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Also appearing in the theaters this week is the adaptation of the hit Broadway show Deathtrap, in which homosexuality is used more to give a sharp twist to the first-act ending than as prime subject matter, though at one Los Angeles screening someone cried out at the sight of Michael Caine kissing Co-Star Christopher Reeve, "Say it isn't so, Superman!" This spring will bring Partners, about a gay policeman (John Hurt) and a straight one (Ryan O'Neal) who set up housekeeping in the Los Angeles homosexual community in order to entrap a murderer who is preying on it. Like all the other pictures in what looks suspiciously like a trend, it reportedly shows homosexuality neutrally, as just another fact one is likely to encounter while stumbling through modern life.
If this is the way gays are going to be portrayed in films, it represents real progress from the prissy sissies played by the likes of Franklin Pangborn and Grady Sutton 40 or 50 years ago, and from the self-tortured gays of The Boys in the Band and the monsters of Cruising, among more recent characterizations. Some observers liken the new gay movies to the Sidney Poitier period pieces about blacks: necessary non-evils designed to disarm the middle-class public by stressing a minority group's similarities to it as a (possible) prelude to more eccentric and individualistic portrayals. For the moment, at least, that is the way gays prefer to see these pictures. Says Lucia Valeska, executive director of the National Gay Task Force: "If gayness is seen not as a deviant life-style but as something that happens to a lot of people, this can only be positive for us."
There is, however, something more at stake here than sexual politics. The new films about gays have so far refused to acknowledge that sexual outlook has an influence on aesthetics. We would not expect a celibate straight director to make a film indistinguishable from that of a celebrated roué. No more should a film by or about gays look as though it was financed by the ACLU. Indeed, in modern popular culture there is no more distinctive aesthetic than the gay one. As defined by Canadian Critic Lawrence O'Toole, it includes a taste for grand romantic gestures, excesses of "spirit, personality and desire" and "a refusal to apologize for outlandish behavior." This spirit, O'Toole argues, informed the mannered and stylized American comedies, musicals and romances of the '30s and '40s, many of which are now considered classics. These days he finds it notably lacking. Of the current crop, Victor/ Victoria perhaps aspires to some of it, though the musical numbers unfortunately miss the oldtime zip and fizz.