Matt Connolly. Cinema Journal. Volume 57, Issue 2. Winter 2018.
As scholars of American queer history have noted, the gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1970s had a particular investment in combating the perceived misrepresentation of LGBT experience in popular media. Marc Stein, for instance, writes that “activists held [the mass media and popular culture] responsible for promoting negative stereotypes about homosexuality and erasing, marginalizing, and pathologizing the voices, values, and viewpoints of gays and lesbians.” These misconceptions regarding the lives and identities of LGBT people had been present in popular culture for decades. Gay men and lesbians had previously organized to make their displeasure with such representations known. The flowering of the gay and lesbian liberation movement in the wake of the Stonewall riots that began on June 28, 1969, in New York City, however, led to an increasingly targeted and vocal effort on the part of activists to combat these images and ideas—either through the creation of alternative media representations or by publically protesting their prevalence within film, television, theater, and other forms of popular culture.
The growth of LGBT-specific production in film and video throughout the 1970s would be a crucial development in the history of both queer media representation and activism. Less documented and discussed have been the attempts by gay and lesbian liberation groups to change the images of LGBT people in mainstream cinema. Scholars have tended to mention the criticism of select films in the larger context of liberation groups’ protests against mass media and popular culture, without specifying what liberation groups hoped to see specifically changed in filmic representation or how they went about achieving these goals. Besides offering trenchant critiques of many films from the 1970s featuring LGBT characters and plotlines, Vito Russo notes some of the actions and demands of liberation activists in response to the film and television industries generally, as well as to specific titles such as The Laughing Policeman (Stuart Rosenberg, 1973) and Busting (Peter Hyams, 1974), both of which I discuss in detail later. A sustained account of these activities and their development across the decade, however, is not found in his book, which is chiefly concerned with analysis of filmic representation itself. Charles Lyons also provides a brief overview of 1970s-era LGBT activism but primarily uses it to contextualize his more detailed look at protests surrounding later films such as Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980) and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Offering a fuller account of the goals and processes of earlier LGBT activists will not only help better conceptualize their work in its historical moment but also enrich our understanding of its development through the latter third of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.
It should be noted that scholars of LGBT images in American television have more consistently noted the ways in which activists in the early to mid-1970s used a variety of tactics to disrupt live broadcasts, organize boycotts, and negotiate with networks over on-air visibility and more nuanced on-screen portrayals. Steven Capsuto, in particular, considers in some detail the shifts in activist strategies that occurred during this time period. Certainly, protest activity against representations on television overlapped with those objecting to cinematic portrayals. As I discuss later, however, the practicalities of the production, distribution, and exhibition of feature films required somewhat differing strategies for activists aiming to protest LGBT representations within them. In focusing primarily on film, my goal is not to sideline television’s role as a target of liberationist protest but to highlight in greater detail how Hollywood cinema offered activists specific kinds of challenges and opportunities.
This article, then, seeks to analyze how gay and lesbian liberation activists interacted with the mainstream American film industry in the years after the Stonewall riots. More specifically, I trace such activism from 1969 through 1974—from initial, somewhat diffusely organized public protests by loosely affiliated liberation groups to early attempts by the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) and others to interface more systematically with the Hollywood studios, advocating change through a combination of publicized demonstrations and private negotiations. I begin by surveying two of the key strategies employed by liberation activists in the immediate years after Stonewall: the condemnation of individual titles through public demonstrations and media outreach and the criticism of individuals within Hollywood for antigay remarks through a similar combination of press coverage and in-person protest. I then turn my attention to the limits of these early efforts and the development of the National Gay Task Force, focusing on their initial negotiations with the Hollywood studios over representational strategies. (These negotiations, it should be stressed, were carried out in concert with other gay and lesbian liberation organizations.) Finally, I analyze the protests organized around two films, The Laughing Policeman and Busting. Both the demonstrations and the industry meetings that preceded them highlight the broadening palette of activist strategies, even as they reveal some of the tensions and divisions that arose both between NGTF and more radical gay liberation groups, and among members of the larger LGBT community over what constituted an offensive representation or objectionable film production.
