Movies and book you didn't realize were all about their strong gay subtexts until you were older

"Paul's Case" by Willa Cather

Moby-Dick

the movie "Julia"

With a name like Moby DICK, you didn't realize it was gay‽‽‽‽

The Great Gatsby is not "all about" its gay subtext. The Catcher in the Rye isn't either.

r3 I agree about Catcher in the Rye, but I can't remember Gatsby.

Reading A Separate Peace was my "dialling the phone with a pencil" moment in high school.

Bewitched TV show.

R5 sorry, I’m a rebel, I did not respect your clear boundaries ‘movies and books!’

Fried Green Tomatoes

Mrs. Dalloway, to an extent

Frasier

Hitchcock's "Rope": that one flew right over my little flyover head.

Everything written by Tennessee Williams or William Inge.

My mom gave me a copy of A Separate Peace as a gift when I was a teenager. I don't know if it was conscious or not but there was definitely a message there.

Phineas <- GAAAAAY

The Wizard of Jizz

Frankentits

and of course Mildred Piercing

Strangers on a Train - the movie, not the book.

Three’s Company

R15 I wasn’t joking either. Bewitched has very gay undertone. Elizabeth Montgomery was very progressive. She even stated bewitched was comparable to being stuck in the closet. Hence: secret witch.

Dawson's 20 Load Weekend

Midnight Cowboy--I didn't know it was a book but the movie doesn't seem to have gay subtext. It has overt homosexuality.

The Odd Couple (TV show).

I was an X-MEN fan from birth until about 12 or 13 years old and grew up in Bumfuck with rednecks, so I had no inkling that the mutant gene could be an allegory for homosexuality until X2 came out. Even after seeing that movie, I was an oblivious late-starting closeted nerd so it took me several years to emotionally process and contextualise "when did you first know you were a....." "--a mutant?".

Laverne & Shirley

The Bible, with those all male disciples and their worship fetish.

Top Gun

How is Catcher in the Rye gay, subtextually or otherwise? Or Gatsby, for that matter? Nick hearted Jay? Tom?

As for Gatsby, R24, Nick the narrator has a huge unrequited crush on Gatsby, and his perceptions and his reporting of what he sees are suffused with a glow of rose-colored adoration. I suppose straight critics believe it's all about the glamour of the rich and how it misleads us, but some of us can recognize a man in love when we read his POV!

I could never read "Catcher in the Rye" all the way through, I didn't start when I was young enough tolerate the narrator.

According to John Knowles, the author of A Separate Peace , there was no gay subtext.

r24 I haven't read Catcher in years but I remember Holden going home with an ex teacher I think and waking up to the guy staring at him and freaking out and leaving .I think he also thought a friend of his from school was gay and left his house too. I'm not even great at symbolism and subtext (didn't notice anything gay in Gatsby) but I remember that Holden stuff. He definitely had "gay panic".

Wizard of Oz. As a child, I just thought that all the Ozians were high-spirited.

Batman and Robin, the Hardy Boys

Bert and Ernie

On the Town. West Side Story

Wait a minute, how is "West Side STory" gay? It's the ultimate straight story!

And no, having a Mercutio/Riff character doesn't make a story about the power of heterosexual love gay.

Maybe John Knowles never realized he was a mo. There’s a lot of that in the South.

Bewitched was inspired by Bell, Book, and Candle, where the witches are clearly metaphors for gays (it was written by the very gay John Van Druten) and went to underground clubs, stuck together, and lived in a world apart from straight people. But I loved BB&C when I was a kid, didn't know about the gay subtext till decades later.

Billy Bottom...I mean, Budd.

Anita and Maria clearly want to get it on.

R7 did the movie cut the lesbian story? I saw it first and read the book years later and was shocked how openly it dealt with their relationship. There’s a scene where her parents tell the gf they’re so happy she’s chosen to be their daughters companion

The Corn is Creamed

Dark Shadows. I guess there was a reason I loved it as a child.

