The Homoerotic Horror of Edgar Allan Poe

When I was a kid in the 1970s, Chuck Acri's Creature Feature broadcast a lot of very loose adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories: The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tomb of Ligeia.  They were all terribly cheesy.

I loved them.

And the original short stories, which I first encountered in a Scholastic Book Club edition of Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Groff Conklin, with a drawing of a naked man (by Irv Doktor) illustrating "Metzengerstein."

It's about a man killed by a ghost horse. The nudity was completely unnecessary, but certainly welcome.

Even without the nudity, the stories were amazingly homoerotic, male narrators visiting male friends to hear their tales of murder and madness, with few or no women around, except for a few husbands who hate their wives.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).  Pym and his boyfriend Augustus stow away about a whaling ship and have adventures.  After Augustus dies, Pym hooks up with Richard Parker.  The two have more adventures.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839).  Roderick Usher and his sister are killed by the evil house.  His sister, not his wife!

 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The narrator and his buddy solve a murder.

 "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842). The narrator is tortured by the pit and the pendulum, but rescued by the strong arm of a French soldier.

(Left: ABC series with Edgar Allan Poe as a paranormal investigator.)

"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843).   The narrator (played on film by Stephen Brockway) "loves the old man," but kills him anyway.

"The Gold-Bug." (1843). The narrator, his buddy, and their servant search for buried treasure.


"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)  Montresor gets revenge on Fortunato by walling him up.  But why is he so upset?

No wonder he was not mentioned in my class in American Renaissance Literature at Augustana, though he lived at the same time as Melville, Hawthorne, and Emerson.

But why was so much of Poe's poetry -- "Annabel Lane," "To Helen," "Lenore," "The Raven" -- about men mourning dead girlfriends?  (Left, Jeremy Renner in The Raven).

Maybe because if the women are dead, the men don't have to worry about any of that icky hetero-romance. 

Poe certainly spent a lot of time courting women through his life, but usually they were sickly or dying, like his 13-year old cousin Virginia Clemm, whom he married in 1836, when he was 27.

Maybe he found some solace in glimmers of same-sex desire.

See also: The Gay American Renaissance.

"Ginny and Georgia, Season 2": 22 Dads, Moms, Gram-Grams, Pop-Pops, Aunties, Love Interests, Siblings, and Gay Guys at 3 Thanksgivings

 

Ginny and Georgia, a comedy series on Netflix, is about a mother-daughter team, like The Gilmore Girls.   I reviewed the first episode in March 2021, but I don't remember anything about it.  No doubt the three gay characters listed in its Wikipedia page had not yet appeared.  So I'll give Season 2, Episode 1 a shot.

By the way, the Wikipedia page was terrible, fraught with grammatical errors and overuse of the cliched term "love interest."  I fixed a little of it, but then gave up.  I have other things to do today.

Scene 1: Mother and daughter dancing in slow motion, experiencing that intense sort of ecstatsy that you see only on tv commercials when someone has achieved everlasting happiness by purchasing their brand of toothpaste or dishwashing liquid.  Daughter explains that when she was growing up, they were soul mates, so deeply in love that they didn't need anyone else.

Switch to Daughter as a teenager, no longer in love with Mom.  She's reading the Parable of the Sower, when Mom, who looks like she is around 15, comes into her room. "What the heck is this trash that you're reading?  I'm so stupid that I don't know what 'parable' or 'sower' mean."  

"It's about the demise of civilization through facist capitalism."  "Oh, I don't know what any of those words mean, so let's make out"  She jumps into bed with Daughter, but calling herself "Mommy" turns the girl off.  So she tries smothering her with a pillow. 

Scene 2:  Daughter wakes up.  It was all a nightmare, a metaphor for Mom's smothering.  The hunky Zion (Nathan Mitchell, left) bursts into her room, calls her "Gummy Bear," and asks if she's ok.  So she's left her smothering Mom for Dad.

