{"id":15153,"date":"2012-01-19T11:11:40","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T16:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=15153"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:07:39","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:07:39","slug":"hollywoods-unnecessary-disdain-for-gay-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/01\/19\/hollywoods-unnecessary-disdain-for-gay-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood’s Unnecessary Disdain For Gay Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Why Does Hollywood Hate Gay Sex?<\/a><\/em> by Ramin Satoodeh in The Daily Beast.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> By now, you\u2019ve probably heard about Shame, this generation\u2019s Last Tango in Paris. Michael Fassbender plays a single (and often naked) Manhattan bachelor named Brandon obsessed with sex, and the movie offers a voyeuristic look into his anonymous encounters with various women. One afternoon he even has sex with a pretty blonde prostitute against the window of the Standard Hotel, for all of downtown New York to see.<\/p>\n

On another drunken night, Brandon wanders into a gay club. He\u2019s so desperate for sex, he\u2019ll sleep with anybody\u2014even a man. The scene is meant to illustrate how depraved his character has become, but the moment is a turning point for another reason. For the first time in the film, Shame is ashamed to show you what Brandon experiences. In a dark underground corridor, a guy unzips Brandon\u2019s pants \u2026 and the camera cuts away. The screen fades to black.<\/p>\n

Gay sex is the last Hollywood taboo. When Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet as the first openly gay sitcom star in 1997\u2014and her fictional self followed suit\u2014a parade of gay characters came after her. There was Will & Grace, and Carrie Bradshaw\u2019s Sex and the City sidekick, Stanford. In movies, the gay best friend became a staple, from My Best Friend\u2019s Wedding to Mean Girls.<\/p>\n

Yet none of these characters do what gay men do. As Hollywood portrays it, the homosexual man is, astonishingly, sexless.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t name any great love scenes between two men in hit films or TV shows in 2011, it\u2019s because there weren\u2019t any. Last summer, Justin Timberlake experienced all the benefits in Friends With Benefits, while his gay pal (played by Woody Harrelson) was sidelined. On Glee, Kurt finally lost his virginity to his boyfriend\u2014off camera, to the frustration of many of the show\u2019s fans. When Christopher Plummer came out of the closet in Beginners, he signaled the occasion by wearing purple (his younger boyfriend hovered in the background). Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s J. Edgar had a hot male companion (Armie Hammer), but he exchanged only a single kiss with him.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his Milk screenplay, says that a love scene would have been too revisionist historically. \u201cI certainly didn\u2019t want to see J. Edgar doing it,\u201d says Black, who is gay. \u201cIn the 1930s, oftentimes, a loving relationship with gay men was never consummated.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t let anyone in the audience think about butt fucking and you\u2019ll be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Max Mutchnick, the co-creator of Will & Grace, remembers attending a party the night before the show\u2019s pilot was filmed. Mutchnick recalls being told by (the also gay) director Joel Schumacher: \u201cWhatever you do, don\u2019t make it too butt-fucky. Don\u2019t let anyone in the audience think about butt fucking and you\u2019ll be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mutchnick continues, \u201cThe sad reality is, if you\u2019re in a theater and they show gay sex, someone in the audience will shout, \u2018Ewww!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the crux of it. Studio executives aren\u2019t necessarily homophobic, but the film business is in a financial slump and averse to risks even in the best times. Though gay marriage is now more accepted across the United States, the industry is driven by tickets sold to straight men. That\u2019s why lesbian sex gets a pass: when Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis spend a steamy night together in Black Swan, it helps sell tickets. There\u2019s no similar financial bump attached to gay male intercourse. As one producer noted, anal sex is still considered something out of the ordinary, anyway. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the anal sex scene is part of a rape between a man and woman\u2014existing as a symbol of sexual sadism.<\/p>\n

As Vito Russo\u2019s significant 1981 book The Celluloid Closet argued, Hollywood has always had a complicated relationship with gay men, keeping actors in the closet and stereotyping feminine men. For a long time, the Hays Code banned gay characters from even being in the movies. When they finally appeared, they did so with a vengeance in the underground queer films of the \u201960s and \u201970s. These movies had a lot of ground to make up for, which explains their pornographic tendencies. Andy Warhol\u2019s 1964 short film Blowjob lived up to its title. Saturday Night at the Baths (1975) featured another early depiction of gay sex. Even in the controversial Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino, gay sex was recognized as an important, defining part of gay male culture\u2014the film features a graphic orgy with a fisting scene.<\/p>\n

But as gay people have become more integrated, depictions of gay sex lost its shock value. By the late \u201990s, two of the factors that inspired rage in gay filmmakers\u2014AIDS and Ronald Reagan refusing to help us\u2014seemed more like problems of the past. The gay man was beginning to enter mainstream movies, especially romantic comedies, as a kind of cuddly figure (see Robin Williams in 1996\u2019s The Birdcage, Kevin Kline in 1997\u2019s In & Out, or Paul Rudd in 1998\u2019s The Object of My Affection).<\/p>\n

