![]() The first English language film to utter the word "homosexual" was titled, appropriate enough, "Victim" (1961) and starred Dirk Bogarde as a married barrister being blackmailed over his entirely platonic involvement with a lonely young man. Supremely, there was Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 "Psycho," in which the sexually ambiguous Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is both male and female, victim and killer, object of pity and object of horror. ![]() Richard Fleischer's "Compulsion" (1959) gingerly evoked the sexuality of child killers Leopold and Loeb. In William Wyler's "The Children's Hour" (1961), allegations of lesbianism lead to the suicide of schoolteacher Shirley MacLaine. Mankiewicz's "Suddenly, Last Summer," from a script by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, the gay character is central to the drama but is evoked only as a shadowy, spectral figure, who is set upon and devoured by the Spanish boys he has been soliciting for sex. In Hollywood, the gothic mode predominated. The image of the homosexual changed almost overnight, from court jester to vague menace, as if the threat to social order posed by an alternative form of affective life were now genuine and imminent.Ä«etween 19, a flurry of films appeared that redefined the image of the homosexual around two extremes-that of the frightening and that of the pathetic-extremes that, under pressure, tended to merge into a single confused, conflicted muddle. It was only at the end of the '50s, when large segments of American society began to protest their exclusion from the dream, that fissures of dissent began to appear, undermining the strength and certainty of the middle-class ideal. Gays could satirize this emerging culture, but posed no real threat to it: heterosexual monogamy was the unshakable norm, producing new communities and driving a new consumer-based economy. That kind of tolerance, of course, is easier from a position of strength, and never was American society more sure of itself than in the immediate postwar years-the period that saw the normalization of the nuclear family, the spread of suburbia and the launching of the baby boom. The "Sitting Pretty" series of the late '40s and early '50s, in which the flagrantly homosexual Webb is hired as a babysitter by suburban parents Robert Young and Maureen O'Hara, amounts to a radical critique of the emerging middle-class value system that few audiences would tolerate today (even though conservative values triumph in the end). It was in such a role that Clifton Webb, Monty Woolley, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore (and later, Paul Lynde) became much-beloved supporting players and, as in Webb's case,even stars. In the '30s and '40s, gays appeared more often as comic figures, sometimes as fluttery, limp-wristed stereotypes (as were many of the hotel clerks and head waiters played by Franklin Pangborn), but perhaps more often as quick-witted, acerbic commentators, whose outsider status allowed them to reflect witheringly on the absurdities of the straight world. The threatening, demonic image of homosexuals is actually of fairly recent vintage in American film. ![]()
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