an experienced platoon
by Douglas Messerli
Greg Fields, Pam Veasey, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans,
Keenen Ivory Wayans, and others (writers), Terri McCoy, Morris Abraham, and
Rosie Perez (directors) Gays in the
Military /
1992 [In Loving Color, Season 4, Episode 10]
This hilarious episode begins as the sergeant (David
Alan Grier) enters the quarters of the all-gay platoon, the soldiers busily
fussing around their highly decorated beds.
The
sergeant begins with the standard military spiel, “For the next six weeks I’m
going to be your worst nightmare. If I say spit-shine my helmet, you will spit-shine
my helmet; if I say jump, you will say how high; when I say stand up straight,
I mean stand up straight.”
But, of
course, this has little effect on some of the men who like their sex tough. When
one on the soldiers in the unit—the three major figures played by the wonderful
trio of Jim Carrey, Marlon Wayans, and Jamie Foxx—says he’s standing as
straight as he can, the sergeant comes back “Well we’ll show how wise you are
when you’re chained up in some Iraqi prison getting pumped by some dude in a
black leather mask; do you have any idea how that feels soldier?”
Soldier
Carrey interrupts: “I do sir. I must have had that experience at least fifty
times, sir.”
“Where soldier,
Danang?”
“No sir,
San Francisco, sir…I served drinks in a bar called The Swallows.”
When he
asks the soldier where he’s from and he replies “Texas,” the sergeant replying,
“The only thing from Texas are steers and sissies.”
“That’s
correct, sir, and I ain’t no steer neither sir.”
So it
goes, the sergeant attempting to intimidate his soldiers who highly appreciate
and even get excited by his “butch and commanding” manner.
When in
reaction, he suggests, “Maybe you grunts would like to spend a week in the hole,”
they all volunteer, jumping into the air in anticipation.
Another
sergeant arrives to announce that President Clinton has now allowed gays into
the military and that he is now formally be in charge of Crisco company.
“Oh great, gays in the life-time military man.
That is just what I need, a platoon of Gomer Pyles.”*
He is
ready to resign but the platoon members stop him by entertaining him first with
touting their cleanliness and the fact that they are the first unit to have
their barracks featured in Home and Garden.
“They
don’t want to be disciplined by anyone else,” as one puts it, “We like the way
you discipline.” They also perform a gay version of a military march which
quickly transforms into the closing song from Chorus Line, “One,” the
men wearing white hats and dancing in unison.
Finally, the sergeant is convinced to stay, and his carried off by
Carrey in the same way that Richard Gere carries off Debra Winger in the 1982
film, An Officer and a Gentleman.
In a
year in which most Hollywood movies were still circling around the idea of gay
movies, while other independent and European movies such as Neil Jordon’s The
Crying Game, Rosa von Praunheim’s I Am My Own Woman, and the New
Queer Cinema’s Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Gregg Araki’s The Living End
were fully embracing LGBT issues, the comedy series In Living Color took
its satire to new levels, while embracing the issue of gays in the military
through outrageous stereotypes, it did it with a kind of tender and even joyous
acceptance. Gays were clearly here, we thought, to stay.
*The man who played Gomer Pyle, Jim Nabors, was
alleged to have been one of Rock Hudson’s regular lovers. Later in his life, he
married Stan Cadwallader.
Los Angeles, June 19, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June
2025).
.png)