Rebecca by Daphne Due Maurier and anything by DH.Lawrence.

In Catcher in the Rye. There's a scene where he has nowhere to stay and sleeps on his teacher's sofa. He wakes up and the guy is stroking his hair, he freaks out and leaves. He says something about "pervert stuff" happening to him before. I took that, not as gay subtext, but subtext that he'd been molested.

I like to think I can pick up gay subtext virtually anywhere it occurs, but I've never seen it Gatsby. "Nick" is just "the narrator," a literary device--he's there to see what happens and to pronounce judgment. He's the truthful witness. Yes, there's a certain swooniness in the prose, but that's the way Fitzgerald always wrote.

"Dude, where's my car?"

R33 Knowles was close friends with both Truman Capote and Capote's nemesis Gore Vidal for many decades: all three were well aware that they and the others were gay.

CMBYN because of its lack of peen.

R42, Nick isn't just a literary device, he's a character in the story. A character who writes swoony prose about the man who fascinates him and who he clearly adores, while he forms a just-friends couple relationship with a female golfer.

Sure, nothing gay about that...

Definitely A Separate Peace; at the time, I could never figure out what it was that Gene hated about Phineas when he clearly loved and admired him so much. DUH!

But then I also had no idea that Freddie Mercury was gay up until his death from AIDS, so I guess I wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer

Mahogany :)

I read Gatsby as a kid in the 70's and assumed Nick was bisexual. Nick is an unreliable narrator - so the reader can distance himself from Nick, and I accepted Nick wasn't going to tell us about any of his male action, but it was clear nick was fascinated by Jay and maybe would have fucked him, but I'm not sure it was love. Remember Jay got his start as a gay yacht boy but GAY FOR PAY. Nick wouldn't fall emotionally for a straight man. Nick was dazzled by the danger and success of Jay, that Jay was a complete phony but still likable. Nick lets us know that Jay is a FOOL to be fatally hung up on Daisy and also Nick gives us the cheating Jordan. Nick envies that Jay is a Horatio Alger type. If Nick really prefers men, then he's not going to be able to pull off the reinvention that Jay seems to have achieved, if Nick wanted to really pursue men. One could say, Nick sees that Jay finally failed at his reinvention, because the dangerous rich and misplaced chivalry gets him killed. Nick retreats away from all that SIN AND DELUSION at the end because he fears he'll end up dead if he follows his own forbidden desires.

Rent

A professor once told me that the key to "The Great Gatsby" is that the narrator is lying. I never understood that remark, but this thread has given me some insight at least.

I had no idea Martin Landau's character in North By Northwest was supposed to be gay until a blog mentioned the cheesy line where he says he has "woman's intuition."

In Diamonds are Forever, the three principal evils are gay: Blofeld, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd. Interestingly, they always kill directly their targets and have several opportunities to shoot Bond dead but instead they are dazzled by his MASC glamour and keep playing elaborate death scenarios with Bond, who never dies in any of them because the gays probably couldn't bear it. When I saw this as boy in 1973, I didn't pick up very much. In fact I was mesmerized by Jill St. John in her bikinis! And yet I'm gay now.

When I read "The Catcher in the Rye," I got a sense that there was at least a possibility that Holden was deeply closeted. I'm sure that wasn't Salinger's intention, but as a gay reader I could "force" that interpretation if I wanted to.

I also read "A Separate Peace" the same way. Maybe it was just the era in which these books were written--they weren't "gay" characters, just young men with different ideas of how to express themselves. It just seems quaint and a little gay to us now.

"Moby Dick" has some of the most homoerotic writing I've ever seen in a mainstream classic novel. Here, though, I wouldn't be surprised if "seeking comfort from your male shipmates" was actually a thing. Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed together in the book's opening chapters is described in a, well, pretty gay fashion:

"But we did not go to sleep without some little chat. How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair."

And later there's a chapter about massaging whale semen. Yes. Whale semen.

