CHAPTER EIGHT
Eric J. Sterling
Homosexuality was designated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a mental illness until December 15, 1973, when it was removed from the list of mental disorders.1 Peter Zachar and Kenneth S. Kendler claim that “sexual practices such as masturbation and homosexuality were considered to be signs of a progressive psychic decline,”2 but in 1970, the APA began to be pressured into removing same-sex preference from its classifications of mental illnesses. One reason for the APA’s decision to remove homosexuality as a category in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was that organizations in America were openly discriminating against gays and then justifying their prejudice by pointing to the APA’s classification in the manual. Another reason is that psychiatrists discerned that gays resembled heterosexuals in their desire for committed and caring long-term relationships, undermining the stereotype that gays solely desired sexual acts with various and indiscriminate partners. Furthermore, the removal occurred because “positive personal encounters reduce negative attitudes about outgroups,”3 reversing negative opinions deriving from a lack of contact with members of outgroups. For instance, during the Holocaust, the Nazis criminalized intermarriage with Jews, prevented them from working jobs or going to school with “Aryans,” prevented “Aryans” from shopping at Jewish businesses, and subsequently removed Jews from cities and their neighbors while placing them in ghettos. The purpose in separating them from the rest of the population was in part to prevent Jews from becoming a sympathetic outgroup, for “Aryans” could gullibly believe Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and consequently be indifferent to their plight (and even want to persecute Jews themselves) if they never interacted with Jews. It is easier to hate, or feel prejudice toward, those members of an outgroup when one does not have any knowledge about, or encounters with, them. Watching movies about an outgroup, such as homosexuals, serves as a visual interaction (and identification) with them and can lead to understanding, sympathy, respect, and acceptance. When examining the gay films Victim (1961), The Children’s Hour (1961), Bent (1997), and Brokeback Mountain (2005)—all set before 1973—viewers can discern sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals in an era in which they suffered widespread oppression; the persecution and prejudice they endure lead gay characters who are not initially mentally ill to experience mental disorders they would not have suffered had they been treated with kindness and respect rather than with cruelty and homophobic oppression. This chapter will focus on the mental illnesses that gays experience due to external prejudices and oppression as well as the film’s significant impact upon creating understanding of homosexuals and sympathy toward their plight regarding the prejudice they encounter. Audience sympathy for these oppressed characters helped influence public opinion about gays in a positive way over the decades, resulting in a more tolerant society.
Self-Loathing
Although the APA correctly removed homosexuality from its DSM, oppression and hatred often lead gay victims to self-loathing, which occurs when the characters start to accept the homophobic prejudice that is prevalent in their society. Self-loathing is dangerous because the characters start to believe that they deserve the oppression they encounter because their sexual orientation is considered abnormal, unnatural, or deviant. For instance, in Victim, the first movie ever to use the word “homosexual,” Henry (Charles Lloyd-Pack), who is forced to sell his successful barbershop to pay off blackmailers, laments to barrister Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde): “Nature played me a dirty trick.”4 Henry’s comment indicates that he believes that his sexual orientation is unnatural and abnormal because it conflicts with what people in his society consider natural and normal. Adding to his shame is his belief that his homosexuality derives from “nature,” so he realizes that he cannot change, that his “abnormality” extends beyond his control and derives from a higher source. His low self-esteem, verging on borderline personality disorder (BPD), comes from him experiencing (undeserved) shame from his homosexual sexual desires that the majority of his fellow citizens (and British law) consider to be abhorrent and from being unable to change and conform. His inability to conform to societal sexual norms has led to his imprisonment four times because homosexual acts violate Section 11 of the British Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885; these arrests have rendered him anxious and neurotic, and thus vulnerable to blackmailers, who use photographs of him to coerce him to sell his beloved barber shop and flee to Canada; his anxiety and neurosis lead to his fatal heart attack when Sandy the blackmailer appears at his shop and starts to destroy it.
