Movie, book TV? Openly gay. Who?
Somebody in a Sapphic poem?
In Greek myth, Prosymnus was a youth who agreed to guide Dionysus to the entrace to the underworld only in exchange for becoming the god’s over.
Most of the (male) Greek gods were bisexual, of course, but here is a character not recorded as being anything but gay. There’s also Hyacinth, of course.
On TV (in America, at least) it’s generally considered to be Jodie Dallas (played by Billy Crystal) on Soap.
If you’re talking about regular characters in a series, it might be Jodie Dallas, in 1977. But Marty Morrison, a recurring character on Barney Miller, made his first appearance in 1975. There may have some earlier, but that’s one I know of.
In film, how about Diamonds are Forever? With the two gay assassins. And Bambi and Thumper were clearly lesbian - at least until Bond ‘converted’ them. Or Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.
The TV show, The Hot L Baltimore, had a gay couple as regulars in 1975. It’s hard to tell when Marty showed up on Barney Miller, but that show premiered one day before The Hot L Baltimore and it doesn’t look like Marty was in the cast on that date. The gay couple, on the other hand, were part of Hot L Baltimore from the first episode.
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times has a gay man (as defined by the prejudices of its day) as one of the people in jail with him.
Gligamesh and Enkidu were clearly more than just good friends, but that’d probably only make them bi.
The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature does indeed start with Gilgamesh.
Homosexual milestones: 1972 to 1999 lists “1972: An ABC made-for-TV movie “That Certain Summer” featured Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen as a gay couple.” preceding Hot-L Baltimore.
The first film about overt homosexuality was Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (Different From the Others) (Germany 1919), starring Conrad Veidt, best remembered today as Major Strasser in Casablanca, as a musician who is blackmailed due to his homosexuality.
Two other German films of note: Geschlecht in Fesseln (Sex in Chains) (1928), about homosexuality in a men’s prison; and Mädchen in Uniform (1931), about homosexuality in a girl’s boarding school.
All three are available on DVD.
In American films, there are gags in silent comedies involving flamboyantly effeminate characters, or characters caught in what is mistaken as a homosexual act (e.g., Chaplin in Behind the Screen, Laurel & Hardy in Putting Pants on Philip).
The sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine (1930) takes a trip to Mars, a screwy place where a burly Martian man wants to marry the visiting Earth man.
Male couples also make pre-Code gag appearances in Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong (1933) and the Al Jolson musical Wonder Bar (1934).
Children of Loneliness (US 1937) was an independently made (and little seen due to state and local censor boards) adaptation of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, with an open lesbian character, and a closeted gay male character. Naturally, both are dead by the end of the picture. The copyright submission for the picture included this statement from the filmmakers:
This Wikipedia article lists early television shows with gay characters. A character on a 1967 episode of N.Y.P.D. was the first openly gay character on American network television.
I don’t know about openly gay, but the character of Leonard, Vandamm’s sidekick, in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), was effeminate enough, according to IMDB, to cause problems with the Hayes Code.
There is also a line where he says something like, “Call it my woman’s intuition, but…”
For anybody not familiar, the definitive treatment of gays in movies (til the time it was made anyway) THE CELLULOID CLOSET. Tons of clips. I believe you can watch it free on Netflix.
Boys in the Band was among the first to portray mostly gay characters in a generally positive light.
Not all that positive – they were all screwed up because of it – but they were treated as people, not freaks to laugh at. I suspect it’s badly dated today.
Here’s an early example from UK TV.
Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served? screams gayness all the way up to eleven. The characterisation is perhaps aided by the actor John Inman being gay himself. However, as the Wiki link points out, some of the situations Mr. Humphries finds himself in support the argument that he was in fact a gay oriented bisexual.
Are You Being Served? was first shown in 1972.
As a side note, Jodie was consistently identified as gay, he only had a relationship with a man in the first half of a season, after which he fell for two women and lived platonically with another.
In books, there was The Hundred Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade. Mid-to-late 1700s.
And fathered a daughter by one of them. Nevertheless, when challenged in court to admit that he was a “practicing homosexual,” his reply was, “I don’t have to practice, I’m very good at it.”
Sodom and Gomorrah?
:: d&r ::
Obviously not the first as previous entries indicate, but JD was significant as a gay character who was not a flamey caricature. Also he was a major character which was rare if not nonexistent.
I remember thinking that Billy Crystal would be hopelessly typecast and would never be able to break out of gay roles. That cross-dressing hetero in Bosom Buddies who was not Peter Scolari also had a better career than I would have guessed.