"A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise."

The first (and only) time I read "Ender's Game" I would've bet my entire bank account that the author was openly gay. Turns out he's a massive anti-gay bigot, but you would've never kown from how homoerotic the book is.

Merchant of Venice.

Women in love.

R55, I don't know why people still fight seeing the gay storyline in the Merchant of Venice.

The extraordinarily brilliant and superbly written A SEPARATE PEACE has a strong homoerotic subtext, not a gay one. BIG difference.

The Great Gatsby practically has a gay sex scene slapped onto the end of one of its chapters. I don’t know why everyone seems to ignore that, or how else the scene could possibly be interpreted.

Which scene r59? I read Gatsby many times.

I should also add that the motif of conflicting/contrasting dualities (rivers, architecture, personalities, etc) is consistent throughout ASP.

r60 Unfortunately I don’t have a copy on hand, so I can’t tell you the specific chapter. The scene takes place as Nick is getting into the elevator at the end of a dinner party with some of the other guests. There’s lots of talk of handling levers between Nick and one of the men, and then in the next chapter the two are looking at photographs (?) in their underwear on the man’s bed. Like I said, I have no idea how else that scene is meant to be interpreted.

The whole affair takes less than half a page.

I could be wrong but whale semen is the point of whaling. That's what the whale oil is, sperm oil. All those homes lit with sperm oil.

I think "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" has gay overtones, even though they sleep with Teddy the painter.

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life."

Lol, could be wrong r64? The rendered fat, or whale blubber is what the oil is made from. What percent of a whale do you think is compromised of sperm?

R37, for "Fried Green Tomatoes," the movie really never overtly said anything about a relationship. When I watched it as a teenager, the undertones were lost on me.

However, the book was quite explicit. I guess the director chickened out on saying anything gay in the movie, but that the food fighting scene was equivalent to foreplay and/or a sex scene without offending anyone's sensibilities.

R55 and R57 Do you mean "A Death in Venice"?

[quote] The name sperm whale is a truncation of spermaceti whale. [bold]Spermaceti, originally mistakenly identified as the whales' semen, is the semi-liquid, waxy substance found within the whale's head[/bold]

R69. Not the poster who mentioned Merchant of Venice, but the play is often read to see Antonio as in love with Bassanio.

Ok R69, so we have the waxy sperm oil to light lamps and the whale bludder for industrial use?

So in Moby Dick they are massaging whale head, not dick. Ok, the book for sure is on the list.

And Iago's motivation has been interpreted as passionate jealousy because he loves Othello who loves Desdemona. "I am your own forever."

The discussions about Moby Dick, which at one point was considered the greatest American novel of all time, are dumb and childish and make me embarrassed to be an American.

R73, really? So the people who have actually read the book and have questions about it, embarrass you. You are embarrassed by people who have read Moby Dick. Ok then.

Maybe we should switch to Moby's gay subtext in Bodyrock?

Moby Dick is a boring catalogue of whaling information, which is occasionally interrupted by story.

I never realized Fatal Attraction was about transgender issues until recently with all the trans awareness.

[quote]CMBYN because of its lack of peen.

Yeah, I don't get why the makers of 'Call Me by Your Name' hired 2 American actors like Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer who were unwilling to do frontal nudity.

Why not hire European actors who would be willing to?

I mean I guess they wanted a name so they hired Hammer but Chalamet was an unknown. You'd think they could have just got someone else.

Fitzgerald let’s readers know Nick is gay in Chapter 2. I don’t know any straight men who are so concerned about lather on another man’s cheek that they take out their handkerchief are remove it — while the other man is sleeping. How could anyone read the end of Chapter 2 and not see that Fitzgerald has outed Nick.

I deny this.

The gay subtext of "All About Eve" went straight over my head as a clueless teenager. Upon viewing it a second time, but as a thirty-something adult, the gayness blared at me, especially during the final scene. GAY!