Public Demonstrations and Multiple Messages—Early Film-Focused Activism
Early liberation activism surrounding films can be defined by its diffuseness, in terms of both the number of recorded protests and the messages that activists hoped to convey through their actions. As Russo recalls, “Gays had gone to movie houses across the country to picket such films as The Boys in the Band [William Friedkin, 1970], Some of My Best Friends Are… [Mervyn Nelson, 1971] and The Gay Deceivers [Bruce Kessler, 1969]” when they came out between 1969 and 1971. Responses to both Kesslerʼs and Nelson’s films offer intriguing examples of how liberation activists went about expressing their concerns about given filmic representations, as well as how those concerns were framed. An article from the July 23, 1969, issue of Variety reported on the picketing of a screening of The Gay Deceivers at San Francisco’s St. Francis Theatre by the Committee for the Freedom of Homosexuals, a locally based LGBT organization. Protesters couched their disdain for the film—a comedy following two heterosexual male friends who pretend to be gay lovers to avoid the army draft—in terms of how it equated homosexual men with effeminacy, cowardice, and the elevation of self-interest over patriotic duty to one’s country. These ideas were underscored in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle by an unnamed protester, who wrote that “the film is not only an insult to the proud and ‘manly’ gay persons of this community but to millions of homosexuals who conceal their identity to fight bravely and die proudly for their country which rejects them.” The unnamed protester, then, locates two overlapping targets of homophobic rhetoric within The Gay Deceivers: the conventionally masculine gay men of the San Francisco area, whose “proud and manly” demeanor does not align with the effeminacy on display in the characters’ draft-dodging charade, and the closeted LGBT men and women of the military who mask a sexual preference that would disqualify them from service if discovered. In this way, the protesters sought to undercut the film’s presumed separation of homosexuality from masculinity and patriotic duty by underscoring the “traditionally” patriotic and masculine gay men the film ignores.
A separate but related tactic is found in the reaction of members of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA)—a major liberation group formed in December 1969—to Some of My Best Friends Are…, a comedic drama about a group of patrons spending their Christmas Eve in a New York City gay bar. Variety noted that the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures had perhaps unsurprisingly given the film a “Condemned” rating and a negative review in their newsletter. The reviewer’s complaints, however, apparently rested less on the preponderance of queer characters than on the general debasement that the film’s director instilled in all his creations: “The objection [the National Catholic Office] had to Best Friends was that director Mervyn Nelson ‘insults, caricatures, and demeans his characters and their homosexuality’ and ‘insults everyone, homosexual or straight.'” Furthermore, the liberation activists viewing the film apparently had the same reaction, with the author noting that the aforementioned criticism “was exactly the view of the film which is understood to have been taken by members of the GAA, who were asked for their reaction at a preview.” The vagaries of journalistic interpretation that occur in that sentence limit the extent to which one can truly determine how aligned the views of GAA were with the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures—an unlikely pairing if ever there was one. The notion, however, that GAA would sympathize with both the criticism that the film disparages its characters’ homosexuality and the complaint that the film’s apparent artlessness ultimately belittles all of its protagonists, regardless of sexual orientation, allowed activists to link the more nuanced depiction of LGBT experience to a higher standard of cinematic characterization generally.
While these tactics might sound somewhat assimilationist, it is important to note that at least some of the demonstrations surrounding these films employed more radical (and attention-grabbing) forms of protest. Contrast, for instance, the aforementioned letter by the Gay Deceivers protester with the descriptions of the demonstration itself: “The pickets, including one sixfooter in drag mini-skirt, carried signs reading ‘Gay is Good’ and chanted, ‘We want freedom now.’ When they recognized other homosexuals entering the theatre, they sang out ‘Don’t be a plastic pansy.’ ” The flaunting of gender fluidity, the unapologetic proclamation of homosexuality’s inherent worth, the explicitly liberatory messages proclaimed by the group—all these visual and verbal signs speak to a queerly nonconformist attitude that seems to complicate the protest’s perceived aims of highlighting the sort of tradition-bound notions of masculinity and patriotism that The Gay Deceivers apparently assumed to be antithetical to male homosexuality.
Furthermore, the verbal accosting of gay patrons by activists not only underscored tensions regarding the proper response to the film’s representations but also raised the question of how much The Gay Deceivers truly offended the LGBT community at large. A film critic for The Advocate, for instance, acknowledged the movie’s indulgence of stereotypes while admitting that “a thousand bad ingredients and just a very few good ones add up to a picture so enjoyable that I have to shelve my self-respect in order to recommend that everyone go see it.” Such disparities over both what constituted an acceptable LGBT representation and what the responsibility of an individual queer person was once activists targeted a given film would become even more salient as the decade progressed.
