popsublime: Five Favorite Gay Cinematic Losers

There’s a book of queer theory from 2007, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, whose central concept I still love today: “Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.” For this reason, the gay “losers” of cinema are always the characters that have interested me the most. Their more successful counterparts steer clear of the loser designation either by mimicking straight culture so well that they can pass for straight, or by following the gay rulebook so closely that they effectively give up their own sense of an individual identity. Within twenty minutes of thinking of the idea to write this post, I had already compiled a list of twenty gay cinematic losers, and that was just from browsing my own shelf of DVDs at home. Maybe I’ll write a sequel (or two) to this post eventually, but for now, I’ll focus on my five favorite gay losers of cinema, the characters who’ve stayed with me the most over time, and what they all share in common, as well as where exactly they diverge.

Miguel Arteta’s 2000 film Chuck & Buck, written by and starring Mike White in a gloriously unashamed performance as the perpetual man-child Buck, is somewhere in my top three favorite movies of all time. I remember that at the time of its release, actors as diverse as Jeff Bridges and Catherine Deneuve praised the movie and Mike White’s performance in it. During the course of the film, Buck tries to re-connect with his childhood friend Chuck (Chris Weitz), another kid from his neighborhood who’s now a straight, married music executive in Los Angeles, and whom we find out later in the movie had sex with Buck for a period of time in their youth. I related a lot to the film’s main storyline because I’d experienced exactly the same thing with a boyhood friend from school back when I was growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and at pretty much the same age. I assume that plenty of other boys had such experiences, too, but for obvious reasons, they almost never get addressed by the culture in any serious way.

To say that Buck remains stunted in the wake of that childhood experience, and in his totally understandable desire to relive that early experience again with Chuck and nobody else, is an understatement. Stuck in a kind of torturous yet blissfully unaware form of eternal youth, Buck writes a bizarre play about his boyhood friendship with Chuck, stages it at a tiny community theater right across the street from Chuck’s office building, and then invites him and his wife Carlyn (Beth Colt) to watch it on opening night, Buck’s way of trying to force Chuck to confront the truth of what had transpired between them. I recall that back when the movie came out, a somewhat lunkheaded gay writer I knew back then interpreted Buck as a kind of stalker figure, which completely misses the point of the film. The movie is, moreover, about the important question of whether we change or don’t change over time. The truth is that we both change and don’t change, but our pasts never change, and we all must find ways to reconcile with that.

The only ripped-from-the-headlines performance on this list is Christian Slater’s career-best portrayal of online gay porn purveyor Bryan Kocis (here named Stephen) in Justin Kelly’s 2016 film King Cobra. Kocis, who discovered the porn star known as Brent Corrigan (perfectly embodied by Garrett Clayton) and filmed the gay porn movies in which Corrigan starred early in his career, was brutally stabbed and killed in 2007 by two guys who were running a rival porn company (Keegan Allen as Harlow Cuadra and James Franco as Joseph Kerekes). Slater’s performance in the film has received far too little attention, probably because it’s so on-the-nose that it kind of floats along under the radar. Slater deftly hits all of the requisite notes of regret, frustration, and desire that most gay men can relate to at midlife, aging into their nether years while still trying to hold onto some semblance of youth and social connection. Molly Ringwald, in an underdeveloped role, plays Stephen’s concerned sister who’s aware of some but not all of her brother’s shady dealings.

What makes Slater’s performance special and precise is his subtle and fairly naturalized way of inhabiting the character. While some traces of flamboyance rise to the surface on occasion, Slater’s approach to the character remains mostly subdued, the most sensible choice for a middle-aged gay guy who’s living out in the suburbs and filming porn right in his own home, and just at the moment when the internet was beginning to gain traction as a viable source of income in the culture. The eventual tragedy of the film’s violently murderous climax is always lurking under the character’s surface in Slater’s skillful and quiet counterpointing of Stephen’s resignation and desperation. In a movie that’s focused on dramatic elements like sex and money, it’s easy for those sorts of subtleties to get overlooked, but at every moment while watching the film, I knew exactly where that character was coming from because of how specifically Slater channeled his particular nuances. I liked him, I feared for him, and I felt sorry for him all at once.

It’s probably a bit of a controversial choice to include on this list Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist from Ang Lee’s 2005 gay romantic blockbuster Brokeback Mountain. After all, it’s not entirely Jack’s fault that he falls deeply in love with a man who’s even more closeted than he is himself, and not just briefly but over a substantial series of years and semi-covert encounters. This role was clearly the pivotal point in Gyllenhaal’s career when he became a serious actor who’s in it for the long haul, and the performance gathers its power from watching Jack Twist transition from a randy young sheep herder and rodeo bull rider to an emotionally tormented wreck of a man who can’t shake how much he cares for Ennis Del Mar (the wonderful late Heath Ledger). If there’s one quality that all five of the gay characters on this list share: they fall in love with emotionally unavailable men, and then they never quite find their way out of that experience.