Scene 3: A prim Southern Belle who looks like Melanie from Gone with the Wind opens the door and yells "Welcome back, bitches!"  A blond woman with a man's haircut, probably her "openly lesbian" partner, admonishes her to not call "Nanna and Pappy" bitches.  

The elderly Nanna and Pappy enter, hug the couple, and ask Clint (Chris Kenopic), a middle-aged man, if he's ready for the Pats to lose.  The New England Patriots, so this is the Northeast.  I thought it was the South due to the Southern belle and the Mom named Georgia. Plus Nanna brought "whoopie pies," a Southern dish.

Nanna asks Man's Haircut, Ellen, where Marcus is.  So both of the woman have heterosexual partners, and they're all living together?  "He'll be down in a bit."

Scene 4: Marcus (Felix Mallard), a rebellious teenager, is in his room, smoking drawing bugs on the wall.  Southern Belle bursts in to tell him that Nanna and Pappy have arrived.  "Too bad -- I'm not doing Thanksgiving this year, because it is a celebration of Native American genocide." Wikipedia to the rescue -- Southern Belle is his sister, the "openly lesbian" daughter of Man's Haircut Ellen, even though she looks a bit older.

Marcus wants to know if Southern Belle has talked to "her," because she hasn't been to school in a week, and she's stolen his bike.  Must be the Daughter.  According to Wikipedia, Marcus is one of her Love Interests.

Scene 5:  Smothering Mom wandering around Daughter's room, pawing her stuff, sniffing her clothes, and remembering how they used to be in love.  A hot guy, Paul (Scott Porter, top photo), asks if she's ok.  Wikipedia: Paul is her Love Interest.

"You miss them!" he proclaims.  Smothering Mom denies it: "Of course not!  Normal people don't miss their kids when they move away!"  Them?  Is Daughter nonbinary, or is there a second kid that we haven't heard of yet?   He wants to make out, but instead she puts on Daughter's t-shirt and runs out to the kitchen to threaten him with a frying pan.

Their discussion of the Daughter alternates between "they" and "she." 

Scene 6:  Flashback to Thanksgiving past.  Daughter is a preteen, but Smothering Mom is the same age.  She has to work, so Dad Zion will be picking Daughter up to take to Gramm-gramm's house.  But not to worry: on Black Friday, when food is half off, they'll deep-fry a Twinkie.  Do they have Black Friday food sales?  

Cut to the present: teenage Daughter looking up poisonous plants on her phone, and remembering Mom putting wolfbane in a blender just before Kenny -- a man in top condition -- had a heart attack.  Ginny & Georgia wiki: Kenny was one of Mom's husbands.   He was sexually abusive with Daughter, so Mom murdered him.   

Scene 7: Daughter discussing dying with her little brother.  Ok, she has a little brother.  That's the "they."   He's angry because Mom never sent Gil any of his letters.  Does he have a boyfriend?  Wikipedia: Nope. Gil is his father, in prison. Hunky Zion enters and asks for help: his parents will be arriving for Thanksgiving soon. 

Scene 8: At the hospital, a middle-aged woman is watching a critically ill patient. She goes home and tells her kid, Zack, that they're not doing Thanksgiving this year, under the circumstances -- husband dying, I guess.

Switch to a downtown coffee shop or deli or something, where Barista Joe is angry at "her" for not showing up to work.  Is "her" Mom or someone else?   Mom orders stuffing and a pie, and asks him about his Thanksgiving plans.  He glares at her, but they touch anyway, in a moment of horniness.  A lot of back story there.

 The woman with the dying husband comes in to make a last minute order; she decided to do Thanksgiving after all.   Mom criticises her appearance.  Dying husband, no time for makeup, bitch!  Barista Joe (Raymond Ablack) gives her two dinners on the house. Mom glares at him.  The lady does not know the meaning of the word "nice."  Or "parable." 

Scene 9: Zion's parents arrive for Thanksgiving, and complement everyone on how much they've grown -- including Zion.  After an extensive prayer, heronormative Grandma asks Daughter if she has a boyfriend.  She stares in horror; Zion tells Grandma to leave her alone.  If Wikipedia didn't have a list of Daughter's male Love Interests from Season 1, I would swear that she was afraid to come out as a lesbian to the elderly ultra-religious lady.

