sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer) (10/30/84)
"Consenting Adult" is a book by the same author of the 1940's (or 50's) novel, Gentlemen's Agreement, a book which dealt with anti-Semitism. I think her name is Laura Hobson. I read it a few years ago, and it does not stand out strongly as a particularly good or bad book; rather it is one of the genre of books which are remarkable only for their point-of-view given their intended audience. It should make a good (albeit "tasteful") TV movie. >Whilest on the topic of TV Movies: I highly recommend the 1972 >made for TV Movie "That Certain Summer" with Hal Holbrook, Hope >Lange, Scott Jacoby and Martin Sheen. Holbrook gives an >excellent and touching performance as a homosexual father who is >confronted with the torment of discovering that his 14-year-old >son (Jacoby) has found out about him. Lange is Holbrooks ex-wife >Sheen is his lover, both of which offer excellent and touching >support. All very tastefully and honestly done. "That Certain Summer" was a landmark of sorts, given its time. What is most bothersome, however, is how little progress has been made since then. If "Summer" was a watershed TV movie, it also introduced the modern post- Biblical TV image of gay people: ordinary people, just like you and me, except they have this "affliction". In earlier times it might have been "cancer" or "tuberculosis", now it's "homosexuality". And these TV images are most striking in their asexuality; divorcing this "affliction" from anything remotely resembling human love and affection. My memory is a little weak (I was but an impressionable 18 year old) but I remember being struck by the fact that Sheen and Holbrook might as well have been brothers for all the sexual animus between them, displayed or implied. In this sanitized view, gay people don't hold hands, they don't express affection with each others, and they certainly don't have sex. "Homosexuality" has been raised to an abstraction, a totem, a latter-day Scarlet Letter. Even today, we are treated to reruns of "Soap" where Billy Crystal plays an ostensibly "gay" character, but as unconvincing as a transvestite wearing a dress. No one is fooled by the writers' borscht-belt vision of what it means to be a gay person. Or the "Dynasty" character, for that matter. Both are cyphers with the label "gay" plastered across their foreheads. And both are most notable, not for having a serious gay relationship, but for the fact that they both have sired children, an act which legitimizes their reappearance on prime-time. And let us not forget Tony Randall, in "Love Sidney", whose character, a late-middle-aged gay man whose lover has died, was literally castrated by the censors and network brass into an older, asexual "Felix Unger". No, the network TV images of gay people have a long way to go. -- /Steve Dyer {decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!sdyer sdyer@bbncca.ARPA