As social attus evolve, mastream cema has begun to treat gay love stori like any other romance. Love, Simon prov the pot
Contents:
LOVE, SIMON: AT LAST HOLLYWOOD IS SAYG ‘I’M GAY’
Though ostensibly the story of a pair of bachelor roommat, fsy Felix and outré Osr, the play (which went on to bee a film and televisn seri) was, many ways, a portra of day-to-day male uplehood that one uld scribe as proto-gay. ”Simon’s film Murr by Death is often discsed — along wh Clue — as one of the most mp cematic mysteri of all time, and featur a rare performance by the openly gay Tman Capote. In a stroke of irony, actor Tony Randall, who played The Odd Couple‘s ambiguoly gay character of Felix Unger, also died of pnmonia and plitns of heart surgery 2004 New York at the age of 84.
"The F Briga": Neil Simon's Gay Characters As a playwright who has achieved popular acclaim as well as artistic succs over the past twenty-five years, Neil Simon provis an stctive example of changg middle-class Amerin attus toward homosexualy. While he sometim employs gay stereotyp the service of an easy lgh, Simon's gay characters are by and large sympathetic and admirable, although somewhat pathetic.
If Simon's portrayal of them evc an imperfect unrstandg that rarely go beyond the superficial, the evolutn of his thkg about homosexualy sce the 1970s approximat the earnt, well-meang tolerance of his dienc. Simon's first gay character appears The Ggerbread Lady (1971). Jimmy is the first character seen onstage when the play opens, and the stage directns scribe him as " his early forti, portly and probably homosexual.