warning signs: the day the earth stood still
by Douglas Messerli
By the late 1950s and certainly by the early 1960s, as I’ve argued in several essays in this and other of My Queer Cinema volumes, something had radically changed with regard to the US view of the queer world. Of course, along with the Communist threat, the Red-baiting right and Christian fundamentalists had long feared what they believed was the “gay” threat, men and women who, given the attacks on their heteronormative culture, were, in their minds, a truly subversive force in the government. But by 1955 or soon after, gay men were also perceived as something other than simply “different,” but characterized as sexual predators, men primarily who sought to “convert” a younger boyhood generation into their sexually perverse world. The confusion with being gay and being a pedophile was one of ignorance, of course, but remained a terribly dangerous misconception that would, frankly, never completely be removed from the general homophobic attitudes that resurged again in the late 1970s through the rhetoric in individuals such as Anita Bryant, and which may have been responsible, in part, for San Francisco Board of Supervisor member Harvey Milk’s death.
It is terribly important, accordingly, to discuss the roots of this
vision, which reach far back before the films this essay discusses, but still
remain lodged in US and even some European consciousnesses.
I’ve gathered these important and, at times, unfortunately well-meaning institutional,
city, and school-board funded films into several essays, beginning with the various
versions of the 1955, terrifying, if now somewhat laughable Sam Davis’ movie, Boys
Beware, instructional movies I’ve
gathered under the subtitle of “Homosexual, the Lurking Monsters,” along with
discussions of so many serious and comic of films that followed in response:
Christopher Peterson’s short, Only Once (2005), the “OneMinuteGallatica’s”
2011 satire Earth Boys, Beware, Ivan Bellaroba’s spoof Beware of the
Homosexual (2014), Gregory Pennington’s strange appropriation of the Boys
Beware from of the same year, 2014, the 2015 (?) Los Angeles LGBT Center
satire Boys Beware, the film of possibly the same year by “Bella@the
Bellzar” by the same title, Devon Green’s satire of 2015, Beware Homosexuals,
as well as the continued exploration of dangerous homoeroticism in the 1950s
films by Callahan Bracken, again titled Boys Beware (2017), Trevor
Scholten’s 2019 satiric work with it's referent Boys Beware 2 title, and
the final Boys Beware version of 2021 by Eden Poag.
Who might have imagined in 1955 that so very many gay works would have
grown out of the Sam Davis’ closed-minded work in which he collaborated with the
Los Angeles United School District and the Police Department of Inglewood? The
terror of the time might certainly be laughed at, but it is still a horror with
which nearly every gay man and many a lesbian (I might surely have included in
this medley of horror Clu Gulager’s A Day with the Boys of 1969, Jan
Oxenburg’s A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts of 1975, Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s
Abuse of 1983, Gianni da Campo’s The Flavor of Corn of 1986, and
Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche of 1986) in which loving and caring
homosexuals were suddenly traumatized for their adult-based love and concern for
the youth which they wanted to help come to terms with their life through
non-sexual mentoring. I now realize just how fully my own fears of being
perceived as a predator kept me away from helping to be a loving uncle to my
own nephews and perhaps even more importantly, my fear of becoming friends with
obviously gay children of dear friends.
One of my friend’s mother pleaded with me to talk about gay issues with her grandson, but I couldn’t possibly imagine such a discussion without the presence of his parents, which obviously delimited any open conversation we may have had. Yet I was terrified always that I might be perceived as being predatory, an issue very much at the center of Connor Clements' 2008 film James in which a teacher, once the boy divulges his sexual confusion, feels it necessary to abandon any discussion of sexuality, leading the boy to explore the gay world on his own.
This fear has impacted not only individuals such as me but homosexual couples, trying to adopt children. In some states, the very notion that a gay couple, male or female, want to raise a child in a loving manner creates red-flags to the homophobic community which dominates. Entire states of the US and countries around the world have refused to even hear of our parental and mentoring possibilities. I might have been—no, actually I could have been wonderful father; but given my time of birth, by upbringing in the very age when these early films of exaggerated fear appeared—in 1955 I was only 8 years of age, hardly able to perceive what a homosexual predator might mean—I resisted sharing my experiences with young men and women.
When I was a young man, I served as a babysitter for several young boys,
the fact of which I am often ashamed to even admit today, and even
have been reprimanded that I had served in such a role on the internet. In some
incidences, I was only 5 or 6 years older that the children I cared for. Today,
I think such a caring role would be perceived as being utterly perverse. Saturday
Night Live has mocked Scout masters (performed by Alec Baldwin) and sexually
interested babysitters such as Buck Henry (caring and a perversely leering uncle
for his nieces Lorraine Newman and Gilda Radner). The society continues to
suggest that we, queer men and women, are a predatory breed. The stigma
remains. The sour pain of our own inabilities to properly nurture young men and
women still stings. That 1955 “warning sign” still roars in my head “Beware of
young boys!”
Los Angeles, February 9, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(February 2025).
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