Gay Men at the Movies: Film reception, cinema going and the history of a gay male community

By Scott McKinnon

Cinema has long played a major role in the formation of community among marginalised groups, and this book details that process for gay men in Sydney, Australia from the 1950s to the present. Scott McKinnon builds the book from a variety of sources, including film reviews, media reports, personal memoirs, oral histories and a striking range of films, all deployed to answer the question of understanding cinema-going as a moment of connection to community and identity – how the experience of seeing these films and being part of an audience helped to build a community among the gay men of Sydney in the period.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783205981

Scott McKinnon

Scott McKinnon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney. His thesis investigates the role of cinema and cinema-going in the emergence of gay male identity and community in Sydney in the years 1950–2010. Scott's research is particularly focussed on intersections between cinema and the themes of space and memory. He has also published work on Hollywood teen films and their place in 1950s Australian teen culture.

Book preview

Part One

Friends of Dorothy in the Emerald City

We’re off to see the Wizard…

– Dorothy and her friends, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

In the 1939 classic MGM musical, The Wizard of Oz, gay icon Judy Garland famously plays Dorothy Gale, a young woman swept from her sepia-tinged Kansas home to the wonderful Technicolor world of Oz. Her aim is to reach the Emerald City, a journey in which she is aided by three, rather odd bachelor gentlemen; the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. Although of uncertain origins, the identity label Friends of Dorothy was used to describe homosexual men in the 1940s and may well have originated with this trio. Certainly, their travels with Dorothy have been adopted by many gay men as a metaphor for the journey from the straight world of childhood to the gay community of adulthood, or from potentially homophobic rural spaces to the bright lights and acceptance of the big city. As Australian academic and activist Dennis Altman writes in his autobiography, "I had grown up rather like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, believing that once I left Kansas (Tasmania) the black and white of life would undoubtedly become technicolour. Some of that belief undoubtedly led me to move to New York in 1981".¹

Part One traces the history of friends of Dorothy in a different Oz and a different Emerald City. Australian playwright David Williamson satirised the faux-glamour of Sydney by labelling it The Emerald City in his 1987 play of that name, and it is a label that has stuck. The physical beauty of Sydney Harbour, and the glamourous residences that line its foreshores, suggest a sparkling place of style and glitz that, at times, seems as false as the Wizard eventually found by Dorothy. But this Emerald City of Oz has also provided a home to a bohemian world of eccentrics and outsiders looking for shelter from harsh Australian conformity.

Sydney is the capital city of the Australian state of New South Wales. It is Australia’s largest city, born from the first settlement of British colonists who established a penal colony at Sydney Cove in 1788. The British had declared the land uninhabited, denying the presence of indigenous peoples who had, in fact, inhabited the land for tens of thousands of years. Participation in, and official condemnation of, same-sex sexual activities was present from the very beginnings of white settlement. The first governor of the colony, Arthur Philip, declared that the sodomite was violent against Nature and that for either of the crimes of murder or sodomy, I would wish to confine the criminal until an opportunity offered of delivering him to the natives of New Zealand and let them eat him.² Although this particular punishment was not carried out, the death penalty for sodomy was in place.

By 1992, American gay journalist Neil Miller would argue that Sydney was where Australians and New Zealanders came to be gay.³ Over the course of two centuries and with the birth of new forms of sexual identity, the city had developed a reputation as a welcoming home for gay community and culture. That reputation had been based on the colonisation by gay communities of a relatively small number of inner-city suburbs. Those areas have variously been defined as bohemian, liberated and sophisticated spaces and as dangerous, degenerate and diseased spaces. They have been both praised and condemned as areas from which gay culture can be dispersed or as areas in which homosexuality must be contained. Conflicts over the meaning of these spaces have been a defining element in the history of gay male identity and community in Sydney.

This isn’t to say that the persecution of gay men ended in colonial times. Sydney has, in fact, embodied one of the contradictions at the heart of twentieth-century gay life, in which urban visibility meant both freedom and fear. Male homosexual acts remained illegal in New South Wales until 1984.⁴ Homosexually attracted men have faced violent, officially sanctioned persecution throughout much of Sydney’s history, from cruel medical treatments to the brutality of police. The everyday experience of homophobia has meant lost employment, rejection by families, abusive comments on the street and the violent attacks on gay men colloquially known in Australia as poofter bashing.

The history of gay life in the city is a story of homosexually attracted men negotiating the difficulties of expressing their romantic and sexual desires and, eventually, finding a greater degree of acceptance or tolerance for a particular form of public homosexual identity. Through the course of the six decades covered in Part One, a successful social and political movement forged change on an extraordinary scale. The push for equality continues, of course, but the very fact that the writing of a book like this one can be an exercise free from controversy means that, in the course of sixty years, the world has shifted in astonishing ways.

Friends of Dorothy in the Emerald City follows the yellow brick road through those years of change, delving into the subject of gay urban history and suggesting some broader viewpoints from which to contemplate the role of the movies in gay life. Most importantly, this research reveals the significance of the movies as a means through which friends of Dorothy have contemplated the place of sexuality within the formation of individual and collective memories; as a point at which emerging gay male identities have been debated and performed; and as a contributing factor in the emergence and framing of gay male communities.

Notes

1. Altman, Dennis, Defying Gravity: A Political Life , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p. 31.

2. Quoted in Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868 , Pan Books, London, 1988, p. 264.

3. Miller, Neil, Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life from Buenos Aires to Bangkok , Random House, New York, 1992, p. 237.

4. Willett, Graham, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, p. 206.

Chapter 1

The 1950s — Censored from view for all to see

Not looking at a fire doesn’t put it out.

– Maggie The Cat Politt, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Gay space, cinema-going and censorship in 1950s Sydney

In the 1950s, Hollywood made films in which homosexual characters could be found, if you knew where to look and how to identify them. Up on the screen were men whose very presence relied on their deniability. They existed in a liminal space, revealed and hidden, simultaneously presented on-screen and excluded from it. This containment of homosexuality had certain similarities with the public position of homosexual people in Sydney. Gay life in the city was an open secret through which male homosexuality was criminalised while its very existence was denied. This was a crime so unspeakable that it had to be loudly condemned. The 1950s were a time of oppression and persecution of homosexual men, yet some did participate in an active social scene. Occasionally lives like their own could be found at the movies, either on-screen or in the audience. The presentation of those on-screen lives, the discussion about them in the media and their presence in picture theatre audiences, all served as kindling to a newly lit fire. Through them, the contradiction inherent to the liminal framing of homosexuality began to be revealed; it gradually became impossible not to see that which had always been