Similarly, in Victim, stage actor Calloway (Dennis Price) pays a significant part of his income to the blackmailers yet defends his homosexuality by saying, “I’ve never corrupted a normal. Why should I be forced to live outside the law because I find love in the only way I can?”5 Calloway’s defense suggests that he considers homosexuality to be a mental illness and abnormal behavior, for he suggests that it is the opposite of “normal” (heterosexual) comportment. In addition, his employment of the word “corrupted” suggests that he considers homosexual intercourse to be a “corruption,” a negative deviation from heterosexual sex. Thus, in Victim, the idea that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral has been instilled into the minds of gay characters such as Henry and Calloway, destroying their self-esteem and causing self-loathing and depression.
In The Children’s Hour, Martha (Shirley MacLaine) starts to hate herself after she is accused of being a lesbian. When the grocery boy stares at her and giggles, she yells, “I’ve got eight fingers, see? And two heads. I’m a freak.” Upon her discovery that she is indeed a lesbian, she laments to Karen (Audrey Hepburn) that they can never leave the house again because of the rumor that they are lesbian lovers, “We’ve been famous …. We’re bad people. There’s always been something wrong [with me] …. I can’t keep it any longer.”6 Martha, like many women who feel persecuted, suffers from depression because of low self-esteem, feelings of helplessness, and pessimism.7 Martha loathes herself because she unconsciously accepts the societal prejudice that being gay signifies that there is something wrong with her, that she is sinful. She feels ashamed of herself although she has done nothing wrong and has never touched Karen in a sexual way.
Likewise, in Bent, Max (Clive Owen), while on the transport train to Dachau, feels ashamed for being gay. Max hates himself for punching his gay lover Rudy (Brian Webber II) to death (on orders from Nazi guards) and for denying his sexual orientation, saving his life by assuring the guards that he is not gay. When gay prisoner Horst (Lothaire Bluteau) tries to comfort him by touching him, Max pulls away, saying, “You mustn’t do that. For your own sake. You mustn’t touch me. I’m a rotten person.”8 Max’s self-loathing derives from his denial of his sexual orientation and his realization that his family has disowned him because he is gay. When Max tells Uncle Freddie (Ian McKellen) that he wants to reconcile with his family, his uncle replies that because he is gay, “Maybe they don’t want you back.”9 Max’s self-loathing leads to his incessant escape of reality through his abuse of alcohol and drugs, his self-destructive behavior, and his depression.
Trauma
In Bent, Max’s desire to hide his sexual identity leads to a traumatic event on the train to Dachau. To please the Nazi guards and to save his life, shortly after Max is forced to punch his lover Rudy until the man dies, he must then have sexual intercourse with the corpse of a teenage Jewish girl whom the Nazis have recently murdered. If he does not have sex with her, if he cannot get an erection (if he is “bent”—an actual term the Nazis used in German), he will also be killed. He relates the humiliating experience to Horst flatly and tonelessly, as if he is almost in a catatonic state:
Just dead, minutes … bullet … in her … they said … prove that you’re … and I did … prove that you’re … lots of them, watching … laughing … drinking … he’s a bit bent, they said, he can’t … but I did… I hit him, you know. I kissed her. I killed him. Sweet lips. Angel… I proved that I wasn’t… [Silence] And they enjoyed it… And I said, I’m not queer.10
Traumatized by having to help kill his lover, he must then publicly humiliate himself in front of the guards; as a gay man, it would be hard enough for him to have an erection with a woman, but to do so with a female corpse as guards mock him is utterly debasing. The frequent ellipses in the aforementioned quotation demonstrates his shock, as if he is too humiliated to speak coherently. In fact, after the incident, he can no longer remember Rudy, even though they have been longtime lovers who live together until the Nazis raid their apartment. It seems clear that this shocking episode causes Max to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Similarly, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) experiences a life-changing traumatic event in Brokeback Mountain. Del Mar tells his lover Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) that when he was nine, his father forced him to witness a murder scene involving two gay men. Ennis says, “They found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick till it pulled off.”11 Del Mar is traumatized because he was so young when he saw the aftermath of the horrific murders and because of the implied threat from his father, who Ennis admits might even have been responsible for the crimes. The father forced his son to see the dead gay cowboys, even the one with the penis ripped off, to threaten his son: if Ennis ever engages in homosexual sex, this could (and should) be what happens to him. The sight renders Del Mar paranoid and fearful for the rest of his life of being identified as a gay man, making him neurotic and anxious. This traumatic event clearly hinders Del Mar from ever maintaining a sustained romantic relationship, and he continually finds excuses to refrain from spending his life with Twist.