The second target of liberation activists was generally any individual in the film industry who made publically homophobic comments. Perhaps the most prominent example in these years came after actor Ben Johnson—nominated for a 1972 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)—was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying that he’d “rather see a picture with violence than all this queer sex we’ve been seeing these days…. I’m tired of the sick people. I’m for shipping the gay people off to their own island and letting them stay there.” These comments first inspired noted female impersonator Charles Pierce to protest them in The Advocate, noting, “With all the gay people in the academy, any who would vote for that man would have to be insane,” adding that Johnson was “ridiculous, suggesting shipping Gays off to an island.” Pierce’s commentary proves interesting not only for its public condemnation of Johnson as “ridiculous” but also for its two assumptions: that there are a multitude of gay people in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (who hand out the Academy Awards) and that publically stated comments on homosexuality should affect how these members cast their vote. In this way, Pierce’s critique goes beyond Johnson’s comments to envision a swath of LGBT people within the Hollywood power structure who could utilize their position to deny a homophobe a potential honor if they chose to.
This use of Johnson’s statements as a jumping-off point for a wider indictment of Hollywood’s representational failures and closeted power brokers extended to a protest of the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony itself. Roughly forty members of the Gay Community Alliance and Lavender People, as well as other liberation activists such as Jim Kepner and Morris Kight, protested across the street from the awards, held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. Though protesters named Johnson (who would win the Academy Award that evening) as a target, they also handed out leaflets with a list of Hollywood films that they claimed were “presenting Gays as ‘decadent, unhealthy, deranged or undesirable.'” The Advocate noted that the films on the leaflet included The Boys in the Band, Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne, 1970), Fortune and Men’s Eyes (Harvey Hart, 1971), and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969), with The Gay Deceivers not included in the literature but mentioned among the protesters. The assumption that many more LGBT people existed in Hollywood than was generally assumed was also underscored by Gay Community Alliance member Michael Manning, who told The Advocate, “We know a lot of the celebrities getting out of their cars are closet cases, and our freaky line shook ’em up. They’ll go home and screw each other, but they’ll think about it.” Within the protest of Johnson’s comments, then, we find a larger critique of Hollywood hypocrisy.
Of course, Manning’s description of their feisty, if numerically light, “freaky line” offers a telling visual symbol of where liberation activists stood in relation to the industry throughout the early 1970s. Separated from their targets by police and able to shout their protests only from across the street, they made their displeasure known by gathering outside Hollywood halls of power and hoping that their messages would be felt through media coverage. The year 1973 would prove critical, then, as the emergence of a new LGBT group began to broaden the range of options that activists had in dealing with cinematic representations and those who crafted them.
The Limits of Early Activism and the Emergence of the National Gay Task Force
Before discussing the emergence of the National Gay Task Force, it is helpful to contrast protests around portrayals of LGBT experience in cinema with activism surrounding the other major visual storytelling platform of the era: television. Doing so offers an opportunity not only to consider how structural differences between the two mediums shaped the types of strategies that activists utilized when protesting them in the early 1970s but also to emphasize the need for evolving tactics specifically aimed at film as the decade progressed. Marc Stein offers a helpful overview of some of the most notable actions surrounding TV representation from 1970 to 1973:
Live television presented promising opportunities for activist interventions. In 1970, the GAA-NY made plans to disrupt the Dick Cavett Show [ABC, 1968-1974] after his guests repeatedly made antigay jokes. After learning about the plans, Cavett agreed to interview several gay activists on his show. Similar developments led to the appearance of GAA members on the Jack Paar Show [ABC, 1973]. The most successful practitioner of this form of media activism was Mark Segal and the Philadelphia-based Gay Raiders. They began by zapping local television stations in 1972, but in 1973 reached wider audiences by disrupting Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News [CBS, 1948-Present], Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show [NBC, 1954-Present], Mike Douglas and the Mike Douglas Show [Syndicated, 1961-1981], and Frank Blair and the Today Show [NBC, 1952-Present]. In several instances, Segal and his allies chained or handcuffed themselves to television cameras or other fixed objects, making it difficult for security officers to remove them quickly. Also in 1973, GAA-NY learned (thanks to an ABC insider) about an upcoming episode of Marcus Welby, M.D. [ABC, 1969-1976] in which Dr. Welby told a divorced father that his homosexual feelings were signs of a serious illness. After ABC refused to revise the script, GAA picketed and held a sit-in at ABC headquarters; six protesters were arrested.
