by Guy Branum
The best line in The Graduate is when Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin are in the hotel bar before their first sexual rendezvous. She’s trying to force this little person to be the man, to take control, to be suave. He has the capacity for none of this. She’s annoyed with Ben and with herself.
When the waiter comes over, Mrs. Robinson says, “I will have a martini.” It is not a request. It is an order. It’s the Bene Gesserit voice. It is quiet, but it is certain. I know that her tryst is ridiculous, and that in the end she’s ranting at Ben like a child who left his bike in the driveway, but I still love and respect the strength and certainty of Mrs. Robinson’s cocktail order. There are moments in your life when you’re not going to give anyone the chance to fuck something up. Mrs. Robinson’s martini is one of those moments, and it lets us know so much about what the rest of her life is like.
The last act of The Graduate is a dud. Benjamin “falls in love” with Elaine Robinson and tries to wrest her away from a Berkeley frat6 guy. Mrs. Robinson has a few diminished moments telling Ben to stay away or cursing at him in a church, but her story is done. The goddess has to be stripped of her powers. We could have access to a creature that magnificent and wild only as an impediment to some man’s boring story.
It always happens. The Devil Wears Prada is this magnificent film about a girl getting offered the chance to learn to be a dragon lady from the very best, then she turns it down so Vinnie Chase can make her grilled cheese with ten dollars’ worth of Jarlsberg in it. Nice stories need conventional endings. Mrs. Robinson isn’t conventional.
The caged-beast predation of Mrs. Robinson, the polite domestic pedophilia of a woman toying with her lesser because she had nothing left to lose—I would be lying if I said it wasn’t the first sexuality I saw that made sense to me. Mrs. Robinson had lived long enough in a world that did not value her. She was done asking for permission to lead a life she hated. She was going to take something, even if it was wrong. Because it was wrong.
As an intelligent, right-thinking adult, I know I should not admit that. I should not admit to finding any part of Mrs. Robinson’s psychological manipulation of a barely adult Benjamin erotically appealing. In the movie, it is permissible because it was 1967 and because Mrs. Robinson is a woman. She can’t be a real sexual threat. I am a gay man, thus a presumed manipulator, predator, and pedophile to many. My inclinations are also not ameliorated by the fact that, when I watched the film, I was five years younger than Ben is in the movie. I’m still a gay man, and admitting that age-based psychological coercion in sex interested me will make me suspect to you. I know these things as an intelligent, right-thinking adult.
But one of the key problems with our modern, liberal construction of homosexuality is that it conceives of homosexual men only as being intelligent, right-thinking adults. “Two consenting adults” are the words on which the gay rights movement was built. Gay adolescents, meanwhile, we ask not to exist. Gay children must wait. They must watch their classmates’ adventures, and they have to watch movies about young, imperfect heterosexual love and dance to songs about it. And then they have to wait to get in to a good liberal arts college and become a consenting adult. But no, you will tell me. Things are better now. Glee happened. Shit’s cool now. Gay teens now have the option of a nice dating life so long as it has the most perfect, burnished sheen of suburban domesticity on it; if the one to two out gay teens in their high school turn out to have mutual attraction, and no one’s parents are religious or conservative enough to send one of the involved parties to a re-education camp when they learn about the adolescent tryst. Love, Simon made a modest profit! Things sure are fixed. Good luck and Godspeed, class of 2020!
But I wasn’t born in 2002. I still lived in a world where gay sex was illegal in a lot of states, and I couldn’t foresee a sexual life for myself that wasn’t built on lies and manipulations. That Mrs. Robinson’s desires chafed at social decorum (if not the law) was integral to the appeal. Don’t ask me to watch and identify with stories of heterosexuals engaging in sweet, innocent adolescent love when sweet, innocent adolescent love was a thing I’d never had the option of.
I was a gay teen, and I was a housewife wasting the best years of my life. I was in a house with people who didn’t give two shits about my self-actualization or happiness. I had a degree in art history, and I was doing absolutely nothing with it. I was not being sexually satisfied, but I looked damned good in a leopard print. This upper-middle-class Gorgon was a far more realistic rendering of my teen sexuality than anyone on Saved by the Bell.