While camping, Ennis expresses his fear that he and Jack will be murdered for being gay: “we’re around each other and this thing grabs on to us again in the wrong place, wrong time, we’ll be dead.”12 He constantly fears that people suspect that he is gay and even stops attending church because he considers the congregation a “fire-and-brimstone crowd”13 that attacks him personally when they condemn homosexuality. Ennis asks Jack, “You ever get the feelin’… when you’re in town, and someone looks at you, suspicious… like he knows. And then you get out on the pavement, and everyone, lookin’ at you, and maybe they all know too?”14 Jack Straw similarly becomes anxious when a suspicious rodeo clown refuses to let him buy him a drink and starts talking about him to others. Ennis asks Jack if his wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway) suspects that he is actually gay or normal (as if gay is the opposite of normal) because the men constantly doubt their own true identity and fear the consequences of being outed. The two men’s paranoia and neuroses are symbolized by the two shirts, one inside the other.
Although many viewers are touched by the image of Del Mar’s shirt hanging inside of Twist’s, showing the inextricable emotional bond between them, Ennis finds the shirts hiding within the deep recess of Jack’s closet, which is itself a “shallow cavity.”15 So Ennis’ shirt hangs within Jack’s inside a niche within an obscured closet in a tiny town in Wyoming. Jack even hides the shirts from his own parents. The shirts, like the men, are hiding inside a closet, and although a touching symbol, the shirts’ image is disturbing, representing the terror the men feel of being identified as gay men in a homophobic culture. The shirts bond together in a way the two men can never do because of their paranoia. Are the shirts a symbol of their relationship or a substitution for it? Living one’s daily life in constant fear inevitably leads to paranoia and anxiety because they cannot be themselves or live life in a manner that is normal for them, and they (Del Mar, in particular) constantly fear that they are being watched and suspected of “inappropriate behavior.” Part of the depression the two men feel derives from their inability to be themselves and participate in the long-term relationship they desire.
Del Mar’s paranoia is apparent at the end of the film when he learns of Twist’s untimely death. Twist’s wife, clearly not concerned about her husband’s demise, nonchalantly explains that a tire blew out and broke Jack’s nose and jaw, killing him. Del Mar thinks back to the traumatic sight he witnessed as a child and suspects, without proof, that Twist must have been cruelly murdered in a homophobic attack. He envisions “a MAN being beaten unmercifully by THREE ASSAILANTS, one of whom uses a tire iron.”16 Paranoia becomes commonplace for Ennis, inhibiting his ability to sustain a romantic relationship or live happily.
Anxiety, Depression, and Suicide
The oppression that the gay characters experience causes anxiety and depression that, in turn, sometimes leads to suicide. In Victim, John “Boy” Barrett (Peter McEnery) embezzles money in order to pay off blackmailers who threaten to reveal his sexual orientation to the public, which would cost him his job and friends while subjecting him to public humiliation. Because homosexuality was illegal in England in 1961, when Victim was filmed, and not decriminalized until 1967,17 Barrett faces a prison sentence for being gay; rather than go to jail, he commits suicide, one of two gay characters in Victim who takes his own life. To the police, Barrett’s major crime, the film suggests, is not that he steals money but rather that he is gay. When Barrett readily confesses that he has stolen the money, the policemen ignore his embezzlement and focus on the motive; they want to know why he stole the money (blackmailed for being gay), leading him to commit suicide in his prison cell. Barrett and Henry become anxious and depressed because they are despised simply for being themselves; if people do not want to be hated for embezzlement, they can simply refrain from stealing, but people cannot stop being who they are or experiencing normal urges.