As this overview suggests, the nature of television production, distribution, and exhibition provided different opportunities for activists than film, in terms of both the immediacy of the protesters’ impact and the ability to intervene in problematic characterizations and story lines. Live news broadcasts and talk shows offered a platform for activists to get their message before millions of viewers and to do so with a disruptive force that would potentially stick in viewers’ minds more than, for example, passing by a protest outside a movie theater or reading about said demonstration in a local newspaper. Additionally, a television series’ weekly shooting cycle made it easier for a liberation group to potentially intervene in the production of an offensive episode (as seen in GAA-NY’s response to the Marcus Welby, M.D. script), or at least to affect future content on a given TV show. The lengthy process of making a feature film, in contrast, often did not allow activists to express their disapproval of a project until after it was already being shot, if not about to open in theaters. If film-focused protests were going to remain a viable strategy, then, liberation activists would need to consider how to make their criticisms known at various stages of the production process, as well as give them an urgency that would attract ever-greater media attention and public support.
Whatever the potential advantages of activism aimed at television as opposed to film, however, it had become clear by October 1973 that neither the film nor the television industry was consistently producing work that met the representational standards of various liberation groups. TV networks had been seemingly more receptive to the criticisms of activists beginning in late 1972 and early 1973. The Los Angeles Times noted in December 1973, for instance, that “gay activists in both Los Angeles and New York have been quietly meeting with television network executives on an occasional basis over the past year—to object to the most flagrant put-downs of gays, to suggest alternative portrayals, and to secure the right to broadcast public service announcements over local stations.” Such moderate levels of access did not prevent misrepresentations from being presented on-screen. For instance, members of GAA were invited to a preview screening of That Certain Summer (Lamont Johnson, 1972), an ABC movie of the week about a fourteen-year-old boy who discovers that his father is gay. After this preview screening, however, the film’s original ending—in which the distraught son promised to continue talking with his father about his homosexuality—was changed to a new conclusion, in which the son essentially rejects his father’s relationship with another man. GAA noted their displeasure with both this change and “the fact that the father and his lover at the end of the film fail to act as lovers naturally would in a tragically dramatic moment” in a public letter to ABC-TV president Walter Schwartz. The fact that the networks could simultaneously seem to include liberation activists in their programming decisions while essentially ignoring their basic demands spoke to a need for a more coordinated effort on the part of activists to convey forcefully their expectations to television networks and, by extension, film studios.
Initial efforts were made in June 1973, when the Gay Activists Alliance “formally requested a meeting with the board of the Assn. [Association] of Motion Picture and Television Producers [AMPTP] to discuss the treatment of homosexual figures and homosexuality in US-made theatrical features and television films.” Of particular note is the moderate tone that GAA struck in its request for a discussion of LGBT representation: “We do not believe in censorship, not even by ourselves. But we do know that your members exercise self-restraint in many areas for fear of offending substantial segments of the potential audience. This restraint has often been engendered by organized pressure—and we intend to apply such pressure.” Aligning the LGBT population with other, previously maligned groups whose systematic protest efforts resulted in greater sensitivity by mainstream producers of popular media can be seen as a shift from earlier protest tactics, framing the activists’ demands in the language of common respect and responsible artistic expression. Such ideas would become central to the official list of principles that GAA and other liberation groups would eventually submit to AMPTP and other film and television studios. Despite assurances that AMPTP executive vice president Billy Hunt would meet with GAA, however, no action took place for several months.
