Good point. Thanks, Walloon. You know, oddly enough, I really liked the aspect of girlchild-growing-into-womanhood in “Ode to Billie Joe” and thought they did a great job with it. Her character is remarkable: a backwoods kid with no preparation or support whatsoever, she handles a supremely difficult situation with sensitivity and maturity. She’s a fully-realized character in a time of cinema that showed us women as jiggly, brainless cheerleaders.
The problem I have with making Billie Joe’s night of passion with a man (Dewey Barksdale! That was his name! Thank you! It was driving me nuts trying to pull that out of the ol’ brainpan) the McGuffin was that it was not balanced anywhere in contemporary cinema by a depiction of homosexuality as anything other than a force capable of causing the utter destruction of Western civilization. From the structure of the movie, it’s evident that a gay relationship, no matter the circumstances, was absolutely the highest possible tragedy the producers could conceive of, and that they put a lot of brickwork around their sensitive, tormented hero to make it apparent that it Really Wasn’t His Fault, lest we be inclined to lose sympathy with the heroine’s boyfriend and dilute the tragedy.
Gay themes were few and far between in 70s cinema (believe it or not, they’re not much more common now), and gays never showed up as the good guys. Although the Hays Code was already long out the window by the mid-70s, the one part to which Hollywood clung with tenacity was the clause that homosexuality was not in any way to be presented in a positive light. (Indeed, the same sort of thing has happened in the modern day with the book of Leviticus.) Had it not been for Hollywood’s unfortunate timing in releasing the horrifically gay-bashing"Windows" and “Cruising” at the same time (roughly), I think gay viewers might well have been inclined to let this one go: as you point out, it’s handled with tact, intelligence, and a sense of mature wistfulness all too seldom captured successfully on film.
Of course, any gay viewer who expects to be taken seriously in popular entertainment is setting her- or himself up for disappointment; it was true then and it’s just as true now. A recently-produced amateur video compliation featuring all the famous movie and TV kisses between women from the 30s to the present (“The Haunting”, “Queen Christina”, “DS9”, and some others) occupied all of three minutes of screen time, with some duplications. (The makers of the compilation did not turn to the world of porn, which would have offered a lot more in the way of footage, but somehow the producer appeared reluctant to rely on porn’s impoverished conception of lesbianism.) Three minutes of screen time would get you through the kissing scenes in an average day’s worth of soap operas broadcast in this country; it goes without saying that all the couples you’ll see will be straight.
It’s interesting that you pick up on a common claim made about entertainment about, but not by, gays: “The movie isn’t really about homosexuality, it’s about prejudice.” Or brutality, or murder, or manipulative behavior, or bigotry, or or or–anything but the scarlet letter. That this doesn’t fly well with the community being slanged as deranged, destructive, unbalanced, or evil, in the absence of counterbalancing positive portrayals, isn’t a huge surprise.
Early in his career, an interviewer asked Sidney Poitier how come he always played these shining, noble (usually celibate) heroes. His answer was a window into the depiction of minority in popular entertainment: “I’m the only one,” he said. “I’m the only Negro actor who works with any degree of regularity.” (His use of the term “Negro” should slot this comment nicely into the timeline, by the way.) “Wait until there are six of us,” he went on, “and then one of us can play the bad guy all the time.”