Meanwhile, Mom and Love Interest Paul sit down for Thanksgiving dinner at his parents' place.  How many dinners are we going to have to keep track of?  A young adult named Chris (uncredited on IMDB, but maybe Jake Gosden?) won't eat stuffing because of the gross texture, and makes a lame joke. 

We flash between the three dinners.  At all three of them,the men discuss the football game, and the women criticize each other's cooking and choices in men.   Isn't there anyone on this show who isn't a slave to gender stereotypes? 

Still 41 minutes to go, so I'm fast-forwarding to see if we visit the Thanksgiving dinner of the gay guys, PI Gabriel Cordova (Alex Mallari Jr., left) and Nick (Daniel Beirne)

Not Thanksgiving dinner, but at minute 47, PI Gabriel is looking at Mom's mug shots and marriage certificates on his computer, and finds out "who she really is."  Apparently she has quite a sordid past.

Boyfriend Nick enters and complains about dying from a leftover sandwich.  Gabriel lies, saying that he's working on a lesson plan for his third grade class.  Wait, I thought PI stood for "Private Investigator."  Ginny & Georgia Wiki: He's pretending to be a third-grade teacher while investigating Georgia's involvement in the murder of her second husband, Anthony. (it's Zion, Anthony, Gil, Kenneth, and now Love Interest Paul).

We cut to Daughter getting naked to take a bath - pervy closeups of various body parts -- if you've got a foot fetish, you've come to the right place.   She tries drowning herself, but it doesn't work, so she settles for lying on her bed, being morose. Love Interest Marcus comes in, and they swallow each other's faces.

 And that's it for the gay guys: chatting from across the room.  But to be fair, this episode contained 20 other speaking parts: Georgia, her Love Interest, his parents and brother,  Ginny, her Love Interest, her Dad, his parents and aunt, the Southern Belle, her parents and grandparents, Little Brother, Mom with Dying Husband, her son, and Barista Joe. And drooling over Daughter's body took a lot of time.  I'm surprised they got those few minutes.

"The Island": A Demon Slayer, an Heiress, and a Gay Priest Save the World

The Island, on Amazon Prime, has an interesting premise about reincarnated gods, and two cute guys who may or may not have a gay subtext. Only the first two episodes are streaming, so I watched the first.

Scene 1: A bride and groom climb a steep trail, the groom puffing, while the photographer criticizes his virility and tells them about the Dol Hareubangs, rock statues with the blood of the gods, who can keep demons from entering our world. There are 46 real ones and many decoys on JeJu Island (a resort island off the coast of South Korea).   

They set up the photo shoot near two Dol Hareubangs.  But suddenly the statues crumble to dust!  Smoke and giant slugs emerge from the holes they left. The groom turns into a spikey demon and kills the photographer, but then Ban (in the subtitles) or Van (on AsianWiki) (Kim Nam-gil), a cute guy with a magic sword, disintegrates him.  The bride, also a demon, vanishes. 

Scene 2: A mountaintop monastery.  Two Western monks notice that a sacred scroll is bleeding, and rush to find Giovanni (in the subtitles) or Johan (on AsianWiki), played by Cha Eun-woo (left).  He's a cute Korean priest, with feminine rings and earrings, busy performing an exorcism on a foul-mouthed Linda Blair-type possessed woman. 

Scene 3: When he is finished, Father Johan examines the scroll.  It depicts a woman who would have been the Savior of the World long ago, but she was killed before she could complete her mission.  But these people are Catholic.  Wouldn't that be Jesus? I guess they are going with a combination of Catholicism and Korean Shamanism).  Her murderer is still alive, and living on Jeju Island. 

But don't worry, we've been keeping tabs on a new Savior (her reincarnation?).  Fate will lead her to JeJu Island. Father Johan is tasked with going, too, to help her save the world. 

