgaren (Youssef Kerkour) and Piotr (Samuel Blenkin), a young man who defrauded his way onto the ship.  They have a gay-subtext buddy bond.

Sister Agatha and the Captain manage to sink the ship so Dracula can't "infect" England.  He ends up on the bottom of the ocean, but being undead, he just start walking toward the shore.

Film 3: Apparently Dracula took a wrong turn.  When he emerges from the surf, 123 years have passed: it's 2020.  He seduces/kills a couple, moves into their house, and starts adjusting to life in the future.  

He gets a new slave/lover, Frank Renfield (Mark Gatiss), who works for the same law firm that sent Jonathan Harker over years ago.  And he meets Dr. Zoe Von Helsing, Sister Agatha's grand-niece, who is studying the undead, financed by the foundation set up by Harker's fiancee  Mina years ago.  

See how neatly everything works out?

Meanwhile Mina's descendant Lucy is a party girl, dating around, leading on lovestruck Jack (Matthew Beard), who is working for the Harker Institute (see how neatly everything works out?), and then rich playboy Quincey (Phil Dunster, left).  

That all changes when she meets  Dracula. The two begin a consensual vampiric relationship.  When she dies from a botched feeding, he eagerly awaits her returning as his bride, only to discover that Jack had the  body has been cremated!

That leaves Zoe, who for some reason has all of the memories of Sister Agatha, the only woman who was ever strong, powerful, and intelligent enough to be Dracula's equal.  They  fall in lo-oo-oove, deep, everlasting, soul-changing.  Heterosexual.

Moral: Same-sex desire is always destructve, predatory, downright wrong.  Only true, real, "normal" heterosexual romance can lead you to salvation.

Yuck.

The writer, by the way, is the gay homophobic Mark Gatiss, the Uncle Tom who kept the gay content out of Sherlock and swears up and down that there is no same-sex desire or behavior in "Dracula."

The Beverly Hillbillies

The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the 1960s line of hayseed comedies (others included Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show), slogged on from 1962 to 1971, and your parents watched every week, so you couldn't avoid it.  It was amazingly popular with adults: some of the regular episodes -- not even Christmas specials -- became the most watched episodes of all time.

The basic premise: a hillbilly from Bugtussle, Tennessee or Arkansas, Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen), becomes unbelievably rich when oil is discovered on his property, so he moves to a mansion in Beverly Hills, along with his crotchety mother-in-law Granny (Irene Ryan), his daughter Ellie Mae (Donna Douglas), and his dumb-lunk nephew Jethro (Max Baer Jr.).

Though they became marginally assimilated after nine years, they still wore hillbilly clothes, ate possum pie, and referred to their swimming pool as a "cement pond."  Plots usually involved big city types trying to dupe and manipulate them, but their backwoods wisdom, orneriness, or dumb luck win out in the end.

The message: big city life is dehumanizing.  Only in the country can real be real.

Other plots involved Ellie Mae's dating, Jethro's get-rich quick schemes (odd, since he already was rich), and Granny's dislike of all things big city.

There was never much beefcake in hillbilly comedies.  Max Baer Jr., son of the famous boxer Max Baer, had a nice physique, but rarely showed it on camera.  We were supposed to laugh at his dopiness, not sigh over his muscles.

Bonding was also rather uncommon.  Most of the primary relationships were platonically male-female: Jed and Granny, Ellie Mae and Jethro, bank president Mr. Drysdale and his secretary, Miss Hathaway (Nancy Culp, who incidentally was gay in real life.)









But gay-vague was everywhere.

1. Mr. Drysdale's son, Sonny (Louis Nye) is sophisticated, well-educated, and not interested in girls.  His parents keep trying to hook him up with Ellie Mae (so he will eventually inherit the Clampett millions), but he will have none of it.  He and Ellie are just friends.










2. Hollywood star Dash Riprock (Larry Pennell), a parody of Rock Hudson, is handsome, suave, and not interested in girls.  He vaguely courts Ellie Mae, but his heart isn't in it,  regardless of how much his studio pushes them together.


Apparently the producers thought it hilarious to keep having Ellie Mae run into men who were not interested in girls.







3. Jethro had a "twin sister," Jethrine.  She stayed back in the hills, and didn't show up often, but when she did, it was obvious that it was Jethro in drag.  I got the distinct impression that everyone was just playing along, responding to his drag persona as if she was a different person.

See also: Petticoat Junction; Green Acres