I was not attracted to Dustin Hoffman. I don’t think anyone is, really. There are times in Tootsie when he’s got the charismatic-actor short-guy arrogance going on and he seems attractive, but mostly, he just reminded me of a more Jewish version of my dad. Ben wasn’t hot, but Mrs. Robinson’s capacity to go for what she wanted, regardless of the consequences, was intoxicating.
There was recently a Netflix campaign called “The First Time I Saw Me” about members of traditionally underrepresented minorities recalling the first time they saw someone like themselves in media. It is focused primarily on visible racial minorities. Gay people, of course, don’t need anything like this, because on the surface, we look like not-gay people, and surfaces are all you’re looking for in art, right?
Let’s jump back for a moment to that 2004 review of The L Word by Stacey D’Erasmo that I referenced in a previous chapter. In it, she notes, “Visibility is a tricky thing; is someone visible when you can point her out in a crowd, or when you understand what her life feels like to her?” D’Erasmo goes on: “[The] peculiar consequence of so rarely seeing your kind on television, in movies . . . you can become, almost unwittingly, attached to a certain kind of wildness: the wildness of feeling not only unrepresented but somehow unrepresentable in ordinary terms.” In 1992 in America, or really, anywhere in the world, I had no options for seeing myself in media under any terms that would make rational sense to someone else. Mrs. Robinson’s literal wildness brought her closer to me. Her rage was of operatic scale, and as a sixteen-year-old boy repressing all sexual or emotional desire, I needed that.
I remember when I lost this specific shred of white male entitlement. I was reading Pawn of Prophecy, the first book in the Belgariad, a fantasy series by David Eddings. They’re these bad 1980s fantasy novels where a cipher of a boy discovers he’s the wizard messiah and gets an Object of Incredible Power with which he defeats all evil. Glen Weldon of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour once described such works as Tolkien methadone—works that the primary purpose of which was to help adolescent boys taper off from the actual artistry of The Lord of the Rings. I was reading this adventure about a Regular Boy of No Qualities, and out of nowhere, I broke. I distinctly remember yelling at myself in my own head, “You are not like Garion.” Garion was the protagonist; he was regular. I stridently reproached myself: Who did I think I was, pretending I was a regular boy, like I was a hero? I wasn’t normal. I was fat, I was wrong, I was not a person on whom adventure could be overlaid. Whom, in my own head, was I trying to fool?
If you ever ask me who my favorite Disney princess is (and you should), I will answer, “Ariel.” I will say this because I like The Little Mermaid better than any of the other Disney princess movies, because I like the songs in The Little Mermaid better than just about any other musical’s, and I will say it because Ariel’s hair is pretty. The real answer isn’t Ariel, though. The real answer is that my favorite Disney princess is a sea witch.
If you’re an intelligent, critical person looking on from a distance, this is hardly a surprise. Ursula, the obese, betentacled temptress of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, is just another Mrs. Robinson. She’s savvy, dejected, and willing to ruin the life of a young person to get what she needs. The difference is that she’s a cartoon; she’s unbounded by the restraints of suburban Pasadena. In fictitious monochromes, her manipulations are freed to be all the more buttery and delicious.
Ursula is a villain, bu
t she isn’t EVIL. She’s not archly malevolent like, say, a Maleficent; she’s not trying to bring people down just for the sake of evil. She’s got an angle, a beef, a story we’re seeing only the edges of. Triton, with his infinite power and well-muscled torso, screwed her over at some point,7 and she’s ready to take back what she can, and she doesn’t really care whom she hurts in the process.
Ursula is results-oriented. If Mrs. Robinson is in an emotional cage and lashing out indiscriminately to try to feel again, Ursula is a calculating predator in the wild. She plays everyone from Triton to Eric to Ariel. Her greatest power isn’t her “little bit of magic,” it’s her voice. In a world full of sentimental kings and lovers saying how they actually feel, Ursula always says what she needs to be saying. Even before she steals Ariel’s voice to romance Eric, she’s taking on figurative voices to be the person her prey needs in the moment. If the undersea world won’t respect Ursula for her talents, she’ll use those talents to fool them into giving her what she wants. She’s Margaret Thatcher with tentacles. That’s really all I’ve ever aspired to be.