I read those books but I can not remember anything about them. I guess I did not enjoy them. There must have been nothing sexy about them.

Who's gay in all about eve other than the critic? Are there lesbian subtexts? I never got that.

Lord of the Flies. I read that book at an impressionable age. I would fantasize about being trapped on that island with those stranded boys. I admit, I cried when Simon died.

Regular 19th century lamps were lit with whale oil that had been made from the whale's rendered fat or blubber. When the whalers caught a whale they'd play off the deep layer of subcutaneous fat and boil it down into oil, and they did that to enough whale's to keep several lamps lit every night, throughout the US or Western world.

The spermawhatsit in the head gave a very high grade of lamp oil, I think. If I remember correctly, that's what rich people used.

[quote]However, the book was quite explicit. I guess the director chickened out on saying anything gay in the movie, but that the food fighting scene was equivalent to foreplay and/or a sex scene without offending anyone's sensibilities.

Not to mention the honey gathering scene. Idgie literally sticking her hand in the honey pot. Mary Louise Parker plays that scene really well.

As a dumb kid the gay overtones in Nightmare on Elm Street 2 completely went over my head. Watching it now I can't imagine how I could ever have been so blind.

This was won the first Oscar for best picture. Hiding in plain sight: Wings

Pink Floyd's the Wall. Actually, I understood the gay context immediately, but my roommates, who were obsessed with finding "meaning" in it, did not.

“Top Gun” (1986)

[Quote]Who's gay in all about eve other than the critic? Are there lesbian subtexts? I never got that.

Eve was assumed by many to be a manipulative, self-serving lesbian. Her demeanor turns butch in the final scene.

I guess if you want to see it that way, you can, r92. But I didn't, either time I saw All About Eve.

There's a few articles written about the gay/lesbian subtext in "All About Eve," r84. Here's an interesting one to skim over:

That "gay" scene (actually a very beautiful--and rare--display of platonic male friendship) in WINGS is truly one of the most heartbreaking moments in all cinema.

I should have known something was up when I read A Separate Peace and cried like a baby at the end.

To be fair, I was in the fifth grade.

Is R55 being sarcastic or stupid? Hard to tell.

R90

Can you elaborate about The Wall? I havent seen it in years.

r98 Shakespeare was a rumored gay, tsss; r93 Bette Davis pongs all over the place, but dl always pretends like lesbian celebs don't exist, except three, four, maybe they are right and lesbianism really doesn't exist, pretty annoying though.

I had the same reaction when I re-read ASP (for the third time) last year, r97. And I assure you, I'm not in the fifth grade...

Rebecca...when Judith Anderson rubs Rebecca’s fur coat against Joan Fontaine’s face...”FEEL this...” one day after watching it for the umpteenth time, it hit me...

For those of you who think Moby-Dick is just "a boring catalogue of whaling information, which is occasionally interrupted by story," perhaps you should instead try Billy Budd.

Or this . . .

In “A Separate Peace”, Gene is a teenager who doesn’t know how to process his obvious physical attraction to Phineas.

R99 didn't realize the male group called "Queen" was making a reference to homosexuality, so realizing that "Pink" Floyd were talking about gays was far far beyond his little pea brain capacity.

Pink Floyd is gay because they are pink? Ohhhhkay.

Point Break.

"Gene is a teenager who doesn’t know how to process his obvious physical attraction to Phineas."

No, Gene doesn't want Phineas, he wants to BE Phineas.

When I was still not quite out to even myself, I cried so hard at the end scene of Y Tu Mama Tambien because I interpreted the emotional distance between the two male friends (they meet for a drink a year after the threesome they have with the woman, IIRC) as cinematic proof that there is a tragic limit to straight male relationships; that if "that line" is crossed--it's implied that they get with each other during that tryst and not just with the woman during the act--the friendship can never be repaired.

I was so black and white about things "before" I was gay!

