Gay Men at the Movies: Cinema, Memory, and the History of a Gay Male Community by Scott McKinnon; Intellect/University of Chicago Press, $60
Almost every LGBT person can remember a movie that was all-important to them, that helped in determining who they are and what mattered most to them in life. How movies have played a role in the way we think about ourselves as LGBT people, our identities, and the emergence of the LGBT community, is at the heart of Scott McKinnon's brilliant new book Gay Men at the Movies.
McKinnon, a postdoctoral research fellow at Western Sydney University, shows how the experience of seeing movies and being part of an audience helped to build a community among the gay men of Sydney, Australia from the 1950s to the present. Because the films were primarily LGBT-oriented ones from America and because Australia's gay rights movement parallels closely that of the U.S., McKinnon's findings are as relevant to us as they are to Australians. "Memories of the movies can act as one of the signposts or landmarks through which we chart a course from our remembered childhood selves to our adult subjectivities."
The book is not a history of gay films or a history of gay men as film actors, writers, directors, or producers. McKinnon's focus is on gay men as film audiences rather than as filmmakers. The films considered here are popular cinema, meaning movies screened in commercial theaters and reviewed in the mainstream media. McKinnon is not interested in developing new insights or analyses of these films but rather in understanding "the historical processes of interpretation and meaning-making undertaken by audiences." At the movies, we engage not only with a film, but also with a space, with an audience, friends, and a neighborhood, so that going to movies is an act of social and cultural interaction and participation. Thus to understand how movies have shaped gay culture, identity, and community, we need to contemplate the place, context, and ongoing memories of film viewing that become part of our individual histories and a collective past.
As part of his research, McKinnon conducted 16 in-depth, oral-history interviews with gay men of Sydney, aged 20-70, covering not only their memories of the movies but their childhoods, coming out, and feelings of connection to the gay cultures and communities of Sydney. He wants to discover not just how gay men have been represented on screen or which movies have been significant within gay culture, but also the place of cinema within the personal lives of the interviewees. McKinnon charts a chronological course from 1950-2010, examining a specific decade, looking at theater-going, censorship and gay life in Sydney in that period, before looking in-depth at the reception of particular films: Tea and Sympathy and Rebel Without A Cause (1950s); Victim and Advise and Consent (1960s); Boys in the Band and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1970s); Cruising and Making Love (1980s); Philadelphia and Longtime Companion (1990s); and Brokeback Mountain and Milk (2000s), among many others.
For gay men, movies were often a form of escape from homophobia and bullying, where one could safely indulge one's fantasies of a happier life, or temporarily resolve issues of childhood confusion or isolation. Films could also be the place where one discovered one's sexual attraction and desire by seeing (near) naked male bodies onscreen. As cinema delved into gay lives and topics, one could learn how to come out, behave as a gay man, learn gay culture, or even how to have sex, believing that a film was telling your story. Movies could be the place where we found we were different, but also enjoyed seeing a gay movie with an LGBT audience who understood all the dialogue, references, and connotations. "Feelings of isolation around childhood movie-going can be replaced with feelings of belonging and of pleasure in having located a group that shares one's cinematic tastes and movie memories," with one's ability to quote from a particular film (Wizard of Oz, All About Eve) as an indicator of group identity.
Films based on well-known homosexual figures or based on moments from gay history (Stonewall, Milk) can be mobilized as part of our current history. Past history can be reclaimed as part of my history. For McKinnon, each generation makes its own meanings of movies and creates new memories on which to "contemplate, debate, dispute, build, and celebrate" new forms of identity. McKinnon has managed in coherent language to show us that as much as movies are made by us, they also make us who we are, by shaping our gay personal and community memories.