I have never been that savvy or manipulative, just like I’ve never been as sexy or commanding as Mrs. Robinson, but in Ursula, I saw something electrifying. I don’t know that I ever consciously thought that I wanted to be like her, or that her capacious body was more reminiscent of my own, but I definitely felt access to Ursula in a way that I wasn’t used to finding in narrative.
Every child wants to be good, I think. I tried very hard to be good for the first twenty-odd years of my conscious life, and I eventually realized that the rules of good required too much of me. In the musical Wicked, Elphaba says she’s sick of playing by the rules of someone else’s game. She says she’s spent her life constraining desires and powers to avoid losing love: “Well, if that’s love, it comes at much too high a cost.” We never see Mrs. Robinson or Ursula when they’re still trying to be nice girls, but we know the story. They realized that “nice” is a game that ultimately benefits only Triton or Mr. Robinson. Mrs. Robinson is in an in-between place, broken and confused, but Ursula has come out the other side. The norms of morality are no longer meaningful for her. She understands that you can’t save yourself by being quiet and well behaved; you can save yourself only by having power.
In How to Be Gay, David Halperin describes the way that gay men watch Mildred Pierce.8 The story is supposed to be about a long-suffering mother who gives too much to her daughter, but the laughter and shouts of support from gay men always back up the greedy, venomous daughter. Ironically, Halperin describes a group of gay men watching Mommie Dearest9 in precisely the opposite fashion. The story is supposed to be of a cruel, vain mother demanding too much from her abused child, but the gay bar is collectively mocking Christina for putting her nice dresses on wire hangers. Yes, we identify with powerful, interesting female figures, but we are also invested in upending narrative. If the role of comic or romantic narrative is to get a happy heterosexual couple together to give us the prospect of a baby and hope that life will continue, we gay people know there will never be a place for us in the center of that story.
So we have to steal the narrative. We co-opt it, like Ursula taking Ariel’s voice and Mrs. Robinson taking Ben’s nuts. We can make it ours for a delightful, chaotic moment, but then the flow of narrative has to return, we have to let the conventional, boring, and normal attend to do their job of making babies. In the words of Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, “The world must be peopled.”
In 1981, clusters of gay men in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles started being diagnosed with odd combinations of opportunistic diseases, including Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumonia. It was called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) but by 1982 had been categorized, of course, as AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). I was six. Before 1982, there were occasional gay characters in TV and film, mostly evil, mostly in art films targeted to cosmopolitan audiences, but our representation was growing. Then 1982 happened, and all gay men in film became a locus of disease, shame, pity, and death. I was still six. In 1996, Dr. David Ho pioneered treatment of HIV with a three-drug cocktail that included protease inhibitors. The number of AIDS-related deaths went from 41,000 a year to 16,000 a year, and Dr. Ho was named Time’s Person of the Year. On June 20, 1997, My Best Friend’s Wedding came out in theaters, and it was a hit. I was twenty-one.
My Best Friend’s Wedding is a romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts. You probably assume based on this fact that it is lame, basic, and without value. You are wrong. It tells the story of Jules (Roberts), a food critic who once made an agreement with her best friend, Michael (either Dylan McDermott or Dermot Mulroney), that if they were unmarried when they turned twenty-eight, they would get married. When she gets a call from Michael a few weeks before her twenty-eighth birthday, she assumes he’s calling to invoke the pact. But she can’t! Ugh, how dare he bring his silly love to the table. He’s clearly been carrying a torch for years.
What Michael actually tells her is that he’s getting married to twenty-year-old Kimmy (Cameron Diaz) in just a few weeks. He invites Jules to the wedding. Jules goes, but she’s determined to break up his engagement and make Michael realize she is his true love.
That is the story. It is all of it. Why am I talking about it?