Scene 4: The woman, Mi-Ho, talking to reporters about a new art collection she has acquired to display at the Daehan Hotel.  This deserves a press conference?   They want to know if people really choose hotels based on the paintings hanging on the walls.  I agree.  I would invest in hotel amenities instead.

Afterwards, she's having lunch with her Butler and Dad, when her glaring Auntie arrives.  "I own this hotel!  Why didn't you tell me about the major art collection purchase?" 

 "The hotel is losing business; this will draw guests.  Besides, Dad is the CEO. Your position is just symbolic."  

"Growl, growl, we'll see about that, My Pretty.  And your little dog, too!"

Scene 5: Night.  Min-Ho is on the way to the art museum, when another car cuts them off!  Secretary Kang (Lee Soon-Woon) gets out to yell at the other driver, but the hulks inside think he's responsible and demand an apology.  The situation escalates, and Min-Ho ends up clobbering them. 

 Uh-oh, it was a set-up to discredit the heiress!  The next day, a video of the incident has gone viral,  there's a company boycott, the stocks are dropping, CEO Dad is furious, and Owner Auntie is gloating: "Finally, I can get rid of the competition!"   Min-Ho is exiled to Jeju Island, with just two servants(the Butler and Secretary Kang), to work in a high school!  

Scene 6: Getting off the plane at Jeju Island, they are mobbed by reporters.  Secretary Kang distracts them while Min-Ho runs for the parking lot.  Suddenly a spikey demon in a wedding dress stops eating the lot attendant, snarls "It's you!", and starts chasing her!  She hides in a delivery van, but the demon can punch through metal!  

Just as she is about to be eaten, Ban from Scene 1 appears. to fight the demon.  After it is vanquished, he stares at Min-Ho with recognition.   

Scene 7: Min-Ho is awakened by her Secretary and Butler, in her elegant cliffside apartment.  She wants to know what happened; they don't know. 

Meanwhile, Ban the Demon Slayer is picking up rocks in wilderness. An elderly woman approaches and asks what the new Savior is like.  "She didn't recognize me."  "Well, she must not be awake yet."  "Then why was she targeted by a lust demon?"

Flashback to ancient Jeju. Some monks discover that a whole village has been killed by a lust demon.  Wait -- two boys survived!  They take them back to their monastery.  The elderly woman from earlier disapproves of Head Monk Jongyeong's plan to raise the boys as Demon Slayers: "You've tried it a dozen times, and you always fail.  The kid dies."  But the ceremony goes on anyway; it involves making the boys all spikey, like demons.

Scene 8: Head Monk Jongyeong announces that the boys survived the ceremony, so they will become Demon Slayers..  He renames them Ban and Gungtang (he has not appeared yet, but as an adult, he will be played by Sung Joon).

During their training montage, Ban sees a preteen girl (who no doubt will be reincarnated as Min-Ho), and stares at her in recognition.

Scene 9: Min-Ho starts her new job as a guidance counselor at Tamra High School.  The principal  knows that she is an heiress and kowtows (also, her dad promised to build a new auditorium if they hired her). The other teachers are grumpier (they have cubicles instead of offices, 

Scene 10:  Well, the guidance counselor has an office.  In terrible disarray, dusty, with books and papers scattered everywhere.  But, on the bright side, one of Min-Ho's female friends works there.  They hug gleefully.

Scene 11: Night.  Secretary Kang drives Min-Ho through the dark night to dinner. She gets an email and orders him to stop; she's just discovered that he arranged the driving scam!  "Yes, but I never betrayed you.  I was working for your Aunt from the beginning."  She fires him and storms off, letting him keep the car.  But suddenly a cloud of sparks descends on him, and he turns into a demon and attacks!  The end.

Beefcake: None.

Heterosexism: None yet.  I imagine that Ban the Vampire Slayer...er, Demon Slayer...and Min-Ho will fall in love. UPDATE: In Episode 2, they fall in love as kids.

Gay Characters: No one has expressed any heterosexual interest, but no one has expressed any same-sex interest, either.  Father Johan is quite feminine, with his multiple rings and earrings, so maybe he'll be canonically gay.