One should not solely credit the formation of the National Gay Task Force in October 1973 with the subsequent meetings between Hollywood studios, NGTF, and other liberation groups later that year. In particular, the Gay Media Task Force (GMTF)—a committee within the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center founded in 1973 by activist Morris Kight, filmmaker Pat Rocco, and others—would prove a key ally in planning talks and organizing protests on the West Coast. Given the ambitious intentions and high-powered staff of NGTF in its early months, however, the timing must at least be taken as a sign that NGTF provided impetus to jump-start the proceedings. NGTF was not created to focus exclusively on the monitoring of media representation. The organization grew out of the GAA in New York. Hoping to avoid what historian Toby Marotta referred to as “the paralyzing interference of members with radical and revolutionary convictions,” GAA president Bruce Voeller and his associates put forth a plan in the fall of 1973 to “reorganize GAA so that it was run by a board of directors, a salaried staff, and a membership that met monthly to consider general policy.” This contrasted with the looser model of democratic organization that had developed within the organization since its founding in 1969. GAA members rejected this plan, and Voeller left to form NGTF a few days later. The organization had the imprimatur of professional respectability from the beginning, with Dr. Howard J. Brown—a former member of the administration of New York mayor John Lindsay who publically came out in October 1973—chosen as the president of NGTF’s board of directors. National in scope and comprising individuals with “successful careers in academia, journalism, publishing, and the social services,” the group “believed that by pressing for recognition of the ways in which homosexuals resembled heterosexuals, as well as those in which they are different, they could win the support of other gay professionals.” According to NGTF leaders, accomplishing this would require a more targeted and organized set of political goals than those found among the more radical and far-reaching aims of GAA or the earlier Gay Liberation Front.
Reaction within The Advocate to the group’s formation underscores both the excitement surrounding NGTF’s potential and the fear that its founders were privileging a particular brand of gay politics. The editorial board commended NGTF’s creation, framing their endorsement by praising professional capability and sober managerial skill over the passion—and, by implication, disorganization—of the earlier liberation groups. “We do not know exactly what type of organization the new gay group will be,” the board wrote, “but we hope that it, too, will be run by competent men and women who have records of accomplishment, who know how to get things done, and who don’t believe in wasting time on petty, stupid bitch fights.” These high expectations were complicated the following month in a column by writer and activist Arthur Evans. On the one hand, Evans applauded the group’s intentions “to coordinate the activities of all the different gay activists scattered across the country.” On the other hand, he strongly questioned the seeming contradictions within NGTF’s mission, which simultaneously claimed to be a national organization encompassing the activities and goals of all liberation organizations and a more narrowly focused interest group aimed at LGBT professionals. The potential for the ascendency of a fairly privileged sector of the LGBT community at the expense of all others caused Evans deep consternation.
Both NGTF’s organizational prowess and distaste for the more “rough and tumble” aspects of earlier liberation activism were on display in November 1973, when it partnered with other liberation groups in Los Angeles to begin planning for a series of meetings with high-level members of the film and television industry later that month. Two media events particularly seemed to incite activists to push for the industry meetings. The first was an October 19 episode of the television sitcom Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972-1977), which, in the words of The Advocate, “paraded various homosexual stereotypes during an episode about a gay bar [and] was apparently the last straw for Gay [sic] fed up with being portrayed as anguished and effeminate, needing only Understanding to ‘get it up’ for the opposite sex and middle-class morality.” The second was the forthcoming release of Busting, a drama about a pair of police officers (Elliot Gould and Robert Blake) who, as New York Times film critic Vincent Canby put it in his review of the film, “spend most of their time arresting people who are more of an emotional than a physical threat to society: call girls, massage-parlor employes [sic], and the clientele of homosexual bars.” The film would not be released until February 1974, but advanced screenings had already begun generating controversy regarding its depiction of LGBT characters. Arthur Bell, an openly gay film critic for the Village Voice, sent an open letter to the film’s distributor, United Artists, in October 1973, criticizing the film as “the most perverse, sleazy, mindless film yet to come from Hollywood,” copying both GAA and another liberation group (Gay Action Inc.) on the letter. Taken together, these two representational offenses underscored the continuing need for activists to make their criticisms clear to the film studios and television networks.
NGTF media director Ronald Gold spearheaded the effort to schedule meetings between liberation groups and the major film and television organizations and networks. A series of meetings between various LGBT activist groups and ABC, CBS, and NBC were scheduled for November 12, 1973, followed by a gathering with AMPTP the following day. Considering the lingering request by GAA to meet with AMPTP from the previous June, the ability of NGTF to schedule such gatherings quickly perhaps spoke to both the organization’s focused managerial style and the air of professional respectability it had attempted to cultivate with its prestigious hires. Additionally, a November 5 meeting between liberation groups and Norman Lear, producer of Sanford and Son, boded well for the other scheduled gatherings, as Lear admitted that the episode in question was in “bad taste” and that he would encourage writers and producers to meet with gay leaders to discuss representational issues—though he drew the line at “formal policies governing the writers.” Going into the planning stages for the meetings with AMPTP and the three networks, then, NGTF and other groups appeared to be holding a position of negotiating strength.