In Victim, the gay characters are frequently reminded that their lives are considered worthless. For example, despite knowing that Barrett desperately seeks a place to stay, Sylvie (Dawn Beret) refuses to allow her husband Frank to let him spend the night, asking, “Why can’t he stick with his own sort?”18 She implies that gays are inherently different beings than heterosexuals, so the latter should refrain from interacting with or helping homosexuals, as if they are a different species. She speaks her insulting question loudly so that Barrett will hear—as if gays lack feelings or that their feelings do not matter. Frank lamely consoles Barrett about not letting him stay in his house, saying that gays are persecuted less now than witches were in Salem: “It used to be witches. At least they don’t burn you.”19 The camera zooms in on Barrett’s face several times, including after Frank’s insincere comment, to manifest the terror that the oppression he encounters causes him. Deputy Inspector Harris (John Barrie) observes that approximately 90 percent of blackmail cases involved homosexuality.20 Hugh David notes that gays were targeted so often by blackmailers that the term “blackmailer’s charter” became a common term, and that between 1921 and 1963, the number of homosexuals targeted rose greatly, as high as 24 percent in some years, leading to many emotionally scarred lives.21 Unsurprisingly, Barrett’s anxiety becomes so great that he fears blackmailers over an innocuous photo: he is simply crying while barrister Melville Farr puts his arm around his shoulder—not proof of homosexuality, but the photo still terrorizes a man suffering from great anxiety. It is not surprising, then, that Barrett commits suicide. When talking to Farr about blackmail, Henry laments that “Barrett is well out of it,”22 suggesting that as a persecuted homosexual man, Barrett is better off dead than incessantly hounded and despised. The persecution has rendered Barrett so depressed that he chooses to end his life.
An effect of incessant persecution (such as institutionalized homophobia) is anxiety and depression, which, unfortunately, sometimes lead to self-destructive behavior, even suicide. This is apparent in The Children’s Hour when Martha commits suicide after her depression, brought upon when people accuse her of being a lesbian, seizes control of her. For eight days, she refuses to leave her house and sits despondently on her chair. She has been banned from the ladies clubs and even from stores, so in order to eat, she must have food delivered to her house. Her best friend Karen has also been accused of being gay, ruining her marriage plans, and Martha feels responsible. It is unclear from the film whether Martha is a lesbian or if the accusations render her so depressed and confused that she incorrectly accepts them as factual. She confesses to Karen, “I’ve got to tell you how guilty I am…. It’s all my fault. I ruined your life, and I ruined my own …. I feel so sick and dirty. I can’t stand it anymore.”23 For years she has lived with Karen, yet her sexual desires have gone unfulfilled. Peggy Thoits notes that “members of groups that are weakly integrated suffer from disappointment and misery because their escalating passions, unregulated by norms or relations with others, inevitably go unfulfilled. [Emile] Durkheim called this kind of suicide ‘egoistic suicide,’ because individuals in poorly integrated groups are more likely to succumb to despair caused by unchecked and unfulfilled personal desires.”24 Martha then hangs herself because the accusation and its ramifications render her depressed and hopeless.
Conclusion
Rather than portraying gays as abnormal beings, effeminate caricatures, or sexually-obsessed perverts, Victim characterizes the protagonists as sympathetic, three-dimensional, normal human beings. Producer Michael Relph called Victim “the first wholly adult and serious approach to homosexuality that the British cinema had made, with gays portrayed as ‘human being[s] subject to all the emotions of other human beings, and as deserving of our understanding.’”25 Such an honest and sympathetic portrayal offered hope and benefitted the mental health of gay viewers. Bogarde notes, “The countless letters of gratitude which flooded in were proof enough of that [inner peace given to homosexuals], and I had achieved what I had longed to do for so long, to be in a film which disturbed, educated, and illuminated as well as merely giving entertainment.”26 Renowned gay British filmmaker Terence Davis was moved by Victim: “The fact that it features a sympathetic homosexual protagonist—the first in British cinema—was no small matter, and the effect it would have had on a boy of 16 struggling with his own homosexual feelings is incalculable.”27 Gay films such as Victim, Brokeback Mountain, Bent, and The Children’s Hour helped successfully to diminish the mental illness suffered by homosexuals through their humanizing and sympathetic protagonists. The aforementioned films actively undermine the social stigma and inaccurate stereotypes about homosexuals that many people inevitably encountered and naively accepted as truth. Male gay characters such as Farr, Del Mar, Twist, and Max are manly, not effeminate. Homosexual characters such as Farr, Del Mar, Twist, and Martha are virtuous and kind people, not abnormal beings or sexual predators. Most of the characters in these gay films desire long-term and emotionally satisfying relationships, not merely indiscriminate sex acts with any available partners, as the stereotypes suggested. Part of the reason why psychologists considered homosexuality to be a mental illness was the mistaken belief that, unlike heterosexuals, gays were incapable of having long-term romantic relationships and that their relationships were based primarily on the physical, not the emotional, with many partners. The realization that gays were no different than heterosexuals in desiring permanent and monogamous romantic bonds proved instrumental in the acceptance of gays.