Because of George. Because Rupert Everett, an actual gay actor of ridiculous actual charm and handsomeness, is also in this film. From the first moments, when Jules is dragon-lady-reviewing food, she’s chattering with George. Because when she is at her wits’ end, she reaches out to him for help. Because he’s smart and fun and loves Jules very much. My Best Friend’s Wedding is the end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death for gay men in mainstream American films. George is alive.
It may seem to you that the victory I am suggesting is a flawed and meager one. This is still Jules’s story. This is still about inevitable straight happiness and a love triangle with two women, neither of whom are attracted to the other. These estimations fail to understand what a deeply subversive rom-com My Best Friend’s Wedding is.
First of all, our heroine, Jules, is trying to vex the happiness of others. She is, in her own way, a villain. She is trying to stop Michael from loving Kimmy. Under traditional rom-com rules, we would discover that Kimmy is vain or limited or cruel. She’s not. She’s wonderful. She’s all the nice, happy, much younger wife a straight guy should people the world with. Jules is making a mistake. And George is there for her.
Romantic comedies that came after My Best Friend’s Wedding have tried to echo the role of George and failed. They gave their heroine interchangeable sassy gay friends with a couple of one-liners and some makeup advice. I should know: I played one in 2011’s No Strings Attached.10 George was not a functionary; he was a force.
When things are looking worse for Jules, she calls George in. He arrives, he tells her she’s doing the wrong thing, then he helps her out. He hijacks the narrative. Yes, he does it by pretending to be her fiancé, echoing and validating heteronormative rom-com tropes, but he shits on them the whole time. He understands this world. He’s lived in heterosexuality his whole life, but he tap-dances around it. He’s Ursula stealing voices and using them to get what he wants.
There is a moment in My Best Friend’s Wedding when George is slinging so much magic and bullshit that he actually manages to turn the film into a musical. At lunch with Kimmy’s family, he’s telling the nearly impossible story of how he “fell for Jules,” and he manages to make it so intoxicating, they come along for the ride. He pushes further, and he starts singing. Yeah, it’s a movie, yeah, it’s all made up, but why create a character who’s irresponsibly heightening the farce to the point of breaking?
Because George doesn’t care. He’s not invested in heterosexuality. He’s in a heterosexual story, he’s moving it along, but he does not commit to the idea that heterosexual success for his friend is the only path. Eventually, Jules lets go and lets Michael and Kimmy get married. She finds herself alone a
t the reception, having done the right thing. She calls George on her ridiculously large 1997 cell phone, and he magically reappears. He narrates his own arrival: “He comes towards you . . . the moves of a jungle cat. Although you quite correctly sense that he is . . . gay . . . like most devastatingly handsome single men of his age are, you think . . . what the hell. Life goes on. Maybe there won’t be marriage . . . maybe there won’t be sex . . . but, by God, there’ll be dancing.” When a story doesn’t know how you fit in to it, you have to do the narration yourself.
George Downes comes into a perfectly nice, respectable heterosexual romantic comedy, and he steals the narrative just like Ursula and Mrs. Robinson, but he is not thwarted by normalcy. Instead, he shows one of the characters in the very normal plot that there are options outside of that plot. He guides Jules to a very unconventional end, one without the certainty of heterosexual reproduction, and he reminds her that there’s a lot of joy to be found there, too.
Rupert Everett is way more handsome than I could ever hope to be. He’s astoundingly sexy and smart. Yes, he was an aspirational figure for a young gay man like me to see, but the reason I was able to so delight in his identity wasn’t because I imagined I could ever be as suave, seductive, or beautiful as he. I could identify with George because he wasn’t safe. He wasn’t boring. George did nothing to assure Jules or me that happily ever after was our birthright. But he didn’t die, either. He didn’t disappear, diminish, or get sad. George knew there were other joys to be had.
Joan Didion says we tell ourselves stories to live. We seek narrative to provide rationalization to the chaos of life. Some people cling to the narrative they are given, by choice or by instinct, finding selves they should be with certain happinesses prescribed for their ends. Some of us don’t. Like D’Erasmo said, we believe our stories are singular and uncapturable. I fear it. I fear I am alone, that my story is errata, that I am unlike others and a little bit gross. The truth is, though, that our stories are just not domesticated yet. They are dangerous wild things that may bite you, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