Desert Fury, a lurid film noir in Technicolor starring Kirk Douglas, John Hodiak, Mary Astor, LizBeth Scott and Wendell Corey. 1947. Douglas is in love with Scott, bit so is her mother, Astor, who runs a casino. At one point, Astor gives Scott a full on the lips erotic kiss and the implication of lesbian incest is unavoidable. And gangster Hodiak is followed around by Corey, his right hand man, who is obviously gay and in love and lust with him. It stuns modern viewers with how obvious it all is but it got away with it all from the censors because it's all subtext with nothing explicitly stated but again, so obvious in the playing.

From WP:

[quote]In later years the film has been praised as a seminal and unique Hollywood melodrama due to its bold overtones of homosexuality:

[quote]Film scholar Foster Hirsch wrote, "In a truly subversive move the film jettisons the characters' criminal activities to concentrate on two homosexual couples: the mannish mother who treats her daughter like a lover, and the gangster and his devoted possessive sidekick. (...) Desert Fury is shot in the lurid, over-saturated colors that would come to define the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk."[4]

[quote]Film noir expert Eddie Muller wrote, "Desert Fury is the gayest movie ever produced in Hollywood's golden era. The film is saturated - with incredibly lush color, fast and furious dialogue dripping with innuendo, double entendres, dark secrets, outraged face-slappings, overwrought Miklos Rosza violins. How has this film escaped revival or cult status? It's Hollywood at its most gloriously berserk."

^ Sorry, Lizabeth, not LizBeth.

r11, It's Lizbeth. Oh never mind.

'Desert Fury' (the full movie) is on YouTube:

The Hitcher with Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell -- serial killer chases young dude across the desert. He kills the dudes love interest... just because.

This thread just makes me believe you can see "gay" anywhere you want to.

I also believe it's easy to misinterpret historical events and fiction if you're not putting it within the context of when it occurred/was written. Just the word "gay" has changed its meaning in the last 100 years.

I started to post a link to that youtube version of Desert Fury but it's terribly cropped in, both top and bottom and on both sides, so I didn't. They sometimes show a good print on TMC. The Technicolor is lush and lurid.

And it's spelled Lizabeth but was usually pronounced Lizbeth.

Even as a super-sheltered teenager the gay subtext in Billy Budd was glaringly obvious to me (fortunately, I've managed to avoid having to read Moby-Dick so far, but it can't be any gayer than BB).

I didn't see it in A Separate Peace, though (in fact, I found that book deeply boring when I had to read it freshman year of high school). Maybe I should re-read that one.

My tutor actually marked me *down* for writing about and suggesting there was a homosexual subtext in DH Lawrence’s Women In Love!!!!!

Admittedly it was a long time ago, but still!

I first discovered A Separate Peace when I was in boarding school, ie prep school, and it shook up my young closeted self very much. I left the prep school for public high school my senior year and then saw Lindsay Anderson's film "if...." in the theater on it's first release and it almost destroyed me.

i am much older now and have lived through quite a bit and nothing bothers me.

R110, I believe *I * was the star of DF.

[quote]This thread just makes me believe you can see "gay" anywhere you want to.

FRAU ALERT!!!!

And indeed you are right, Burt Lancaster, young starlet you then were. My apologies.

[quote]How is Catcher in the Rye gay,

Jesus Christ.

The Haunting - it wasn't until I read the book I understood why Eleanor screamed "Unatural!" at Theo.

Yes, r121, we have been frauslained

Also, in DF, Astor had an affair with Hodiak back in the bootleg days. Hodiak was an automat pickup by Corey.

John Hodiak was exempted from WW2 due to high blood pressure and died of a heart attack in his early 40s. He had been divorced for a few years from--Anne Baxter! Margo in AAE is based in part on Bankhead, with whom Baxter appeared in Royal Scandal, and Hodiak was with Bankhead in Lifeboat.

What is more DL gay than Peter Pan? I mean the guy is probably hundreds of years old but doesn't look more than twelve, because, you know, he's the boy who could never grow up?

