From the Closet to the Street

Celluloid Closet a homo movie! Not really it's just a great documentary. By documentary the very definition would be,  documentary: A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.

When Roger Ebert reviewed the film he said” When was I first aware that a movie character was intended to be homosexual? It must have been in the early 1960s, in the final sequence of Fellini's ``La Dolce Vita,'' when two transvestites join the sad group that goes to meet the dawn. What ``The Celluloid Closet'' makes clear is that I had seen lots of gay characters before then--it's just that the movies never quite identified them as gay, or, like a lot of moviegoers, I didn't pick up on the clues.” April 26, 1996.

Celluloid closet is a documentary directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffery Friedman, based on a novel written 1981 in a book of the same name by Vito Russo.   

Vito Russo co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a watchdog group that monitors LGBT(lesbian,gay,bi-sexual and transgendered)  representation in the mainstream media.

The documentary showed me a different world to mainstream cinema and there earlier portrayals or denials of gay culture, even for themselves. Here is a quote from the Boys in the Band “You’re a sad and pathetic man you’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be, but there is nothing you can do to change it. Not all your prayers to your god. Not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you got left to live. you may very well be able to know a hetero sexual life if you want it, desperately enough if you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate. But you’ll always be homosexual, as well always… Michael always until the day you die.”

The documentary shows that film played an affluent influence to how gays have been perceived. If movies represented the art of being and art represented life, then the whole denial, sinful, comedic or stereo typical portrayal of homosexuality had been put in a lost place or subdued in a misconstrued form  of representation. A battle torn was there battle worn. In the early 1900s they’re portrayal had been seen as light footed sissy cliches yet under toned still and still not blatantly  identified. It was understood but was not said to be.

It was a search for some to even look for some form of identity to be shown in some way negative or positive to be seen in media some what reflection of life.

Harvey Fierstein ” The hunger I felt as a kid looking for gay images was not to be alone.” Yet the documentary does not bash you in the head with persuasion homosexual sympathy it just states the facts. The truths that some of early to present actors had experienced.

The documentary was given a limited release in select theaters including our Castro Theater here in San Francisco in April 1996, and then shown on HBO.

I feel if released in the present this film would have gotten way more of a buzz then it did in 1996. The vastness of information that can be obtained through the internet and social networking sites in the present would have made it more of a buzz.  More attainable to know that there is a documentary that is relative to homosexual lifestyle and not judge as harsh to put it down in a sense of awkwardness . I say awkwardness because of lack of exposure and exposure I mean not as mainstream as it is today. With gay marriage rights passed in some states and they’re more visual roll in cinema, media or politics.

This is a great documentary to be seen, was just to ahead of its time. Or is it because I have lived in the Bay Area all my life I am sheltered to bigotry.  In my opinion this is a great documentary in the title of Celluloid Closet.