I emailed our film critic David Ansen, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, to ask whether there was gay sex I had overlooked in any recent movies. He wrote back: \u201cThere were actually movies this year with gay sex but really nobody saw them because they only played film festivals, like the very sexy Christopher and His Kind, which was made for Brit TV, and the still unreleased Leave It on the Floor, a musical with an all-black cast about the voguing world. Or James Franco\u2019s experimental student film about Hart Crane, which has very explicit gay sex in it. The movies with gay sex tend to be ghettoized as gay films and not seen by crossover audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you ask gay screenwriters and directors to name the most explicit gay sex scene in a mainstream film, they often gulp in silence. Then they name 2005\u2019s Brokeback Mountain. But that tent scene between Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger is still relatively tame. \u201cI don\u2019t think I would say Brokeback Mountain, because it\u2019s not that explicit,\u201d says B. Ruby Rich, the film professor at UC Santa Cruz who coined the phrase New Queer Cinema. \u201cWe\u2019re in the post\u2013Brokeback Mountain moment. Even a film like Gus Van Sant\u2019s Milk is astonishingly chaste. The actual life of Harvey Milk was drastically different than that, given it was the \u201970s in San Francisco and men were fucking in every doorway.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the standout gay films of last year was Weekend, a British drama that follows a young gay couple home from a one-night stand. It opened last fall to some of the best reviews of the year, yet mustered only $469,947 in limited release. Director Andrew Haigh recalls how difficult it was to secure financing. \u201cEveryone was reticent about giving us money, because they didn\u2019t think there would be an audience,\u201d he says. \u201cWhich I thought was a bit strange. If only gay people saw the movie, there are still a lot of gay people out there! It\u2019s not like there are only three gay people in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

He believes it has to do with a societal reluctance to stories about men falling in love. \u201cI think there\u2019s an idea that people have in their heads, if they are not gay, they are not going to get something out of a story of gay people,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what I find frustrating. Gay people can see a movie with straight people and that can still resonate with them. It should work the other way around.\u201d<\/p>\n

On television, the show that broke all boundaries for gay sex was Queer as Folk. The Showtime series\u2014a remake of a British show\u2014ran from 2000 to 2005, following a group of men in and out of bed, and we saw everything that happened under their sheets. But it was perhaps not without consequences for the cast. \u201cMy gay manager told me not to take the show,\u201d says Peter Paige, who played Emmett. \u201cHe said we all know you\u2019re going to have a big career, I just want to make sure when we pitch you to ABC, they don\u2019t say we can\u2019t put this guy on our network, we just saw him getting ass fucked on Showtime.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the show ended, Paige says he was often turned away in casting. He thinks it has more to do with playing such a flamboyant character, not just the sex. \u201cMy particular challenge is I played the gayest character on the gayest show on TV, and being openly gay, I\u2019ve given myself a triple obstacle to overcome.\u201d He\u2019s found that sometimes even for gay roles, casting directors only want to see straight actors.<\/p>\n

For Trevor Donovan, his steamy gay kisses as the hunk Teddy on the new 90210 was a chance to stretch. \u201cA lot of producers and directors and studios are scared,\u201d says Donovan, whose character was written off the series last year. \u201cThey are scared to take those chances.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had an incident over Thanksgiving, and it was the first time I had any incident outside the show that pertained to me playing a gay character,\u201d says Donovan. He was nursing a beer near his hometown of Mammoth, Calif., when another guy at the dive bar started taunting him\u2014asking, \u201cHow do you like playing a fag?\u201d\u2014and tapped his face. \u201cThat was the first time I was ever harassed or teased, and it was for playing a gay character,\u201d he says. The exchange finally ended with a fight outside. \u201cI threw him in the snow by the scruff of his neck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Real societal change is always the product of the stories we see. In 1967, Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner made interracial marriage normal just months after the Supreme Court ruled that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. That\u2019s why there\u2019s more at stake in this gay-sex debate than just the titillation. If Hollywood refuses to push boundaries, to make more people comfortable with something that a segment of America is still uncomfortable with, gay people remain second-class citizens. \u201cHere\u2019s my thing with gay sex,\u201d Dustin Lance Black says. \u201cIn terms of sex, we get plenty of that every day in our own lives and thrown on the Internet. I feel like what I\u2019m really interested in is gay romance.\u201d And that\u2019s the real problem with no gay sex. You can\u2019t tell a real love story if nobody is doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Why Does Hollywood Hate Gay Sex? by Ramin Satoodeh in The Daily Beast. The Text: By now, you\u2019ve probably heard about Shame, this generation\u2019s Last Tango in Paris. Michael Fassbender plays a single (and often naked) Manhattan bachelor named Brandon obsessed with sex, and the movie offers a voyeuristic look into his anonymous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nHollywood's Unnecessary Disdain For Gay Sex - Prose Before Hos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Article: Why Does Hollywood Hate Gay Sex? by Ramin Satoodeh in The Daily Beast. 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