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Tony Curtis again, this time as Antoninus, Lawrence Olivier's "body servant" in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, describes the suggestive scene in which he bathes his master, and which was cut from the final film.
"I've never seen such a time in my life with censorship", says Gore Vidal. "They cut and cut 'Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.'" "There was no way that Brick [Paul Newman] could have had any kind of sexual desire for his buddy."
Vidal describes his own battles with the censors when he adapted another Tennessee Williams play," Suddenly Last Summer," for the screen.
The drama between Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift revolves around the unsavory habits of Sebastian Venable, a character who is seen in the film only in flashback - and whose face is never shown.
Sebastian meets his end at the hands of the young boys he's been using sexually, who chase him up a mountain and ultimately devour him -- in a scene eerily reminiscent of the early horror classic "The Bride of Frankenstein" (which incidentally was directed by James Whale, one of the few openly gay directors in Hollywood history). As American filmmakers were struggling to make homosexual material acceptable to the Hays Office and the Legion of Decency, a film came out of Great Britain in which an explicitly gay (or at least bisexual) character actually stands up to fight the system that oppresses homosexuals: "Victim," starring Dirk Bogarde as the screen's first gay hero. Hollywood was hurting. Faced with competition from more sexually explicit foreign films, as well as from the newly popular invention, television, filmmakers searched for new ways to attract audiences. Producers were convinced that audiences would pay to see films with more adult themes. By the early sixties, the Code had gradually been whittled away. The only remaining restriction was "sex perversion." Two filmmakers set out to make films that would smash the last taboo. Otto Preminger forced the issue by announcing (prematurely) that the Production Code had been revised to allow him to film the bestseller "Advise and Consent" -- including the subplot concerning a US Senator (Don Murray) who is blackmailed about a homosexual affair in his past.
According to MacLaine, there was so little awareness of what homosexuality was all about that the subject was never even discussed during the making of the film. Both these films dealt with homosexuality as something shameful, a dirty secret -- and, as Susie Bright and Armistead Maupin attest, these films often had a devastating affect on the psyches of young gay people in the audience. As gay screenwriter Barry Sandler explains, "Growing up in that period in the sixties, all we had were images of unhappy, suicidal, desperate gay people." "Walk On the Wild Side," adapted from the novel, is the first movie that actually added a lesbian angle en route to the screen -- Barbara Stanwyck as the tough madam of a New Orleans brothel who is desperately attracted to a glamorous young prostitute (Capucine). Even "The Detective," a Frank Sinatra movie that tried to be daringly enlightened about homosexuality, presented a view of homosexuals as desperate, unhappy, self-loathing -- and ultimately murderous. Sandy Dennis' lesbian character in "The Fox" is a pathetic spinster taunted by Keir Dullea, who suggests that her problem is that she's never had a man. Says lesbian filmmaker Jan Oxenberg, "These images magnify the sadness, the hatred of us, the prediction that we will not find love." "I think the fate of gay characters in American literature, plays, films, is really the same as the fate of all characters who are sexually free," reflects Arthur Laurents. "You must pay. You must suffer. If you're a woman who commits adultery you're only put out in the storm. If you're a woman who has another woman, you better go hang yourself. It's a question of degree. And certainly if you're gay, you have to do real penance -- die". In film after film ("The Detective," "Caged," "Dracula's Daughter," "The Fox," "Rebel Without a Cause," "Johnny Guitar," "Rebecca," "Suddenly Last Summer," "The Children's Hour") characters of questionable sexuality meet their end in the last reel. Just when it looked like there was no hope for gay characters anywhere...
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