Going to Movies in 1981-82; Two Gay Kisses, One Homophobic Slur, A Fake Drag Queen, Tarzan, Conan, and Dolly Parton

1981-82, my senior year at Augustana College!  Time to decide what to do with a double major in English and Modern Languages.  My parents: go to work in the factory!  The Career Counseling Center: find a job in publishing!  My professors: no, you're smart, you should go to grad school!  

I applied for jobs at publishing companies, and got an interview at Hallmark Cards (we used to give or mail cards to commemorate special days).  And I applied to grad school:  English at Notre Dame and Indiana, Spanish at Tulane, and Linguistics and Near Eastern Languages at Chicago.  They all admitted me, but only Indiana University gave me a scholarship, so it was off to Bloomington.  

With all that activity, plus my job at the Student Union Snack Bar, my internship at a military-manual publishing company, Spanish Club, German Club, Writers' Club, the gym, an occasional class, and a very occasional hookup, you'd think that my movie-going would suffer.  But actually it was a banner year: 14 movies in theaters, many with gay characters and themes.

August: Tarzan, the Ape Man: Heavily promoted due to marble-statue Miles O'Keeffe, who doesn't have any lines.  He just glowers, smoulders, flexes, and has sex with Bo Derek. 

August: An American Werewolf in London. College students Griffin Dunne and David Naughton (sigh) are attacked by a werewolf on the Scottish moors.  Griffin dies -- but returns in increasingly decayed states.  David survives -- for awhile, anyway, to meet the Girl of His Dreams and give us some glimpses of his butt and penis.  In 1981, we considered his infamous homophobic slur,  "Prince Charles is a faggot!", a triumph.  LGBT people were mentioned in a big screen!

September: None.

October: Shock Treatment, reputedly the "sequel" to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but with none of the same characters, no gay references, and a supremely heterosexist plotline.  Still, I loved the (accidental) evocation of life as tv .  And the songs, especially the beefcake potential of Janet's "Looking for Trade."   I saw it five times (this was before you could buy movies on VHS or DVD to keep, so once it left the theater, it was gone for good).

November: Ragtime.  I read the original novel because everyone in the English Department told me that science fiction and fantasy were trash; I had to read "serious literature," by which they meant Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Updike,  and E. L. Doctorow.  No gay characters in this evocation of the social problems of the early 20th century.

December: Ghost Story. Elderly New England Ivy-Leaguers played by Hollywood legends like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Fred Astaire, and their sons, are haunted by the ghost of a young women they killed 50 years before. Ponderous, incoherent storytelling, but the homophobia of the original novel is gone, and there is a lot of budy bonding.   

January: None

February: Making Love.  In Rock Island, the only promotion we received was this poster of the three stars naked, implying that Kate Jackson is cheating on her husband (Michael Ontkean) with Harry Hamlin.  My ex-boyfriend Fred called to tell me that it was really about Ontkean coming out; after some hand-wringing, sobbing, and Gay 101 lectures, Kate is ok with it.  Being highly closeted, I drove to a theater in Iowa City, 45 miles away, so no one would recognize me. 

March: Fitzcarraldo: Klaus Kinski builds an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, and has sex with his girlfriend.

March: Deathtrap, a murder mystery, because it starred muscular Superman Christopher Reeve.  I didn't know the plot twist: Christopher and Michael Caine's character are boyfriends!  When they kissed, the entire audience, including me, gasped in astonishment, and one guy yelled "They're fags?  What the f____!"  

April: Victor/Victoria: I went in knowing that this one was about "a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman" in 1930s Paris, with a positively portrayed gay mentor (Robert Preston) who fields the standard Gay 101 questions.  Although he and Alex Karras are shown in bed in the most un-romantic way possible, they are shown in bed. Gay men have sex -- a startling revelation in the days of frilly little lacy things.   

May: Conan the Barbarian.  Sword-and-Sorcery was everywhere in the early 1980s: He-Man ruled Saturday mornings, Dungeons and Dragons was causing a conservative panic, and the Robert E. Howard Conan stories, originally published in the 1930s, were being revisited in both Ballantine paperbacks and Marvel comics.  All we needed was a flexing Schwarzenegger (top photo) to bring the mighty-thewed  hero to the big screen.

June: The Chosen, because among the "serious literature" I read to rid myself of the science fiction/fantasy habit was Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, about a boy torn between his artistic talent and his conservative Jewish heritage.  I could relate.  Here Orthodox Reuven (somebody I've never heard of, buried far down the cast list) and Hasidic David (Robby Benson, sigh!) have a buddy-bonding romance so obvious that it brought tears to my eyes.  

June: Poltergeist:  suburban nuclear family harassed by evil ghosts: "They're he---ere."  Notable for Zelda Rubenstein, who would star in safe-sex ads in gay communities, as a Southern-fried psychic.

June: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  I heard that "Chekov is tortured," so I imagined a BDSM scene, with  shirtless Walter Koenig tied up and struggling like Bomba the Jungle Boy.  Hot!  The torture actually involved an ear-worm.   

July: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,  Dolly Parton as a sassy brothel owner.  No gay content, but you do get to see the entire Texas Aggie football team naked.