Movies, by Gillian

I have never been a really fully-paid-up member of the movie-goers club. In fact I seem to have had, over my lifetime, something of a love/hate relationship with movies. The love side has been made up mostly of documentaries, or what they call 'docudramas', which probably makes me something of a dull person to be around; someone who prefers, for the most part, fact over fiction. Strangely, though, the opposite is true of books. I rarely read non-fiction books, much preferring to escape into the land of make-believe.

Perhaps it is in fact that very make-believe which has tripped me up. My childhood, in the time and place that it was, related little to movies. There were cinemas in the towns in the England of the 1940's and '50's but I and my family and friends had no way to get to them. There were early TV's, too, in some places, but non of us had one. So escape was down to books. And once you are accustomed to using your own imagination, making the written story and characters look exactly the way you want them, it's hard to switch happily to strangers creating the images for you.

And then, of course, there was the gay thing. Though barely even subliminal, in my youth, it was there. Reading the book, I could make Jane Eyre's obsessive love be for a somewhat androgynous Rochester. I could even, and this requires some strength of imagination, believe me, picture poor innocent Catherine Earnshaw with a vaguely unisex Heathcliff. But when, later in life, I saw the Wuthering Heights movie with that darkly menacing Laurence Olivier, he was so completely masculine that all fantasy faded. So, I couldn't really get into movies because they were so overwhelmingly, 100% at that time, heterosexual. So was literature, but anyone can take it wherever they want. These days, of course, we say that ol' Larry was bisexual, if not homosexual. But either way he's completely masculine. Books offer more options than movies.

One member of this Storytelling group, who rarely attends now, wrote one day of trying so hard to hide his infatuation with Tab Hunter. I cannot recall that day's topic, but I had written of my attempts to fake an attraction to Tab Hunter. I bought, in our nearest Woolworth's, a black and white pin-up photo of him, to attach to my school desk. Oh the sad irony of it, I thought. Two of us, sixty years ago, thousands of miles apart, trying so hard to use Tab Hunter - and why him, I ask myself - to define, or not define, our homosexuality. Thank God, those days are largely gone.

Now, when there is such vast choice of movies, I have favorites of all kinds. But I have still never fully embraced 'going to the movies', except for drive-ins which I always found to be great fun. For the most part, movies became more attractive to me when they became readily available from the comfort of my own home and my own couch.

One of my very favorite, totally fictional, movies, is 'Cloudburst', with Olympia Dukakis; the story of two old lesbians running off to Canada to be married. It is funny and sad: that perfect combination that creates fiction at it's best. I also watch 'The History Boys' every time it's on TV. A wonderful 'docudrama', which Betsy and I had somehow missed until it appeared on TV a couple of weeks ago, is ' Freeheld', the true story of a New Jersey police lieutenant, dying of cancer, fighting for her registered partner to receive her pension after her death, as would be the case with a heterosexual couple. There are endless documentaries, not to mention a full-length movie, about Alan Turing and all he suffered for his homosexuality. It's not that all I ever watch is movies, truth or fiction, depicting the plight of members of the GLBT community; but they exist.

That is an ever-amazing thing to me.

They exist.

Movies and I have followed the same path. We have been on a long journey, but we have arrived. And we will never, can never, go back. No matter what rhetoric spews from the mouths of those filled with hate, from Anita Bryant to our newly anointed vice-presidential candidate, we cannot, and they cannot, undo what we have done. I, and all of us here, now know ourselves. Everyone else know us. We tell our stories and the movies tell our stories; not the stories of us, in this room, perhaps, individually, but of us, anywhere and everywhere, collectively. We have travelled from invisibility to out and proud.

If John Cray and I were kids today, we could, at least in many schools, each embrace some modern equivalent of Tab Hunter quite openly; I with indifference and John with passion. Movies have played a huge part in our journey and we owe a debt of gratitude to those who conceived them, financed them, produced them, and above all to the many straight actors who were brave enough to act the part of a gay or lesbian in the early days, when they put their careers at risk by doing so.

In fact, As Roger Ebert, long-time film critic. stated so beautifully,

“We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.”

Through movies, others perhaps learned not only to see us, to know us, but, just for a short time, to be us.

© July 2016 

About the Author 

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.