Top Gun: Is There Really A Gay Subtext? We Asked...
Contents:
- TOP GUN: IS THERE REALLY A GAY SUBTEXT? WE ASKED THE WRER
- TOP GUN: IS THERE REALLY A GAY SUBTEXT? WE ASKED THE WRERFOLLOWTOP GUN: IS THERE REALLY A GAY SUBTEXT? WE ASKED THE WRER
- HOW DID TOP GUN GET SO GAY?
- HOW TOP GUN BEME A GAY CLASSIC
- ¿ES ‘TOP GUN’ UNA PELíCULA GAY? SEGúN QUENT TARANTO, Sí
- CRíTI EXPLI POR QUé TOP GUN UN CLáSI GAY
- JERRY BCKHEIMER WEIGHS ON TARANTO’S ‘TOP GUN’ GAY FILM MONOLOGUE: ‘A COMPLIMENT’
TOP GUN: IS THERE REALLY A GAY SUBTEXT? WE ASKED THE WRER
* topgun gay *
Sce the inic Tom Cise airplane flick me out 30 years ago, fans have argued the ttosterone-fuelled actner is actually lan wh homoerotic subtext – a g-out movie blockbter clothg. Legendary US film cric Ple Kael wrote her review at the time, “the movie is a shy homoerotic mercial: the pilots stt around the locker room, towels hangg prerly om their waists. “It is a story about a man’s stggle wh his own homosexualy, ” he says the film.
TOP GUN: IS THERE REALLY A GAY SUBTEXT? WE ASKED THE WRERFOLLOWTOP GUN: IS THERE REALLY A GAY SUBTEXT? WE ASKED THE WRER
They’re gay, they reprent the gay man, all right? And they’re sayg, go, go the gay way, go the gay way.
They’re sayg no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the gay way, all right?
“Tony has a certa look that he was g stylistilly and you look at that look and ’s a very gay look terms of the haircuts and the styl and the male beefke, ” he says.
HOW DID TOP GUN GET SO GAY?
Jt ask the people who thk ‘The Shg’ is Stanley Kubrick admtg he directed the fake Moon there’s lots of talk of butts and Maverick lls his -pilot Goose “honey”, but do that mean they’re all secretly gay and stgglg to e to terms wh their sexualy?
HOW TOP GUN BEME A GAY CLASSIC
Two years later, he doubled down on that reputatn wh a meo Rory Kelly’s die dramedy Sleep Wh Me, which he lays out the many reasons why Top Gun, wh s many homoerotic unrton, is actually a gay film. “It is a story about a man stgglg wh his own homosexualy. They’re gay; they reprent the gay man, alright?
Go the gay way, go the gay way. Go the gay way. Be the gay way.
Go for the gay way. Last year, when Top Gun celebrated s 35th anniversary, Vulture asked producer Jerry Bckheimer about the film’s standg as an inic moment gay cema. In the late '90s or early ghts, if the movie "Top Gun" me up, someone would be burstg wh newfound zeal to te you on what the film was really about – and that was, why of urse – reprsed homosexualy.
¿ES ‘TOP GUN’ UNA PELíCULA GAY? SEGúN QUENT TARANTO, Sí
It's all about the unspoken homoerotic! They're all jt gay!
CRíTI EXPLI POR QUé TOP GUN UN CLáSI GAY
When the film me out 1986, New Yorker film cric Ple Kael had labeled a "shy homoerotic mercial.
" And then Quent Taranto actg the1994 die "Sleep Wh Me" had a whole riff on the supposed gay subtext of the movie and how was about Mav's "stggle wh his own homosexualy. The famoly homoerotic ’80s fly-boy flick ed to be totally no-homo(Origally published the Daily Telegraph May 12, 2016)Thirty years ago today, the stars of Top Gun were taxig the red rpet at the premiere New York.
When not his, ’s difficult to believe now, but when Top Gun was released 1986, the vast majory of the people who flocked to see did not thk ‘gay’. Nice-lookg, worked-out male heterosexual a on 1994 when I wrote about the outrageo homoerotics of Top Gun my book Male Impersonators, plenty of people still weren’t prepared to have Top Gun’s heterosexualy impugned.
JERRY BCKHEIMER WEIGHS ON TARANTO’S ‘TOP GUN’ GAY FILM MONOLOGUE: ‘A COMPLIMENT’
Later the same year the director Quent Taranto ma a ntroversial meo appearance the movie Sleep Wh Me, argug that Top Gun was about a gay man stgglg wh his journalist Toby Young, a Taranto fanboy, was moved to wre an say the Sunday Tim fendg his favoure movie’s heterosexualy om Simpson and Taranto’s filthy lumni. As I rell, his ‘clchg’ argument was that Top Gun uldn’t be a gay movie bee he’d watched twenty tim – and he’s a queer way, he was right. Top Gun isn’t of urse a gay movie.
And partly ’s bee Top Gun has e to be seen as the qutsential 80s movie – and the 80s are now seen as culturally ‘gay’. Or stance, spe his apparently entirely heterosexual personal life, Simon Cowell is seen as screamgly ‘gay’ – culturally.
)All that said, the erotic ambiguy of Top Gun – which is what really powers – is the spectacular llisn between the mostly sublimated homoerotics of tradnal Hollywood war and buddy movi and the glossy ‘gayns’, and emergent male vany and dividualism of 1980s advertisg. Although we’re all faiar wh now, jad even, back then the male body was jt begng to be sold to the mastream – very often takg s cu om gay porn, bee that was really the only reference pot for the sexualized male late Tony Stt, like his olr brother Ridley, had learned his craft the UK ad bs – and their father was a reer soldier. Hence the glamoro, fetishizg prentatn of the young men the movie, alongsi the more tradnal homoerotic-homosocial banter that we now fd so hilar.