Planning for said meetings between NGTF and LA-based liberation groups, particularly GAA and GMTF, revealed some broad divisions and mutual suspicions between the two camps. Gold accused Kight of packing the room with members of his own organization, many of whom shared Kight’s suspicion of Gold’s less participatory style of activism. Such misgivings proved quite justified when Gold voiced his distaste for more radically democratic organizational strategies, admitting, “Yes, indeed, I am an elitist, and the task force is elitist, if that’s what you want to call professionals who have another style from your own.” An article summarizing the meeting in the radical LGBT newspaper Gay Sunshine revealed a similar level of antipathy on the other side. Deeming NGTF “a recently founded 1950-ish civil rights group,” the article’s unnamed author described Gold’s efforts “to foist the bourgeois reformist views of his New York group on the entire gathering,” a move that was “totally unacceptable to the liberationist voices” in the room.” These more amorphous differences became particularly salient when deciding on the makeup of the “permanent West Coast advisory board” available for consultation and assistance to the studios. Gold nominated three West Coast psychiatrists for the advisory board who, while possessing a history of allegiance to the gay and lesbian liberation movement, were not themselves LGBT identified. A compromise was eventually reached, and more nominees for the committee were invited to attend the forthcoming industry meetings, but the tensions surrounding the advisory board’s members exemplified the differing views on media-focused liberation activism at play between NGTF and the various West Coast LGBT groups.
Despite these divisions (and perhaps reflecting compromises between the two sides), the groups collectively produced an eight-point position paper intended for studio executives and other industry officials. Entitled “Some General Principles for Motion Picture and Television Treatment of Homosexuality,” it outlined the guiding beliefs held by all of the groups regarding appropriate representational strategies for mainstream media producers. Three overriding ideals stand out in this document: the explicit condemnation of treating LGBT individuals or experience as targets of derision or pity, the alignment of the LGBT community with other minority groups who had previously sought more sensitive treatment from film and television producers (e.g. African Americans, Jews, Hispanic and Latino Americans), and the insistence on a broadening of recognizable LGBT “types” on screen. Such demands echo those of some of the earlier liberation activists, particularly with regard to an expansive definition of LGBT identity that encompasses various registers of gender expression and lived experience. It also elided some of the earlier, broader critiques of the film and television industry—most notably, the assumption that LGBT representation would benefit from greater openness on the part of closeted individuals whose existence within prominent media companies and studios was assumed by, for instance, the activists protesting the 1972 Academy Awards. By underscoring the plurality of LGBT experience and aligning themselves with earlier instances of minority protest, the coalition of liberation groups approached the film and television studios with a moderate call for self-reflection and representational expansion without advocating more radical changes to the system.
While activists across the ideological spectrum advocated for a broader range of on-screen representation, it is worth underscoring that almost all the films and television series that liberation groups targeted for protest at this time centered on the representation of gay men. Many of the leaders of said protests were also gay men, as were most of the noted individuals organizing the industry meetings. Lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, and others affiliated with a broadly defined LGBT community of the era often did not have their voices and concerns centered within various protest actions. Even when more inclusive efforts were made, they frequently either addressed very targeted issues or lumped together the overlapping yet distinct struggles of various LGBT people. For example, while the “General Principles” discussed earlier did include “dyke” and “lezzie” among the terms that film and TV producers should avoid, little effort was made to distinguish the particular representational challenges encountered by lesbians, who faced double erasure within an industry that historically favored male protagonists. Such limitations resulted in some of the splintering within the LGBT activist community over the course of the 1970s. Lesbian activists, in particular, noted their minimization within liberation politics, leading members of the Lesbian Liberation Committee in the New York branch of the Gay Activists Alliance to break off and form the independent Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL) in 1973. Advocating for a broad range of protest activities, LFL contested images of lesbians in film and media, as when a dozen members gathered at Lincoln Center in October 1973 to condemn the “sado-masochistic vision” and “sex role stereotyping” seen in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972), which screened at that year’s New York Film Festival. Activists handed out flyers and made their presence known inside the theater during one of the film’s screenings. It says much about the differences in privilege and access between the two groups that LFL activists relied on confrontational, street-level tactics to get their criticisms heard at roughly the same historical moment when several of their gay male counterparts were preparing to meet with heads of studios, networks, and major entertainment industry organizations.