Make their stand And when they've given you their all Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall

It's not a subtext of course, because they talk about it directly, but such is the stupidity of the public that it counts as subtext because people de-gay everything in their minds.

"Pink Floyd is gay because they are pink? Ohhhhkay " Obviously you weren't a white person alive in the 1970s to say something so stupid.The identification of Pink with Gay was so strong there is no alternate explanation.

R128 is a Pink Floyd reference,

[quote]When I read "The Catcher in the Rye," I got a sense that there was at least a possibility that Holden was deeply closeted. I'm sure that wasn't Salinger's intention, but as a gay reader I could "force" that interpretation if I wanted to.

The Catcher in the Rye could be interpreted a few ways, but I was kind of wondering if Holden might be gay even before the teacher incident. It has been awhile, but some of his comments about his roommate made me think of the dumb jock who irritated you partially because deep down you felt an attraction to someone you felt was an idiot (and were still in denial about your attraction to the same-sex). He also used some derogatory terms that could have been partially due to denial. The teacher scene could have been a molestation attempt, but I also got the impression that the teacher, who seemed to be closeted and in a loveless marriage, recognized himself in Holden and guessed Holden was gay. He seemed to care about him and want to help him, so he could have also just been checking on him. Holden awakening and at some level realizing the teacher recognizes and understands his gayness and freaks out. I would have to reread the scene, but I was so irritated with Holden by the end of the book (esp. the books smug last line) that I have no desire to reread it. It is definitely a book you need to read by a certain age, otherwise Holden is just an annoying brat.

Sounds like the remake of 3:10 TO YUMA, r110. Ben Foster plays Russell Crowe's sidekick and it's clear that he's in the latter's thrall.

[quote]The identification of Pink with Gay was so strong there is no alternate explanation.

That doesn't make Pink Floyd synonymous with gay. Oh, and as "a white person alive during the 1970s"—in New York, no less—I don't recall a single utterance of this idea prior to this thread.

Australian movie "Picnic At Hanging Rock" (based on the book of the same name).

IIRC, the Sapphic atmosphere completely eluded me as a kid.

r134 Maybe the "Sapphic atmosphere" is what made Picnic at Hanging Rock the first movie I fell asleep during.

Agreed, it needed more inter-galactic laser-shooting robots and explosions.

"This thread just makes me believe you can see "gay" anywhere you want to."

Well, some people saw it in The Teletubbies so don't blame the DL.

R128

Can you just answer the fucking question? Pink is not neccessary gay. Sometimes it's just pink.

Is Pink bi, or is she a lesbian?

The character of Phineas in "A Separate Peace" was based on a real person, a man named David Hackett whom the author met while at boarding school. In real life, Hackett's brooding, less attractive roommate was Robert F. Kennedy. They remained friends Hackett had a minor role in the Kennedy Administration, he was the first head of the President Council on Physical Fitness, that bane of my childhood.

Author John Knowles must have had a hell of a crush on Hackett.

[quote]This thread just makes me believe you can see "gay" anywhere you want to.

[quote]FRAU ALERT!!!!

How does my comment qualify me for "Frau" status? I'm not saying any of these interpretations are incorrect, just that there are elements in most productions that we can now associate with "gay" works.

Just like the age-old question of who is gay in Hollywood - well, Matt has never been married, so claearly he's gay. And John has been married to the same woman for years and years, so clearly he's gay and in a long-term bearding arranjgemnt. And Brad has had several relationships over the last 15-20 years, so clearly he's gay and his relationships end when his wife/girlfriend finds out or gets sick of the bearding. You can basically take any arrangement and produce the end result of the guy being gay.... and any one of them (or all of them) could possibly be correct.

Sherlock

Withnail and I

Bulletproof.

Damon wayans and Adam Sandler are clearly ex-high school lovers and it would just take one or two lines of dialogue (“look, this isn’t high school and we’re not together anymore... I’ve moved on...) to make the whole thing crystal clear.

