Secret history

Interview, April, 1996 by Stephen Greco

Based on a book by the late film historian Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet explores a history of homophobic prejudice through talking heads and dozens of film clips. It is most ironically delightful when revealing how risque double entendres and carefully encoded sexual signals were, for years, virtually the only way gay themes could be smuggled into Hollywood movies.

STEPHEN GRECO: Vito Russo himself tried to get a movie of The Celluloid Closet made in the '80s, but the studios wouldn't cooperate. What was your experience?

HOWARD ROSENMAN: When I first started working on The Celluloid Closet, I had to go through the bureaucrats to get permission to use the clips, and I was getting nowhere. Fueled by rage and frustration, I made a list of all the studio heads I knew and called every single one of them. It took me a half hour. I said, "A lot of the money we'll make from the movie is going to go to Hollywood Supports [an AIDS-education organization based in the entertainment industry]. This is very meaningful to me, personally." Every single one of them, except one, said, "You can have the clips you want."

SG: Were there gay and lesbian actors whom you approached to be in The Celluloid Closet, but who wouldn't agree to appear?

HR: I don't think so. There aren't that many gay movie stars. I don't care about the rumors. I'll tell you: Richard Gere is not gay. Tom Cruise is not gay.

SG: The story Gore Vidal tells about the gay subtext in that scene between Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd in Ben-Hur [1959] gets funnier every time he tells it.

HR: We had trouble from Heston. He wrote a letter to [columnist] Liz Smith saying that he'd done more research than anyone on Michelangelo [whom Heston played in The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965] and that there wasn't a shred of evidence that Michelangelo was gay. Of course, we delighted in using a clip of Heston in Ben-Hur. That was genius!

SG: I'm amazed by the subtlety of the coded language and behavior that was used in these old films to make homosexuality visible. Do you think younger viewers noticing that elegant coded language for the first time will develop some sort of nostalgia for the bad old days of the closet?

HR: No. I think they'll be puzzled by it. [Screenwriter] Jay Presson Allen is especially illuminating on these codes in our film, and so is Gore talking about what they had to go through on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [1958] and Suddenly, Last Summer [1959]. When you have an extreme right-wing opposition, like we had then and like we have now, it becomes subversive and mischievous to see how much you can get away with. These days, the filmmakers are younger and more open and they won't brook this right-wing shit.

SG: How do you think Vito Russo turned his inside knowledge about Hollywood into a real cultural criticism of homophobia?

HR: What he said was that the images Hollywood presented were false. They were giving negative stereotypes to the population. Why not tell the truth?