Probably no record setter, but Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon was explicitly referred to as a homosexual in the book, and very clearly implied as one in the 1941 Huston/Bogart film.
Oddly, in the pre-code 1931 version that is explicit about the sexual relationship between Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, there’s virtually no obvious sign that Cairo is supposed to be gay.
Effie facetiously describes Cairo to Spade as “gorgeous”.
The original book, by Vito Russo, is wonderful. It of course has lots of things that were left out of the film, and the writing is superb.
Vito Russo was a friend of mine, and damn I miss him a lot.
Howard Hesseman played a guy who was gay and one of Bob’s patients on the* Bob Newhart Show*. He played Craig off and on from 1974 till the series end. He was gay but he was not seeing Bob for that. It was for things like being unemployed.
On Mary Tyler Moore, Phyllis brother was gay. She didn’t know and set him up with Rhoda. And in somewhat of a surprise at the end when Phyllis is going nuts, because she’s afraid Rhoda might marry her brother, Rhoda “outs” Phyllis’s brother. To everyone’s surprise she’s could care less, she’s just relieved that Rhoda won’t be her sister-in-law. That was 1973
Jodie from Soap, was horribly written, the writers obviously had no idea what a gay man was about. He was everything from a cross-dresser, to a trans-sexual, then at the end he falls in love with a woman and says “He likes it.” He was written as straight people (at the time) thought a gay man was
As far as I know, the film Advise and Consent portrayed the first gay bar in film history.
The Wikipedia entry for SOAP says the first openly gay character in a TV series was actually Peter Panama in “The Corner Bar”, a two-season comedy set in New York. He was played by Vincent Schiavelli, veteran “that guy” actor, famous as the subway ghost in … er, “Ghost.”
She could not care less?
Achilles and Patrocles were lovers. In the Symposium Alcibiades tells how he tried to seduce Socrates, but didn’t get anywhere.
Of course ancient greek homosexuality was a complicated thing. Most of these guys were screwing women too.
:smack:
I knew I was forgetting something! I could see Gordon Jump delivering the line, and Billy Crystal replying, "So that means it wasn’t a suicide,"but couldn’t pin down what I’d skipped.
OTOH, Wilmer is explicitly described as homosexual in the movie. It got by the censors because they didn’t know what “gunsel” really meant.
In The Maltese Falcon, Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.) and Kaspar Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet), who professes to love Wilmer “like a son,” clearly have a gay relationship. Sam Spade even refers to Wilmer as a “gunsel,” which I thought just meant “gunman” until I looked it up. (Presumably the Hays Code censors were similarly confused and let it slide.)
In Chandler’s novella The Big Sleep, Arthur Glenn Geiger is bi and his young friend Carol Lundgren is a “pansy.” Like much else in the book (including the nature of Geiger’s rental-pornography business), this is only implied in the movie (the plot of which is so confusing that even the actors were baffled by it).
Actually, they do. Most translations deliberately omit one of the tablets; it’s an interlude scene, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu are talking about their relationship in more graphic terms.
In the Dogville short “Who Killed Rover” (1931), one of the dogs being interviewed is a bulldog. The police ask him where he was on the night of the murder. He replies in a very effeminate voice, “I was just walking down the street. . . just walking down the street.” The cops respond, “Weeeeellll. . . color me pink. . . it’s a pansy!”
And possibly neither did directors or casts of the films. The character is portrayed in both as weak, but not effeminate or otherwise outwardly gay.
I don’t think that their relationship is “clearly” gay from the portrayals by the actors. It is a subtext that many, if not most, viewers might not catch.
But the gardenia-scented calling card and Peter Lorre’s obviously effeminate mannerisms are much clearer signs that only rather naive viewers (like me when I was 16) are likely to miss.
There is no similar campiness to Otto Matieson’s portrayal of Cairo in the 1931 film. Absent that, Effie’s introduction of him as “gorgeous” and a “knock-out” could easily be read merely as her teasing the womanizing Spade with the possibility of another potential conquest.
Possibly, but Hollywood was one place where homosexuality was not automatically condemned and Huston probably knew gay men and couples. It wouldn’t be surprising that he’d know some of the codewords, especially since he worked on Broadway in the 20s when there was an active homosexual scene that didn’t bother keeping itself secret (straight couples, for instance, would go to gay nightclubs for a thrill).
Remember, Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby has some dialog that shows a knowledge of the gay underculture in New York (the well known “I just turned gay, all of a sudden,” and the less obvious, “I’m just waiting for a bus on 42nd Street”). Both he and writer Dudley Nichols lived in New York in the 20s and probably would also have known about the homosexual “fad” of the time.
And even without that section you’d have to be blind to miss all the other evidence. Hell, Gilgamesh turns down the goddess of love for Enkidu, which is what got the guy killed in a fit of jealous rage.
How about the movie Victim? I have it in my Netflix queue. Supposedly the main character played by Dirk Bogarde is gay and portrayed sympathetically–and it was a 1961 release.
Something I’ve wondered that perhaps a Doper can help me with:
Robert Morley played Oscar Wilde in a 1960 film (based on a play he’d been performing in off and on for 24 years at the time). The film ends with Wilde, disgraced and in his post-penal French self-imposed-exile last days, drunk in a courtyard cafe and asking the musician to “Play something gay!”, then he almost collapses into drunken bitter laughter.
Was this an early reference to “gay” in the modern sense?
I recently watched the 1929 film “Pandora’s Box”, starring the sublime Louise Brooks. This features a blatantly obvious lesbian character, Countess Geschwitz.
Admittedly, the reasons he turns down Inanna/Ishtar all make perfect sense even if you see him as entirely straight. Bad things DID always happen to her lovers. A mortal king turning down a roll in the hay with Ishtar is rather a young super-hero declining a job offer from Lex Luthor.