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).
