There’s some small gay subtext in Phantom of the Opera, the Book and the 1940’s movie. In the book, the two managers are always around each other and just a little too chummy.
In the 1940’s movie, there are two male leads other then claude rains.Raoul,who became a police inspector strangely, and some other guy, was trying to catch the phantom and apparentrly love Christine. The problem is, they give off gay vibes, particulary at the end when they walk away from christine holding hands(or arm in arm). The fact they’re french is already one strike againest them. I can’t remember it exactly because it’s been a couple years and I don’t feel like sitting through that movie again(I feel it’s the weakest of the versions, including the ALW movie from last year, which at least has catchy songs and is a bit more faithful to the book).
Well, Kazu and Kenta from Digimon (season 3) seemed to have a whole Wint & Kidd vibe going for 'em. (And that was in the edited American version :eek: )
And the Read or Die movie and series sure seem to have a Yomiko/Nancy and Nenene/Yomiko thing going, even though it’s pretty canon that that isn’t the case. (In the series, Nenene comments that she “doesn’t swing that way,” though I understand the manga has her planting a lip-lock on Yomiko in their first meeting. And Nancy and Yomiko both had pretty serious romances with male characters.)
Though from what I’ve read, with anime, it is a lot easier to read in gay subtexts that aren’t neccesarily there because strong, loving, but non-romantic relationships between people of the same sex are much less out of the ordinary in Japanese culture, compared to American culture. In fact, it’s apparently easier to depict such a pairing than a romantic, heterosexual pairing.
Heh. Ain’t human romantic and gender relations completely insan—er, “fun”?
I don’t have any stories in mind, but I do want to thank you for resisting the urge of writing yet another Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Pit post over at the Pit, which, I’ve been told, are all the rage! nowadays. You are an example to us all.
:dubious: Cite? All the references I’ve found show “gunsel” as a hoodlum with a gun…with overtones of recklessness and youth (and a realationship to the Yiddish word for goose) but nothing about homosexuality. And while I haven’t seen the movie in a long time I just reread the book and while Wilmer is something of a patsy, an actual sexual relationship with Guttman (or Cario) is suggested but far from clear.
Trowa was Catherine’s brother as was revealed in Wing Zero.
Sorry no cite, but back when I was obsessed with GW, I once read in an interview with the creator of the series that they were trying to appeal to the ‘boy’s love’ audience which is a HUGE market in Japan. The homoerotic scenes are often there for a puprose. You’ll notice you’ll find a lot of lesbian and gay characters in anime and manga, far more than there would be irl.
That’s what critics term the Intentional Fallacy, or interpreting a work by reference to external evidence {in this case, Tolkien’s assumed intentions in creating the characters} to determine the author’s purposes: if we presume that only the author can determine what he “meant”, that renders any work immune to deeper analysis, and a lot of English lecturers would be standing on the street holding signs saying “WILL DECONSTRUCT FOR FOOD”.
I linked to my earlier deconstruction of the homosexual themes inherent in the Toy Story movies: my analysis was {mostly} frivolous, but it does serve to raise a number of ideas which are interesting and viable in that they’re justifiable within the text itself, but which I’m quite sure John Lasseter and Pixar didn’t intend. That lack of authorial intention doesn’t invalidate my analysis.
The Intentional Fallacy was suggested by a couple of critics by the names of Wimsatt and Beardsley back in 1947: “They asserted that whether an author has expreesly stated what his or her intended aims or meanings were in writing a literary work, or whether these are merely inferred from what we know about the author’s life and opinions, such intentions are irrelevant to the literary critic, because the meaning and value of a text are inherent within the finished, freestanding and public work of literature itself.”
“Reference to the author’s supposed purposes or state of mind in writing a text is held to be a harmful mistake, because it distracts us to such “external” matters as the author’s biography, or psychological condition,or creative process, which we substitute for the proper critical concerns with the “internal” constitution of the literary product.”
{from A Glossary Of Literary Terms {5th edition} by M. H. Abrams}
Staying with Tolkien, try your own analysis of the sexual subtext in the following passage, which I’m quite sure Tolkien didn’t intend:
“Now splaying her legs she drove her huge bulk down on him again. Too soon. For Sam still stood upon his feet, and dropping his own sword, with both hands he held the elven-blade point upwards, fending off that ghastly roof; and so Shelob, with the driving force of her own cruel will, with strength greater than any warrior’s hand, thrust herself upon a bitter spike. Deep, deep it pricked, as Sam was crushed slowly to the ground.” Phwooar.