Described by Variety as “the first concerted effort to meet on a non-confrontation and non-zap basis with filmmakers and production executives,” the November 1973 meetings with AMPTP, NBC, CBS, and ABC—as well as conferences with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and the Writers Guild of America West—were characterized by industry leaders largely willing to discuss ways to discourage or reframe representations that were deemed offensive by LGBT activists. Concrete results from the meetings included plans for follow-up conferences with the Screen Actors Guild and the Producers Guild of America, as well as “the establishment on a formalized basis, here [Los Angeles] and in NY, of gay resource groups, which will make themselves available in the two key production centres for consultation and advice on film and telefilm projects involving homosexual plotlines or characterizations.” These meetings were followed by similar gatherings in New York City later that month with ABC, CBS, and NBC, in which the networks agreed to consult with liberation groups about representational content before the purchase of films for broadcast, as well as the publication of an open letter to DGA president Robert Wise containing guidelines for directors working with LGBT-centered material.
Such direct negotiations with heads of talent guilds, television networks, and film studio executives reflected decided shifts in the tactics of liberation activists from the previous four years, where protests of either specific films or individual comments by public figures within the entertainment industry were the primary strategies. It underscored a movement toward more formalized interaction with the organizations and companies that produced film and television, as a means of institutionalizing the expectations of LGBT activists within the production process. As the sometimes fractious negotiations between NGTF and other liberation groups attest, however, this shift did not result in a standardizing of protest tactics, nor did it preclude disagreements and divisions among activists. The political and social ecosystem of LGBT media advocacy remained a heterogeneous space as many of the groups mentioned earlier turned their attention to two films that affronted the very representational standards they had fought to enshrine within the entertainment industry.
The Laughing Policeman and Busting —Testing New Forms of Film-Focused Activism
In the wake of the November 1973 industry meetings, activists in both NGTF and other liberation groups turned their attention primarily toward two films to be released in December 1973 and February 1974, respectively: The Laughing Policeman, a drama about two San Francisco cops (Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern) attempting to hunt down a man who murdered a busload of civilians, and the aforementioned Busting. Both films contained scenes and representations deemed offensive by activist groups. The Laughing Policeman’s mass murderer is represented as a gay man—one who carries around his submachine gun in a shoulder bag—and Dern’s surly cop frequently peppers his language with such homophobic pejoratives as “fag,” “dyke,” and “fruiter.” As mentioned earlier, Busting focuses on two cops whose rounds include entrapping gay men in public restrooms and includes two scenes that particularly offended activists: a visit to a gay bar by the police duo in which one of the officers is both hit on and accosted by a black gay man and a subsequent scene in a courtroom where a judge condemns two disheveled drag queens. The films’ overlap in terms of content also provided a seemingly convenient way for activists to pair them—and their representational deficiencies—together, as they reflected dominant trends in both the resurgence of police-centered dramas in Hollywood and the preponderance of male buddy movies that had proved popular since the late 1960s. In this way, the films provided a notable opportunity to press the standards of representation surrounding LGBT identity and experience that the November 1973 meetings addressed.
Protest actions surrounding the films reflected a continuation of previously utilized methods (e.g. picketing theaters) and reliance on newer strategies, including an intensified use of mass media; stronger attempts to partner with other, potentially aggrieved groups; and public questioning of individuals involved in the films’ productions. This range of tactics underscored the mixed presence of older liberation groups and NGTF in the coordination and execution of activities surrounding both films.