The Savior: Min-Ho is a fun character, in the evening soap "I'll take what's rightfully mine!" vein, and she has proven martial arts skills, but whenever a demon charges at her, she turns into a Damsel in Distress.  You'd think that the Savior of the World would be more kickass.  Maybe when she's fully awakened. 

Kaleidoscope: A Gimmick Caper TV Series with Some Gay Potential

 

Kaleidoscope, #1 on Netflix, is a gimmick-caper tv series: audiences "enter at different points in the story."  I don't know what algorithm decides what episode you start with, but mine started with lesbians.

Scene 1: An old guy in his underwear  (Giancarlo Esposito) says things like "No one can succeed alone.  You have to find a soul mate," while a woman researches Kate Soto: a lesbian, and into Dickens.  She orchestrates a meet-cute with a copy of Little Dorritt, takes Kate out to dinner, and steals her id card, which she uses to steal $2 million from the vault at her offce.  She and her partner Roger reports back to the boss. "We just walked out with this stuff.  Your security is terrible. You need to buy one of our custom vaults."

I guess she was just pretending to be a lesbian to make the score, and Kate Soto won't appear again.  All heterosexuals from here on out.

Scene 2: The old guy, Leo, examining a list of jobs for his upcoming heist: :break, security, chem, wheels, and so on. For "supplies," he goes with Stan (Peter Mark Kendall), a cute curly-haired guy unloading raw meat from a walk-in freezer while his mother and sister or girlfriend yell at him: "Your parrot shit in the kitchen again."  He explains that he's going to use it in a complicated barter scheme.  They continue yelling and criticizing him.(The raw meat is for the bird).

Scene 3: Stan at his job in a deli loaded down with piggy banks.  Old Guy Leo enters; they hug enthusiastically.  "What's up, boss?" Stan asks.  He explains that he would love to go on a heist, but with Mom and sister or girlfriend yelling at him constantly, he's afraid to anger them further.  "But it's 7 billion dollars."  "I'm in!"

The heist: underground vault, plated steel, three cobalt doors, accessed through a secure subfloor, biometric sensors, military-trained security staff, where $7 billion in unsecured bonds are held.  The owners are The Triplets, three sleazy bankers:

1. Cho-Young Woo, a young guy in a pimp outfit, drinking with ladies.

2. The elderly Suzanne Grosvenor, who has Queen Elizabeth on her speed dial.

3. And the long-haired Swiss Stefan Thiele, whose bank is full of Nazi gold.  

Scene 4: Roger (Rufus Sewell) from Scene 1, who runs a vault-making company, congratulates his team for a job well done.  "We've got the Triplets to buy our vault.  If they're happy, the rest of the town falls in line."  They sell more bank vaults?  He passes out assignments. 

Andrew, in charge of security audits, assigns the extremely hot Rajiv (Sathya Sridharan, top photo) to do the source code review. Uh-oh, Old Guy Leo tells Stan that he's got an inside man, and Andrew flashes a sinister smile.  He's a mole!

Scene 5: Back in the deli, Stan agrees to supply the gear for the heist, but he'll need $50,000 in seed money.  Old Guy Leo has that covered: they're going to do a preliminary heist for funding.  "Why are you doing this?" Stan asks.  "You're not interested in cars or yachts or..."   Old Guy Leo: "We'll get a billion dollars each, enough to fix everything that went wrong with our lives."

Scene 6: A police lineup. The witness asks them each to say "I'm a fucking moron...and really try to sell it."  She picks one, takes off her wig, goes to a bar, and celebrates with Bob (Jai Courtney), another of the lineup guys, who has an Australian accent. "Next time just tell the cops that you didn't see anyting," he suggests.  They smooch five times.

She -- Judy -- heads to the back of the bar, where she is shocked to see...Deli Stan!  "You look amazing!" he exclaims, as another gay subtext bites the dust.  Aussie Bob comes back looking for her, and is not happy to see Stan.  "I told you never to come back to this town again!"  "But I have a guy who wants to hire Judy."