One essential factor in the portrayal of gays in the films is perspective. Each of the films addressed in this chapter is presented almost exclusively from the perspective of homosexuals, which allows them to tell their stories and dreams, demonstrate that they are human beings with feelings like any other people, and show the audience the tremendous hurt caused by homophobia. The sympathetic, first-person portrayals in these films generated significant empathy, understanding, and respect for gays, which, in turn, created a more tolerant attitude toward them. A rare instance of a homophobic perspective actually creates more empathy for gays. In Victim, heartless Miss Benham (Margaret Diamond), an ugly spinster and blackmailer, speaks of gays with great prejudice and paranoia: “They disgust me…. They’re everywhere—everywhere you turn…. Somebody has to pay for their filthy blasphemy.” Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan note that Benham is “bitter and vicious, with an almost psychotic hatred of homosexuals.”28 Thus, heterosexual viewers feel more tolerance for gays when they witness the mean-spirited, homophobic diatribe by the unsympathetic Benham, whose hysteria suggests that some homophobic people are actually latent homosexuals and suffer from their own mental disorders. Undoubtedly, Relph undermines Benham’s bigotry, employing her homophobia to present gays as victims who should be treated empathetically. Toleration and understanding led to kinder treatment of gays, which, in turn, led to diminished mental illness in gays because they felt more accepted and thus less anxious and depressed.
Notes
1. Paula Caplan complicates this statement by noting that “ego syntonic homosexuality” (self-acceptance) was removed from the manual but that “ego dystonic homosexuality” (anxiety over one’s homosexuality) remained for years, which is problematic when gays live “in a culture that scorns and demeans lesbian and gay men.” Paula Caplan, They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 180–181.
2. Peter Zachar and Kenneth S. Kendler, “The Removal of Pluto from the Class of Planets and Homosexuality from the Class of Psychiatric Disorders: A Comparison,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 7, no. 4 (2012).
3. Ibid., 7:3.
4. Janet Green and John McCormick, Victim, film, dir. Basil Dearden, 1961, Allied Film Makers, United Kingdom.
5. Ibid., my italics.
6. John Michael Hayes, The Children’s Hour, film, dir. William Wyler (United Artists, 1961).
7. Robert G. Meyer, The Clinician’s Handbook: The Psychopathology of Adulthood and Adolescence, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1989), 118.
8. Martin Sherman, Bent, film, dir. Sean Mathias (1997, MGM), DVD.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, “Brokeback Mountain, the Screenplay,” in Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (New York: Scribner, 2005), 53.
12. Ibid., 52.
13. Ibid., 60.
14. Ibid., 71, first ellipsis mine.
15. Ibid., 91.
16. Ibid., 87.
17. Victim was made primarily to overturn the antigay law.
18. Victim.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality, 1895–1995 (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 17, 153–154.
22. Victim.
23. The Children’s Hour.
24. Peggy Thoits, “Sociological Approaches to Mental Illness,” in A Handbook for the Study of Mental Health: Social Contexts, Theories, and Systems, eds. Allan V. Horwitz and Teresa L. Scheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131.
25. John Coldstream, Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004).
26. Christopher Pullen, Gay Identity, New Storytelling and the New Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 87.
27. Michael Koresky, “Queerness and Melancholia: An Excerpt from Terence Davies,” September 4, 2014, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/09/film/queerness-and-melancholia-an-excerpt-from-terence-davies, accessed April 23, 2016.
28. Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan, The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 237.