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Movies that deal with homosexuality in a more honest fashion are still largely taboo. Many moviegoers may have assumed that the young women in the surprise hit Fried Green Tomatoes were lovers (as is more clear in Fannie Flagg's novel), but their relationship was muted in the film. Despite the inherent drama in the AIDS crisis, only one U.S. feature film about the disease, the independently produced Longtime Companion, has been released. Gay activists say all this reserve reflects a strong undercurrent of homophobia in the movie community that has also caused many homosexual executives to remain in the closet and actors of both sexual orientations to shun overtly gay roles for fear of hurting their careers.
Some small films are being made and released independently. Among them is My Own Private Idaho, a story about young male hustlers by Gus Van Sant, the director of Drugstore Cowboy. But industry insiders attribute the dearth of mainstream gay films to the fact that movies with gay themes don't do well commercially. "If Longtime Companion had made as much money as Home Alone, the studios would have 10 times the projects with gay characters or stories in development," says Joel Schumacher, director of Flatliners and Dying Young. "The business doesn't care what you do in bed, but it does care what you do at the box office."
Awareness of the need for a different kind of sensitivity is growing, however. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has conducted seminars for staff members at Columbia Pictures and Carolco. Meanwhile, departing Fox chief Barry Diller and MCA president Sidney Sheinberg recently founded Hollywood Supports, a service organization whose mission is to combat "AIDS phobia and homophobia" in the entire entertainment industry.
But the activists have begun to alienate other studios and powerful filmmakers who could help their cause but are turned off by threats to "out" actors who refuse to cooperate with the activists and by demands to vet scripts that deal with gay subject matter. Oliver Stone was slated to produce and direct The Mayor of Castro Street, a potential breakthrough film about the life of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay activist who was assassinated by a former city supervisor. But Stone decided not to direct after Queer Nation members threatened to disrupt his set because they objected to the way he handled gays in some of his past films. "I'm tired of having my neck in the guillotine," Stone told the Advocate, a national gay publication. "The gay community is extremely outspoken, and everyone in it is a movie critic. I don't need that." What is needed is an open attitude and more good movies about gays.