Old Guy Leo explains that the heist needs a chemist to make some lock burnouts and gas to incapacitate the guards, while Aussie Bob glares at them all.  He's not on th elist, but he insists on getting in on the action.

Scene 7: Hannah from Scene 1 in Vault Guy Roger's office, explaining that someone punched through their firewall.  He tells his assistant to put eyes on Andrew the Mole.

Scene 8: Hannah at home with her girlfriend or rommate.  Lesbian after all?  They're doing more background checks, so be careful: if anyone calls, act normal.

Girlfriend/Roommate wants to be a DJ in Berlin, but she doesn't have a job to save up money, so Hannah offers to set her up.

Scene 9: On the street, Old Guy Leo stops to flirt with a woman walking three dogs.  "All they do is fuck or fight," she complains. He wants to hire her to set up some shell companies and fence the take after the heist is over.  She can also handle security: she shows him her huge gun collection.  Another "Why are you doing this?" question.  Leo doesn't answer.  He suggests that they have sex.

Scene 10: Looking for a driver, Old Guy Leo and Ava the Dog Lady visit a garage, where the mechanic RJ (Jordan Mendoza) is constantly tapping drumsticks. "He's a good kid.  Knows cars, knows tech.  And he's an auto racer, so he can drive." 

Scene 11: Six of the seven gang members gather to argue and insult each other, and list the supplies they will need for their parts of the heist.  They will need $350,000 to start off.

Meanwhile, at the Vault Company, Hannah tells Vault Guy Roger that the security breach came from inside the office!  Andrew glares at her.  After he leaves, she asks Hot Guy Rajiv about him.  

Scene 12: The preliminary heist: 90% of diamonds entering the U.S., worth $24 billion, show up on 47th Street in New York, Diamond Alley.  The gang ignites a lot of smoke bombs, dons gas masks, breaks windows, and grabs.  Aussie Bob is mesmerized by a tiara, lingers, and is shot in the hand.

Cut to Heather and her girlfriend/roommate watching a news story about the preliminary heist.  They discuss Heather's pregnancy and her deadbeat ex-boyfriend. So not a lesbian.  it's heterosexuals all the way down. 

Scene 13: Back at the hideout, they tend to Bob's wound and complain about his mistakes.  Can he crack the safe, now that his right hand is useless?  Cut to Heather showing her roommate her new job, in the Vault Company mailroom.  

Next she's called into a meeting with the Vault Company Boss.  The security breach was caused by an injectible keyboard.  But we put a "poison pill" in the data, so anyone who tried to retrieve it would be red-flagged.  It was Andrew the Mole!  "You're fired...get out."  And by the way, Heather gets his job as Senior Vice President.

By the way, Boss knows that she's pregnant because she switched to decaf.  His wife did the same thing when she was pregnant.  He's hetero too.

Scene 14:  Old Guy Leo talking to Heather.  OMG, Heather is the mole! She set Andrew up!  They discuss how time goes faster as you get older.  That's true.  When you're 60, the months just blip by.  I wonder how fast time goes when you are immortal.  She has second thoughts about the heist, now that she's pregnant, but Leo talks her into going through with it.

Beefcake: None so far.

Heterosexism: A few random kisses and discussions of boyfriends/girlfriends off camera.

Gay Characters: I'm still not sure about Heather.  Maybe she's bi.  Same with Stan: is that a sister or girlfriend yelling at him back home?   RJ has not expressed any heterosexual interest, but when you have to introduce 7 main characters, plus wives, girlfriends, sisters, bosses, and coworkers, there probably wasn't time.

Kaleidoscope:  So far the "kaleidoscope" seems linear and straightforward.  I'll have to see how other episodes, out of time sequence, augment the story.  

My Grade: B if any of the characters turn out to be gay or bi, C if it's heterosexuals all the way down.