Hey, Scott_Plaid, I give up. Everytime I try to explain my rationale you come back with a criticism of it that implicitly shows you’re not getting it. So either I am incapable of explaining this particular (peculiar?) idea rattling around my (admittedly kinda crazy) head, it’s just one of those irrational things a person holds to without being able to define it for others, or you’re just inherently approaching things with a negative bias and can’t quite get what I’m trying to say as a result.
Either way, I’d like to drop the whole discussion on the rationale behind the comparison and statements I made in the other thread. Since, despite Ethilrist’s comments to the contrary, they evidently were a problem, and they pretty much did end up killing the thread. I’m just tired of it. No hard feelings?
Last things I’ll say about Gundam Wing; as I said above, Scott_Plaid (can I call you Scott?) pretty well showed that GW was intentionally left for viewers to interpret as they saw it. I only went on about it to try and explain why I had previously thought it so patently obvious what it was meant to be. As an aside, the whole “Relena’s a whiny brat! Relena is stupid! I HATE Relena aughlaughhaggleblagh!” thing that many GW fans do never made sense to me. Is she messed up? Well yeah, but her adoptive-father was more than a little emotionally distant, a problem exacerbated by the fact that he had the kind of career where he’d always be traveling and often busy at odd hours. She’s involved (not necessarily in a romantic way) with a guy who her first encounters with involve him threatening to kill her. She’s going to school with a covert terrorist agent and she’s a pacifist. That’s gonna cause anyone to act a little weird. Besides, people complain she’s whiney? She’s a 15 year old, a teenager, that’s what they are supposed to be like. Anyways…
Well, for right now I can’t really think of anything else to add, but I’ll check back in a little. My posting rate will slow down, though (I’m usually kind of a lurker, the last few days have been WAY more activity than I usually ever do on a forum).
Lots of talk about males being each other’s “man,” and “minstrals” (which any actor could easily prounouce "menstrals). The whole scene reads to me like a bunch of guys accusing each other of being gay and, when Romeo tells Tybalt he loves him, violence ensues.
Getting back to the subject, there is a long history of American and other literature where two male characters have adventures together – the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Huck and Jim, Batman and Robin, etc.
However, subtext is often in the mind of the reader. When we read a text, we bring our own experiences and prejudices to it, and an explication of those prejuduces is not necessarily a explanation of what is going on. At best, you can say "current readers could possibly read a homosexual message in this story if the consider the facts I’m presenting in my own prejudiced manner under the light of their own current perceptions (accurate or otherwise).
Wertham inadvertantly showed this with his condemnation of Batman and Robin as being gay, solely on the basis of interview of homosexual men, who were projecting their own fantasies on the relationship.
Ultimately, a literary critic can make a case for whatever he chooses to want to prove. Gay? Sure. Straight? Sure. Into bondage? Of course.
But that tells us more about the critic than it does the author or the text.
Now, it’s certainly true the author doesn’t always know all the implication what he’s writing. But one can read gay subtext into any work of literature you choose. Ultimately, you need to show something more concrete than “this relationship fits into my own current unobjective model of what a homosexual relationship is.”
As for another clear example of the OP, there’s Charlie Chaplin’s Beyond the Screen.. In it, Edna Purviance disguises herself as a boy. Chaplin finds out and, at one point, kisses her. At the moment, Eric Campbell (who doesn’t know about the disguise) catches them and goes into a “fairy” dance. The sight of Campbell (who looks about 6’ 4’ and 300 pounds) prancing around is one of the funniest sight gags in film.
As others have noted the book and film Celluloid Closet asre excellent sources for this. I can buy Gore Vidal’s writing in the subtext in Ben Hur and Stephen Boyd playing to it. After all, as they noted, the story is too dull without it. (Although I’ll bet that Lew Wallace certainly didn’t intend it!) The bit about Joel Cairo is, too. From what I’ve heard, “gunsel” only meant “homosexual” back i the 1930s and 1940s. I’ll bet the only reason that they could get away with saying it openly in that censorship-prone era was because it was unfamiliar (except to those in the com,munity, who must have been secretly delighted by such an open use of the term). Everyone else topok the “gun…” part as meaning a gunman, and the movie thus popularized an incorrect meaning, so that the OED characterizes this as a 1950s meaning.