What r144? They didn't know each other in high school, that's just their banter. Wayans was an undercover cop so clearly they didn't know each other before.

Re: Pink Floyd, I don’t know about anything gay per se—at least not as we understand gayness today—but one of their Syd Barrett-era songs is explicitly about a cross dresser. I believe that Barrett was also known to cross dress occasionally, before he went off the deep end.

So take that as you will.

and Roger Waters was just fucked up about his dad dying in the war, that's all I get from them, I was born in the 70's and never heard that it was a gay reference either, I don't think David Gilmour or Waters are gay.

If Pink Floyd were straight, would they be Blue Floyd or Green Floyd?

Cargo Shorts Floyd

"Becket".

[quote] What is more DL gay than Peter Pan?

I mean, Princess Tiger Lily ALONE!!!

SpongeBob SquarePants.

Ernie and Bert

[quote]You can basically take any arrangement and produce the end result of the guy being gay.... and any one of them (or all of them) could possibly be correct.

On DL:

Older gf/wife = GAY

Less attractive gf/wife = GAY

Asian gf/wife = GAY

'Jules et Jim': two friends fucking the same woman because they secretly want to get 'closer' to each other is apparently a common theme in movies.

Yep, r155. At least several decades ago. Bertolucci's 1900 with De Niro and Depardieu, for example, They both showed dick in bed together with the girl, whoever she was. A hit at the time, then a cult film, now largely forgotten.

Speaking of Depardieu, does anyone remember the early 1970s French film Les Valseuse, starring Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere? It was released in the US as Going Places and became a surprise hit. In one scene, Depardieu and Dewaere go out looking for pussy together but aren't able to score. The next morning, as they leave their motel, Dewaere looks accusingly at Depardieu and tells him his ass hurts. Depardieu tells him to get over it, he needed to get off. The two stars in this road movie are otherwise presented as straight.

I guess it's actually off topic, since it's all right there in the text and not the subtext, but we don't see those kind of exchanges between stars today.

Syd Barrett was not gay. The song Arnold Layne is about a neighbor crossdresser who stole women’s clothes from the clothesline. It’s not about Syd.

Yes, R154, assuming that those things mean a man is gay is pretty silly.

So is assuming that those things mean straight.

Why do the fraus always complain that we think everyone is gay, when they automatically assume everyone is straight?

There are fraus out there who still believe Liberace was straight.

"Little Women"

Jo wasn't gay, R161, she was just a bit butch and overly enmeshed with her mothers and sisters. If she had been gay, she would have had an extremely close "best friend" who she was trying to integrate into the March sisterhood, or at least strong feelings towards another young woman. Instead, she's always involving herself with men, albiet without any great enthusiasm.

Unless there's some other subtext that I missed?

Quentin Tarantino has a memorable monologue about why Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, is really a gay film at heart.

"You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots..." Tarantino riffs. "It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man. You've got Maverick, all right? He's on the edge, man. He's right on the fucking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way."

In Skyfall there is a homoerotic scene between villain Javier Bardem and Daniel Craig's Bond. There was a similar scene in Casino Royale in which Bond was tortured by Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre.

Watch NIGHTHAWKS with Stallone and Rutger Hauer. If that whole movie doesn't have a gay subtext (check out the nighclub scene!). I don't know what does.

"Just like the age-old question of who is gay in Hollywood - well, Matt has never been married, so claearly he's gay. And John has been married to the same woman for years and years, so clearly he's gay and in a long-term bearding arranjgemnt. And Brad has had several relationships over the last 15-20 years, so clearly he's gay and his relationships end when his wife/girlfriend finds out or gets sick of the bearding. You can basically take any arrangement and produce the end result of the guy being gay.... and any one of them (or all of them) could possibly be correct."

