Comments on: The Celluloid Closet

By: KOCE (or PBS in general) Sucks! | Orange County Metblogs

KOCE (or PBS in general) Sucks! | Orange County Metblogs — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:41:35 +0000

[...] during their never-ending pledge drive for your cash. LA Metblogger Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters, even wrote a piece about the film recently. If you have never seen the movie, it’s a documentary about how gay, lesbian, bisexual [...]

By: Chal Pivik

Chal Pivik — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:27:50 +0000

I just looked at Wikipedia and had my memory jogged about how The Celluloid Closet started as a lecture Vito Russo would present with film clips. I remember hearing about these back in the day but unfortunately I never went to one of them, even though we had friends in common and I actually got to meet him.

Also, I found come CC clips on youtube, compelling me to add it to my Netflix list. Thanks for reminding me of it. I’m curious to see what my reaction to it is after all these years.

By: Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:08:18 +0000

Russo’s book in 1981 was definitely in advance of most of Queer Theory. I’m not sure why that was a gap in my reading… back when I could actually read books still (after my doctorate in this stuff, my brain seemed to rot away). By the early 1990s, I was pretty well steeped in the field, giving papers at what was then called the “National Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference” and the like, reading Teresa de Lauretis and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and friends (more for the feminist direction than queer, though there’s large overlap). I am quite confident that the filmmaking cliches of the documentary would have grated on me equally if I had HBO in 1995.

My comment wasn’t about the relevance of the documentary or its topic. I know things have changed, mostly for the better, since 1995. Rather, it was about the unconscious inability of its makers to avoid schmaltz and cliche in the formal technique of composition. It’s about the soundtrack! (a pitfall which the book most certainly did not suffer).

By: Chal Pivik

Chal Pivik — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:27:16 +0000

The book, The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo, (who died of AIDS in ’90 and so was not involved in the film version) was groundbreaking when it came out in the early 1980s, before AIDS was even known. In other words, it was a book first, not “a book too.”

I remember the sensation it caused in the gay community when it was published. My own reaction was, “Finally someone is talking about this!”

NOTHING like it had ever been written before. Yes, it seems like a product of a different era because it is (especially the tone of the film, which is victim-y, I know–). But back then, people didn’t talk about how gays and lesbians were depicted in culture and how it shaped our image in our own eyes as well as others. (Post-Hayes it usually never was good and THAT needed to be acknowledged.) Russo changed all of this; and you can draw lines connecting his seminal work to everything from gender/gay studies courses in academia to what was on LOGO last night.

That it took so long, until ’95, to actually produce a film version should be an indication of where we were as a culture when it came to the subject matter. And ironically, Lu, that you think it’s barely relevant is an indication of the success of Vito’s mission.

Or to put it another way: OMG this was like so totally before Will & Grace :(