Spartacus, of course, has the bisexual Crassus in it, something that’s in Fast’s book, but which was cut from the 1960 original release and not seen until the recent restoration. Hollywood was still uptight back then. If they made the film today, Lawrence of Arabia would probably be more open about the homosexual implications of Lawrence’s torture.
All that said, I suspect that a lot of suspected homosexual elements really aren’t present. Frodo and sam? Holmes and Watson? Batman and Robin? Give me a break!
This is the only movie I came in here to mention. I don’t think it was intended, or maybe it was, but there is a lot of tension between Omar & Lawrence.
Except that doesn’t make any sense. The meaning and value of a text can’t be “inherent within the finished, freestanding, and public work of literature itself”, because the text doesn’t stand alone in a vacuum. The text was written by an author, for his own purposes (whether the author succeeded in accoplishing those purposes or not), and the author lived in a specific society and had his own biases and ways he used language.
To take LOTR, for example, the fact that it was written by a 20th century British conservative Catholic medevalist academic has an impact on the text itself, and we can understand why Tolkein made some of the choices he made because of that.
Regarding:
Obviously, that can be read withe sexual meaning, but how does it help us understand the text to do so? Too often, literary critics put me in mind of Beavis and Butthead:
FWIW, I agree with you. Not about the it bothering me (heck, I’m an avid slasher, I love misinterpreting subtext) but that people tend to see far more homoerotic subtext than actually exists.
There’s two things being discussed in this thread. Stories with actual, implied gay subtext (Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia) and stories with male affection that coudl easily be misinterpreted as gay (Lord of the Rings, Starsky and Hutch, etc). Gundaw Wing is a special case; the series creators knew that cute boys with ambiguous relationships are hugely popular with female Japanese teenagers. Here’s a nice little essay, Why Yaoi? about the GW phenomanom complete with a slightly suggestive official pic.
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While I think having gay culture coming into the mainstream is a wonderful thing, I think it’s had a negative effect on males my age (thirties). Unlike some previous generations, we were familiar with the concept of homosexuality but not yet comfortable with it. Most boys my age were terrifired of being percieved as “gay” and therefore extremely leary of showing any sort of affection for another male. I think an entire generation has lost out on having very close male friends because of a silly phobia and it’s kinda sad.
[/tanget]
Ultimately though, once a work is released, it’s no longer under the creators control and fans are free to interpret it as they wish. I don’t think there really is a “right” interpretation (although there may be the interpretation the author intended), have fun with any subtext you do find, just don’t be an asshole about it if someone disagrees…
I read a book in high school that was a tongue-in-cheek look at the Three Stooges that credited them with, among other things, ending the Depression and World War II, inspiring the counterculture, and hastening the sexual revolution. It had a chapter on how the Stooges pioneered gay themes in TV. While it was in jest, there were some interesting points there – the boys always slept together, they often dressed as woman, there were various scenes that could be interpreted as portraying gay behavior (one I remember is a scene where a witch doctor drinks a love potion and then chases Curley around offering to give him a big bone). After reading it, I’ve never been able to watch a Three Stooges short the same way.
For the life of me I can’t remember the title and any searches I do don’t turn it up.
This does prove my point: whether it’s a gay subtext or not depends on the interpreter.
For the Stooges and their audiences, crossdressing had no sexual connotations – it was considered funny because, according to the thinking of the time, it was absurd to think that a man might want to dress as a woman, or that anyone would mistake him for a woman if he did.
Same with sharing a bed: beds were thought of as places where you slept; the sexual possibilities were repressed or ignored. They were sharing a bed because it was funny.
But it is possible to make a case, using concepts that barely existed when the films were made, and “prove” it has a gay subtext. More correctly, people of the current day are able to create an interpretation that they can use to convince themselves there is a reference to homosexuality.
But to say it is a part of the film is to make the assumption that people in 1935 had exactly the same attitudes we have today.
To me, it’s not about “making a case” or “proving” anything, it’s all interpretation. That’s sort of the nature of the subtextual beast, don’t you think?
Yes, and as previously mentioned, this says more about the person doing the interpretation than the author or the text they wrote.
Anything can be interpreted with a homoerotic subtext:
Sam and Frodo - gay
Batman and Robin - gay
Ernie and Bert - gay
Peppermint Patty and Marcie - lesbian
Tinky Winky - gay
NFL - gay
)