What draws the audience closer to Jack Twist, to the extent that there’s rarely a dry eye in the house by the time we reach his eventual end (and implied murder via a violent roadside gay-bashing), is his openness, at least in intradiagetic narrative terms, in processing his grief at not being able to share any type of stable relationship or more meaningful life with Ennis, due to Ennis’ own fear of cultural reproach for being gay. If, as Roland Barthes theorized in A Lover’s Discourse, the male lover “who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized,” Jack Twist’s expression of emotion through tears and anger at various points in the film allows the audience to empathize with him and, in a sense, care for him in the same way that Ennis wants to, and in fact does, once it’s already much too late for his caring to matter.

Gay American-Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald’s 1997 masterpiece The Hanging Garden is also somewhere in my top ten favorite films of all time, and it remains woefully unknown and underseen outside of Fitzgerald’s current home country. As a film that functions in the slippery terrain of magical realism, and in which each character is named after and wears the colors of a separate and particular flower, it’s not so easy to summarize the movie. Sweet William (Chris Leavins) returns to his childhood home in Nova Scotia after a decade-long estrangement from his family, to attend the wedding of his rowdy sister Rosemary (Kerry Fox, with Sarah Polley portraying the teenage version) to handsome Fletcher (Joel S. Keller), the guy whom Sweet William had fooled around with sexually back when they were all younger. We soon find out in flashback that Sweet William in his teens (bravely portrayed by Troy Veinotte in a performance that’s never been matched by another actor at that age) was both uncomfortably overweight and just starting to figure out that he was gay.

The film also centers around a suicide that may or may not have happened (the movie’s title is a double entendre) and its devastating and lingering effects on Sweet William’s entire family. Chris Leavins’ performance as the slightly older, openly gay, and slimmed down Sweet William remains one of my favorite performances of its kind nearly 25 years after the film’s release. His portrayal of the character is not only totally sexy to me, but also full of humanity, heart, humor, and consummate knowledge of what so many young gay men go through, but that rarely gets discussed or witnessed in any way by the culture-at-large. Coincidentally, I once ran into Chris Leavins at the long-defunct Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus in London, when the store was empty late one weeknight (after I’d just seen Daniel Radcliffe on stage in Equus), and we talked about the The Hanging Garden for a few minutes right there in the shop. He was excited that someone had recognized him from the movie, enough so that he said he’d be telling Thom Fitzgerald about it, one of the more memorable encounters of that sort from my life.

Finally, Christian Bale’s character Arthur Stuart in Todd Haynes’ 1998 film Velvet Goldmine is somewhat of a quintessential gay cinematic loser, even down to the way his character is written into the screenplay. Although the movie’s focus is on the era of ’70s glam rock and the brand of popstars who reigned supreme in those days, it’s really Arthur’s story, and he’s actually the one who’s writing it. Arthur had grown up in Britain as a closeted and socially awkward young gay man, a loner and outcast who was trying to come to terms with his sexuality through the glam rock stars whom he idolized, and against the pressures of his conversative family. By the time of the film’s “present day” setting in New York City in 1984, Arthur has become an investigative journalist who’s researching an article about the staged death of bisexual glam rock star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who has since secretly reinvented himself as Tommy Stone (Alastair Cumming). Slade’s set-up shooting death had been a hoax, which was faked at a concert that Arthur attended back in 1974, at the height of Slade’s involvement with fellow glam rock performer Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) and Slade’s wife Mandy (Toni Collette).

Arthur’s playful costuming, a way of taking on various facets of identity back in that youthful “glitter era,” gives way to his drab gray administrative uniform as a stoic urban journalist in the mid-’80s. Haynes’ camera often moves closely in on Christian Bale’s beautiful, expressionless face as he interviews various figures from Brian Slade’s past, piecing together Arthur’s own relationships with those in Slade’s inner circle in the process. We never quite know if Arthur has even come out as gay by the time we arrive at that slightly later point in his life, but Haynes’ screenplay and direction make it clear that the character identifies as gay, albeit perhaps silently. We also discover during the film’s gorgeous climax and denouement (unless it’s all just a fantasy?) that Arthur had a rooftop same-sex encounter, maybe for his first time ever, with Curt Wild himself, a potent memory that extends far into Arthur’s own future life. By closing the film in the way that he does, Todd Haynes in essence allows Arthur to embrace his extraordinary position as the star of his own private movie, ultimately. He also sends his audience a clear message about whose story is worth telling and whose story will endure.

4 comments:

Christina PughJune 13, 2021 at 4:16 PM
Great argument here -- I love the use of Barthes! Wonderful encapsulation of how these films speak to this idea of the "gay loser." I enjoyed reading your thoughts.
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Five Favorite Gay Cinematic Losers

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