Gay Sunday Funday Palm Sprgs

Contents:

• GAY NASHVILLE

GAY NASHVILLE

’s Sexual Offenc Act of 1967, which crimalized “homosexual acts private between nsentg adults, ” two landmark Brish films centralizg the experienc of gay male characters celebrate signifint anniversari this year. Part of s director’s valuable n of “social problem” pictur, Victim is a tt, clenched thriller which criqu the then-current law that ma gay men easy targets for blackmail.

You and I are both gay male films crics, simultaneoly of highly varied cultural backgrounds and of unnny affy of taste.

To my young, pre-g-out self, this was the most strikg film how sually and matter-of-factly prented a gay male relatnship. Alex Ramon: Growg up and realizg my sexualy, I was attuned to disverg work focg on gay characters, and certa early and mid-Neti films, whether firmly mastream like Jonathan Demme’s Philalphia (1993) or fiantly not like Gregg Araki’s The Livg End (1992) (the latter taped om TV and watched secret), were important to me. It would have been around that same perd of the mid-Neti that I first heard about Sunday Bloody Sunday, and for sure I was immediately trigued by the ia of this queer pneer—an early Seventi Brish film prentg gay and bisexual characters.

In The Sat and the Artist, his book about Iris Murdoch’s fictn, Peter Conradi wr that “part of Murdoch’s unsung urage [is] that she als always wh homosexualy as an unremarkable, general feature of the human scene. The prentatn of Peter Fch’s Daniel as an telligent, profsnal, fully human protagonist, neher lghable nor piable, seems a world away om the gay reprentatns domatg Brish screens (and beyond) then, and enpsulated ic stereotyp like the ever-mcg Mr. However, whereas Rsell’s film set my teenage gay self on fire wh the famo nu wrtlg sequence (I wish to go on rerd as sayg that I fd Oliver Reed and Alan Bat the sexit pairg the history of film), the Schlger film took me by surprise.

Still, many ways, Sunday Bloody Sunday was the film that not only helped shape my notn of what a gay life may have store for me—more profoundly, also formed my ia of adulthood self, as a state of nstant flux, imperfect cisns, and pursu of elive satisfactn.

Sunday Bloody Sunday matter-of-factly prents a gay relatnship opposn to Brish opn of the time. In his jt-published book Shootg Midnight Cowboy [see review the Summer 2021 prt issue of Ceaste], which offers a lot of pellg sight to Schlger’s posn as a gay director, Glenn Frankel not that Midnight Cowboy out of the “brief but fertile terregnum between the eclipse of the old stud system and the rise of a new one, a time when origal, risk-takg movi flourished, old l were shattered and a new breed of film-makers took on adult them and characters that had never been seen mastream movi before.

It’s que clear that if hadn’t been for the Amy Awards and the box-office succs of Midnight Cowboy—sentially a gay-tted buddy movie explog the geo squalor of late-1960s Tim Square— Schlger wouldn’t have worked on Sunday wh the amount of eedom that he enjoyed.

’s Sexual Offenc Act of 1967, and the Gay Rights Movement, then movg to high gear post-Stonewall.

We n e back to the qutn of the film’s polics later, but how do you feel Sunday Bloody Sunday stands up next to other gay-themed films of that pivotal perd, such as Stairse (1969) that also attempts a prentatn of the domtic life of a male uple, or The Boys the Band (1970), which Schlger apparently hated “for s perpetuatn of self-loathg stereotyp, ” which he viewed as “the exceptn, not the le”?