Going to movies in 1997-98: English Blokes Bare It All, Elijah Wood Dies, Marky Mark Dangles, and Joey from "Friends" Gets Lost

 In 1997, I left California for New York, to enroll in yeat another Ph.D. program.  In the humanities, there was constant pressure to embrace only "art"; the grad students competed with each other to determine who had watched tv less: 

"The only thing I watch is opera on PBS."  "Oh, I watched the news once 10 years ago."  "I glanced at a tv screen once in a doctor's office waiting room, but immediately turned away." "TV?  Never heard the term before."

 In the social sciences, grad students and faculty didn't care: all art was garbage.  Richard III or Wacky Races, Mrs. Dalloway or Blondie and Dagwood, all was mindless trash, rotting your brain so you wouldn't be able to think Deep Thoughts about chi squares and logistic regressions.  So go to all the movies you want, but don't expect social scientists to lower themselves sufficiently to accompany you.   

August: The Full Monty.  Unemployed working-class blokes get the idea of making money by stripping (for women). Two of the blokes fall in love.  Actually, one of the grad students in my department did see this; she commented that she went with someone "who is not that way AT ALL," yet still thought that the gay romance subplot was "cute."  So only gay people can watch a gay romance without retching, but everybody can enjoy a boy-meets-girl story?  Heck, the two guys don't even kiss!

September: The Ice Storm.  Bored suburbanite swap partners while their son (Elijah Wood) dies in an ice storm.  I seem to remember Elijah being gay, but the wikipedia summary doesn't mention it.

October: Seven Years in Tibet.  I read the autobiography about a German soldier during World War II who flees into Tibet and becomes the tutor in all things Western for the young Dalai Lama.  The movie goes to great lengths to heterosexualize everybody, giving Heinrich Harrer (Brad Pitt) a wife and estranged son back in Austria.  His  POW buddy (David Thewlis) eventually gets a wife, too.

October: Boogie Nights: the golden age of disco, drugs, porn, and giant penises, with Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler (his giant penis is prosthetic).
There's a gay or bi character, but heterosexual romance saves the day.

November: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  On the evil side, a tawdry closeted "homosexual" is on trial for the murder of a "male prostitute" (he's acquitted, but dies anyway, because Bury Your Gays).   On the good side is Lady Chablis, a transwoman playing herself.  There's a heterosexual romance in the midst of everything, of course.

December: An American Werewolf in Paris,  Not a sequel to An American Werewolf in London, it actually involves a boy discovering that the Girl of His Dreams is a werewolf.  She belongs to a secret society of werewolves that eats his two friends.  So much for gay subtexts.

January: Star Kid.  It was science fiction, so why not?  Teen idol Joseph Mazzello finds a talking superhero suit that helps him save the world and...meet the Girl of His Dreams.  Ugh!

February: Mrs. Dalloway, based on a novel by Virginia Woolfe that I hadn't read, but I knew that she was gay or bi, and traveled in the gay-friendly Bloomsbury Group of early 20th century England.  During a long day fraught with depression, marital squabbles, and suicide, Mrs. Dalloway reflects on a lesbian affair in her youth, and Septimus feels guilty over the death of his boyfriend during World War I.

March: Wild Things.  Sounds like a 1980s sex comedy, but it's actually about a high school teacher who has sex with an underaged student and is accused of rape (which, legally, it was).  

April: Lost in Space. A film version of the 1960s classic sci-fi series about a family waylaid on the long journey to Alpha Centauri, with several of the old cast members doing cameos and hunky Matt LeBlanc as pilot Don West

April: Tarzan and the Lost City.  Audiences were expecting yet another rehash of the Tarzan origin story, not realizing that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote over 20 Tarzan novels. This one brings Tarzan (and Jane) to the lost city of Opar!

May: The Opposite of Sex.  A 16-year old girl, pregnant by her boyfriend, most in with her gay half-brother, and steals his dead lover's ashes.  Meanwhile his dead lover's sister, also pregnant, disapproves of him being gay because it's disgusting and all gay men die of AIDS and..at that point we walked out of the theater.  It was offensive all the way down, which is actually the tagline. 

June: None

July: Smoke Signals.  Victor (Adam Beach) and Thomas (Evan Adams) are gay subtext buddies on the rez.