Plenty of straight people do the opposite - they assume NO ONE in Hollywood is gay (even though showbiz has a higher-than-average percentage of gay people). Plenty of fraus used to insist that Wenworth Miller, Anderson Cooper, Matt Bomer, Kevin Spacey, etc weren't gay......until they came out. Plenty of writers are gay, too, and those who aren't often surrounded themselves with plenty of gay and bohemian types, so I'm not sure why it is so hard to buy that some books, songs, movies, etc. might have gay subtext.

^ Well Brad Pitt is gay no matter how many beards he had. he probably never comes out as gay because his image is totally false and is based on his non existent heterosexuality and his sham marriages and bearding life

The Little Mermaid

Ben Hur!

The Lord of the Rings

Stand By Me = gayest teenage film ever. It is the gay Goonies.

Christine = Artie's relationship with the jock makes sense only if the jock is infatuated with Artie.

Also adding Lost Boys to the list. Not sure that counts as subtext, though.

I recently had a long discussion with some idiot, who kept insisting that "Batman Forever" is straight, and so is Jim Carrey's Riddler.

Yes, dude, an over-the-top campy film about a man obsessed with another man and made by a gay director is... entirely straight.

r164 I loved Bond's little shrug in that scene like " Of course I've fucked dudes before I'm JAMES FUCKING BOND, SEX MACHINE."

[quote]"Pink Floyd is gay because they are pink? Ohhhhkay " Obviously you weren't a white person alive in the 1970s to say something so stupid.The identification of Pink with Gay was so strong there is no alternate explanation.

Pink Floyd named themselves after two blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

R167 - who is the frightening pretty boy on the left?

R176 Pitt's then date, bf ?

A couple more that are more along the lines of personal theories:

American Psycho (more the film version than the book): Patrick Bateman is gay and is lapsing into misogynistic rage because he feels trapped by the expectation that he will marry Evelyn. He has a fixation on Paul Allen and kills him out of the need to remove the sexual attraction. Everything else: his attacks on the socialites and call girls, his use of Courtney, his disturbing treatment of Jean - all of it is weird form of bearding that either reduces the girls to status symbols or proves actually fatal for them.

Heathers: Heather Chandler is a repressed lesbian - she;s "given up on high school guys", is cracking the whip over the most attractive other girls in school and resentful of any attention shown to males. She "dates" a sleazy Remington student but is clearly more interested in the idea of being at college than being there with him and feels (and is) coerced into a sex act with him. She feels self-disgust at this and takes it out on Veronica in a way that suggests a jealous fit and subsequent break-up. Even her look - the stiff, mannish jackets and severe makeup and hair - is oddly boyish, although attractive.

I think you are overthinking things, Bateman didn't kill anyone, it was all in his mind.

I actually agree with that as well - but I think the impetus for the fantasies is grounded in self-hatred and sexual disgust.

Because the 80s were so relaxed and fun, the overboard long unacted upon sexual tension of Moonlighting made no sense. Adults could sleep together and continue to do so if they felt like it, or stop if it didn't work out.

The only similar sort of tension that would make sense for that time would be if Maddie was attracted to a Susan rather than a David. Susan could even be snarky like David, but since Maddie would be making a real jump to go out with Susan, all that will she or won't she stuff wouldn't seem so odd.

[quote]the overboard long unacted upon sexual tension of Moonlighting made no sense. Adults could sleep together and continue to do so if they felt like it, or stop if it didn't work out.

But it's a tried-and-tested "TV trope" that even has its own acronym: UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension).

R181: the carefree eighties aside, you forget the whole issue of "professional boundaries" and not "crossing the line" between David and Maddie.

R183, and herpes.

None of that hit until the 90s, r183, the HR decade, at least for targeted gays.

Amélie or Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain

We had to read "A Separate Peace" my sophomore year of high school. I had heard the rumors of gay subtext and all, so I was really excited to read it. I read it as carefully and completely as I could at the time and came to the conclusion that it's not really all that gay at all.

It did, however, make me terrified to break my leg.

10 Movies With A Shit Ton Of Lesbian Subtext