Gilbert Cates | Consenting Adult / 1985 [TV movie]

parents with problems

 

John McGreevey (screenplay, based on the novel by Laura Z. Hobson), Gilbert Cates (director) Consenting Adult / 1985 [TV movie]

 

In 1985, presumably it was still felt necessary to create a full melodrama on the issues parents had to face when their child suddenly announced to them that he or she was a homosexual. Although one of the first major events of this work is the revelation the young college swimmer Jeff Lynd (Barry Tubb) makes to his mother Tess (Marlo Thomas) is that he is a “homosexual” (somewhat inexplicably no one in this film has evidently even heard of the term “gay” even though the parents find it nearly impossible to utter the queer word), this is definitely not a coming out movie. The focus is never on the young son who has someone finally found the courage to “come out” to his parents, but is almost entirely on the parents. And in this case, alas, the screenwriter and the director apparently presume that most all US parents, faced with such a situation, are inherently homophobes.

      Tess’s first reaction, a fairly typical one, is how does her son know he’s a homosexual. Relieved to find out that he’s not had any “perverted” sex yet with another male, she quickly arranges for him to see a psychologist, still readily available in those days, who attempts to “cure” him. Mistaking their help as aimed at helping him to be himself, Jeff goes along with the sessions, but quickly discerning the doctor’s intentions, drops him, realizing that his parents are entirely wrapped up in their own reactions instead of attempting to figure out who and what their son really is.

     In fact, Tess and her husband Ken (Martin Sheen) have their own serious problems. After having a serious heart attack, Ken has returned to fairly good health, strong enough to be treated, as the medical doctor assures Tess, “normally,” including telling him what she has learned about their son. But still she holds back the news, in part, to spare him any shock that might possibly set his heart aflutter again, but also because since his return home he is no longer sexually interested in her and is fairly incommunicative to his son even before any knowledge of his sexual shift. When the boy, who has spent his life trying to please him, calls him to tell him how much he loves him on his birthday, Ken cannot even share that news with the rest of the visiting family, Margie (Talia Balsam), Jeff’s sister and her husband Nate (Matthew Laurance), who he in his corny joking manner calls “nat.” The film also makes clear that Ken is a lover of fairly misogynistic jokes, another suggestion, given the rise of feminism long before, that the Lynds are fairly behind the times in their thinking and behavior, despite their financial success due to Ken’s car dealership.

     The mother, moreover, is as almost as inflexible with her daughter Margie that she is with her son, constantly criticizing her more mod, boyish look in hair style and clothing. At least Margie has turned out sexually “normal,” and soon shares the happy news that she is pregnant. But even here the happiness and open love she and Nate show for one another obviously creates some tension for her mother, given that even though they have now returned to the same bed, there is little sexual involvement between the two parents.

    The movie might have looked at these facts a little bit more attentively to suggest why this couple might have become so absolutely homophobic, why Ken can’t even stand be the presence of his son once he is told of his homosexuality, and why although Tess attempts to show her son their love, she can’t abide the reality when he finally does experience gay sex and finds a partner with whom he moves in, having been financially cut off by Ken, who can’t even sleep knowing that his son is a “determined” queer. In those days the idea that homosexuality was primarily something that was inborn instead of a lifestyle decision had not yet sunk in. Even my own parents, who in many ways were similar in their attitudes to the couple in this picture, believed to their last dying days that I had stubbornly insisted on being gay, not that it had chosen me, that as Jeff attempts to explain, it was something within him that made him sexual cold to women, not a whim or an attempt to try out the new “craze.”

     How anyone might possibly imagine that in 1985, the first year in which film began to actually face the AIDS crisis, that anyone might “choose” to be gay had to be rather thick minded, as this couple appears to be. Like so many parents of the time and still even now, their son’s admission of his sexuality seems to be all about them, not about him, and their focus is almost entirely on their own dreadful feelings, not what their own child has had to go through to find the courage to realize that he was different and share that with his mother.

    This film was transparently well-intentioned, aimed at people just like the Lynds, so it didn’t dare go too far in labelling the couple as being ignorant hypocrites who equally were equally unable to face their own sexual problems, which, strangely enough are resolved through their equal concern about their son’s absence. There’s nothing like a little shared homophobia to bring the heterosexual husband and wife back together again.

    And by film’s end, the plot kills off Ken of a worsening heart condition—brought on apparently by his continued inability to deal with the situation; although he has written his son out of his life, he does leave behind a never-mailed letter of partial contrition and a statement of his love. Tess, moreover, eventually comes ‘round, finally even inviting her son’s lover home for Christmas with her son.

     Obviously, we must perceive that this, along with a dozen or more such television dramas like it in the English-speaking world helped to transform the hate of many even educated and fairly wealthy families such as the Lynds to into a better understanding the issues surrounding what would eventually become the LGBTQ+ community. This film, broadcast on ABC, along with Richard Levinson, William Link, and Lamont Johnson’s That Certain Summer broadcast on the same network in 1972—a work in which the father was discovered to be gay instead of the son—were watershed works in series of subtly propagandistic works. The same year as Consenting Adult, NBC premiered a somewhat related drama about a gay man of a similar family background who returns home announcing he has AIDS titled An Early Frost written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman and directed by John Erman. Although this work was far more outspoken, the parents displayed the same sense of ignorance and hysteria.

    But the very fact that An Early Frost was centered on AIDS not simply on the “tragedy” of having a gay son makes it even more apparent just how retardataire the ABC drama was. What was even worse is that it took Consenting Adult’s producer Ray Aghayan 10 years to get the film made.

    By 1985, even my difficult parents had come round 15 years after I had announced being gay and made clear that my roommate Howard was my lover. In that same year, two of the first and very best of films on AIDS appeared, Canadian documentarian Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs and Arthur J. Bressan’s truly memorable movie Buddies. The same year Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts presented a brilliant representation of lesbian life. British director Stephen Frears in My Beautiful Launderette celebrated a gay couple of a seemingly impossible cultural divide and Argentine-Brazilian heterosexual director Héctor Babenco had hinted at transgender behavior and gay camp in his film, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s German director Rainer Fassbinder had already given us his numerous takes of male queer and transgender life as had Spanish director Pedro Almadóvar; and German female director Ulrike Ottinger had screened her vast lesbian and male gay worlds. And these were just the most notable examples of hundreds of other brilliant representations.

     Obviously none of these major film masterworks had reached suburban America, but their very existence makes clear just how puny the hysterical soap opera Consenting Adult was and how unwoken to different sexual and social orientations most people in the US were—and, in many instances, are still today in a culture in which many have high-tailed to a world under the covers and back into the closets.

    If any tears were shed in watching this hopefully educative drama, for me it was because of just how ignorant we remained at a time when the gay community particularly needed the full understanding and help of the heterosexual majority, part of the reason why so very many brilliant, vibrant, and beautiful young men of the 1980s and 1990s grew sick and died without proper medicines or the help of their families. If one can’t even bear to be in the same room with a son who has confessed to being gay, how might we expect these people to speak out against an administration which was not at all interested in helping find a cure or even proper health care for the children who dying of disease that first hit this vulnerable portion of our population?

    Barry Taub played a handsome, athletic gay man quite excellently, while I felt the liberal and activist actors Marlo Thomas and Martin Sheen were terribly miscast. Knowing of their careers it was hard for me for one moment to believe they were supposed to be so selfish and intentionally mentally deprived. Naturally empathetic people have a difficult time in conveying stubborn hate.

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).