hijack- there’s A big typo on that site:
Correction: Lyle was an effeminate heterosexual. That was the joke of the sketch- even his wife and kids thought he was gay.
Clearly how? It’s a bromance and nothing more. They don’t get it on. One of Gilgamesh’s faults is his rampant philandering with his female subjects.
I came in to say The Boys in the Band, but have been beaten to it. Although there were many cases of homosexuality depicted in Ameruican films before, they never actually came out and said it. But BitB, as I understand it, made an issue of making it clear.
Of course, from the little I’ve seen of it, it seems like a rotten lifestyle choice – they all seemed viscious and surly about it. Not “gay” at all. Maybe it was supposed to be non-subtle anti-gay propaganda.
I seem to recall Lou Costello (of Abbot & Costello) getting in drag, and having to fend off the amorous advances of some confused nameless third party, with Lou trying not to break character.
Is this type of comedy setup considered insensitive nowadays?
Any idea what the first depiction of consensual gay sex occurred on screen in the U.S.? (I can think of some with prison rape or implied rape earlier, but the first non-porn where it’s seen as sex and nothing more or less; I’ve never seen Making Loveso I don’t know how graphic that is.)
Would you count references during the Victorian era to “Confirmed Bachelors”? It’s a euphemism, but a widely understood one, and was used on radio shows.
He also almost had a sex change operation so that his parents would accept his lover :(
:mad:
That’s a staple of farce, from Shakespeare to Charlie’s Aunt to Tootsie and beyond: When a character dons drag for whatever reason, another person of the same sex will begin flirting.
A Hallmark Moment type of sex: soft (very soft) focus, distant shots, and close-ups of candles. The characters are kissing, but the bedcovers primly stay at waist level; no one’s legs are in the air and no hip thrusting. Stand-ins were used for the two stars, and Arthur Hiller reportedly let someone else direct the scene.
Peter Finch is on top of Murray Head in bed in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) when he’s interrupted by a telephone call.
No. It was a landmark in that it something of a plea for tolerance. The characters were gay (actually, AFAIK, the word wasn’t used in the film), and were just trying to live their lives.
The character of Emory, for instance, is pretty confident in his sexuality, and is certainly the most appealing character in the film.
The Ritz from 1976, might be the first film that indicated it could be fun to be gay.
I haven’t seen Soap in years, but wasn’t it always implied that he had boyfriends on the side?
Well, it was SOAP, for Loki’s sake. Intentionally ridiculous. I mean, his stepbrother died by being stabbed shot, strangled, smothered, and suffocated. 
Speaking of Loki, he changed into a mare and bore Odin’s steed Sleipnir. Odin, for his part, practiced the form of magic known as seid, for which he was criticized by his fellow gods as that was thought to be woman’s work; and Thor, of course, once convinced Hymir the Giant that he was Freyja (goddess of [del]love[/del] sex & seid who got half the valiant dead) by wearing a dress.
My vote goes to Snagglepuss.
I agree. *The Boys in the Band *is more than dated: it’s homophobic. The theme of the movie is that being gay will ruin your life. Granted, it blames “society” for this, but it’s still a fundamentally pessimistic, negative movie.
I’d argue that anything ancient should be disallowed - the category ‘homosexual’ didn’t exist. And it would make the question truly boring - I could list 10-20 same-sex relationships in ancient literature off-hand.
Nineteen forty-eight’s Rope by Hitchcock, which was based on the real life murder by Leopold and Loeb, never came right out and said it but implied that two of the main character who lived together were gay.
Though one references having dated a female character, the two men – played by John Dall and Farley Granger (gay and bisexual) – live together, plan a trip to “get away” and at one point tells a character that the phone is “in the bedroom.” “How cozy,” she replies.
There were many homoerotic lines in the film (based on a play which had many, many more such lines). It all adds up to their being gay and lovers and not merely aesthetes and bon vivants, though not openly gay as in the OP.
An awful lot of these are not openly gay characters, as requested by the OP, but rather characters who were strongly implied to be gay.
Of course, if you go back more than a few decades then many readers/viewers would not have had the same concept of sexual orientation that we have today. Most would have considered homosexuals to be either people who practiced a particular sexual perversion or people who were mixed up about their gender identity. These readers/viewers would have been confused by an openly gay character as we understand it today.
That said, I wanted to mention Carmilla (from the 1872 J. Sheridan Le Fanu novella of the same name) as probably the first homosexual vampire in literature. Before I ever read Carmilla I’d heard of it as being about a lesbian vampire, but assumed it would be one of those things where if you wanted to see a homoerotic subtext then you could. But when reading it I felt it was about as obvious as something from 1872 could be.
Carmilla repeatedly declares her passionate love for the story’s heroine/victim Laura and is always eager to embrace her and kiss her. And this isn’t a case of “that’s just how people were back then”. Laura finds her mysterious new friend’s behavior to be both confusing and disturbing. She can tell that Carmilla isn’t just interested in being best friends forever – Laura even describes her as behaving like a lover – but Laura is sheltered enough that she can’t think of a good explanation for Carmilla’s interest in her. At one point she asks Carmilla what she means by saying she loves her, because they aren’t even related. Laura also briefly entertains the idea that Carmilla might be a disguised boy who is trying to court her in secret, but rejects that notion due to Carmilla’s feminine face and figure. Although she doesn’t have a label for it, Laura can tell that (setting aside the whole blood drinking thing) Carmilla desires her the way a man might desire her.
King David and Jonathan from the Old Testament
Colette’s Claudine novels, the earliest of which was published in 1900, have a bisexual heroine. The first book has her as a schoolgirl with some very manipulative behaviour towards her female crushes, then after she settles down and marries, her husband encourages her into an affair with another woman. (He has some odd ideas about women and sexuality.)
Bludgeoned, too.