Jul 28, 2022

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 TexasDolly Parton as a sassy brothel owner.  No gay content, but you do get to see the entire Texas Aggie football team naked.

11 comments:

  1. O'Keefe couldn't even run properly. And it's kinda gross for Bo Derek's parents to basically make a movie called My Daughter's Tits. #AreTheStraightsOkay

    No, no, I said Prince Charles was into homeopathy. Minus 0.000000000000000000000000001 points.

    Conan was also in Dark Horse. This is actually where Chuck Dixon (now of "Tim Drake isn't gay" rants) got his start. (I mean, the whole thing's funny because Tim's creator decided to lace both Teen Titans and when his Speedy stories in Action Comics crossed over with the Titans with gay subtext. And for recent comic book fans, I must point out Speedy's the ho.) I mean, one of the Thulsa Doom cultists is hitting on Conan as well

    Poltergeist is kind of an interesting thing because it establishes many modern ghost story conventions.

    To be fair, Chekov's ear worm is relevant later. (Had to!)

    By the way, have you ever seen Venture Bros.? Rusty says "It seems Dolly Parton has been in a little movie called Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." And Brock just looks at him like "Um, Doc? I don't think"

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    Replies
    1. Yes, I watched all of the "Venture Bros" series until the mythology became too complicated. I'm all for world-building, but when you need charts and tables, it seems a little much. Lots of gay subtexts, though.

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    2. My big issue was the whole "Cartoon Network doesn't believe in schedules" mentality.

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  2. Arnold as Conan... 💪🏻🔥😈

    Miles has a great body in that shot, too 👌🏻😉

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  3. Barry Miller plays Robby's pal, Rod Steiger (then aged 56) plays Robby's father.

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    Replies
    1. Sorry, I just googled it, and Rod Steiger got second billing, so I figured he must have played the friend, not a minor character. Granted, he looks old in contemporary photos, but so does Robby Benson -- it was 40 years ago. By the way, I've never heard of Rod Steiger as an actor. Is he the same Rod Steiger who writes all of those books on the occult and paranormal?

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    2. Brad Steiger is the author. Rod Steiger made many movies, some that were very good - he won the Academy Award for his portrayal of a southern lawman, opposite Sidney Poitier in "In The Heat Of The Night" - to very bad - he, Yvonne De Carlo and Michael J. Pollard were in a truly awful VHS era horror movie, "American Gothic."

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    3. Thanks for the clarification. I spent all afternoon looking for "Rod Steiger" books on google and amazon.

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    4. The Chosen was a key movie in my growing up, watching it as a 10yo Southern kid with little idea what Judaism even was! But Robby Benson (sigh!) and the homoerotic subtext hooked me.

      Rod Steiger was excellent in that as the Rabbi. He also had memorable roles in The Pawnbroker (playing Jewish again) and In The Heat of the Night (as the Southern sheriff).

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  4. "Poltergeist" has Craig T Nelson as the sexy dad bod father

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  5. That's the daring "Making Love" poster which makes it look like a threesome movie- this movie should be on blu ray

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