Two major demonstrations surrounded the release of The Laughing Policeman in San Francisco. The first was a picket line outside a December 12 preview screening at the Palace of Fine Arts, a showing that doubled as a benefit for the Police Athletic League, while the second targeted the film on its opening day, December 21, at Cinema 21. The Reverend Ray Broshears of the Gay Activists Alliance organized the December 12 demonstration, with twenty protesters marching and distributing literature outlining their objections to the movie’s representation of LGBT people. He also partnered with other activists to form Gays against Media Bigotry, which picketed the film on its opening day. Two other local activists also prepared a pamphlet outlining the group’s objections to The Laughing Policeman: Alan Akerson, the publicity director of the Golden Gate Gay Liberation House; and Mark Mastropero, a member of the Liberation House who gained local media notoriety when, during a preview screening of The Laughing Policeman, he “became so incensed that he stood up and shouted his objections during the film’s climactic moment, when the villain is gunned down.” Notably, their pamphlet also included the eight-point position paper that NGTF had coauthored and presented to industry organizations and networks in their meetings the previous month. Such overlap of protest efforts by NGTF and local liberation groups reflected the expanded activist landscape in the wake of the November industry meetings, even if the seeming lack of tight coordination between them perhaps spoke to the continuing ambivalences that both parties felt toward the other’s brand of activism.
These actions were augmented by outreach to organizations beyond the gay liberation circle, as an attempt to amplify their protests through solidarity with other, potentially offended groups. Mastropero and Akerson offered to partner with the San Francisco Tavern Guild—an LGBT organization but one not within the immediate sphere of activist groups—in their protests of the film, as well as with the African American, Italian American, and Asian American communities of San Francisco, all of whom, in Akerson’s opinion, were represented poorly in the film. These attempts to link the negative cinematic portrayal of gay men to other minority groups represented in The Laughing Policeman can be seen in the flyer announcing the December 12 protest, encouraging participants to “protest Hollywood’s ripoff of Gays, Third World people, and all minorities.” Some LGBT publications also cited the film’s plethora of representational offenses, as when Lee Atwell of Gay Sunshine noted that the “bigoted and morally corrupt film exploits not only San Francisco but also the most sensational aspects of that city’s prominent minorities—Blacks, Chicanos, Chinese, and most significantly, its gay population.” While it’s difficult to determine whether these efforts produced tangible results, coalition building around a shared sense of offense put into practice the appeals for respectful representation across all minority groups advocated for within the “General Principles.”
Efforts to interface with the San Francisco Police Department proved more contradictory in their aims. Some liberation activists and gay critics noted that the city’s police officers should consider themselves among those represented poorly within The Laughing Policeman, as when Bill Beardemphl of the Bay Area Reporter noted that “the police are made so stupid and inept [in the film] as to make you [sic] expensive Police Department look as if it were a federally financed work project for half-wits and sadists.” At the same time, the cooperation of the city’s police department in the production of a film that activists felt misrepresented significant swaths of San Francisco’s population proved a major point of contention. Gays against Media Bigotry noted in a press release, “Your tax dollars were used to assist the production of this movie,” which employed “both city and police personnel and equipment” and was being marketed in part on the basis of the authenticity that came with direct cooperation from the department. A separate release by the Media Coalition of the Gay Activists Alliance of San Francisco called on the Mayor’s Office, the Board of Supervisors, and the city’s courts to refuse the use of “taxpayer-supported equipment and facilities” to any media producers who did not first submit a copy of their project’s script to the city attorney “for review to see if it violates the human rights of any San Franciscan.” These demands were not taken up publically by the city. The San Francisco Police Department did offer a measured response to the activists, however, with police chief Don Scott granting that he found The Laughing Policeman “offensive with regard to the language used and the violence depicted.” Scott also met with representatives of several local liberation groups before the benefit screening of the film, although he refused to meet with Broshears, whom he deemed (without explanation) “a fascist.” While the request for a voice in decisions regarding city-sanctioned film and media projects was not ultimately granted, activists did succeed in creating some dialogue with a group not traditionally known for acknowledging the protests of gay liberationists.
In public protests against Busting, meanwhile, one sees an increased effort on the part of activists to engage directly with both the creators and the distributors of the film as a means to voice their critiques of its LGBT representation. Members of NGTF held an entire meeting in November 1973 with executives at United Artists, the distributor of Busting, to discuss why they found the film “offensive and insulting.” An advance screening of the film in Hollywood found writer-director Peter Hyams directly challenged about the film’s representational politics by filmmaker and GMTF member Pat Rocco. Perhaps most notably, Arthur Bell—whose public criticisms of the film had helped inspire the industry meetings in November 1973—published a lengthy critique of it in the March 3, 1974, edition of the New York Times. In this, he outlined in detail the offending scene of the gay-bar patron hitting on and attacking one of the police officers, deeming it “exploitative, unreal, unfunny, and ugly” and described “the derogatory language used to describe the gay populace [in the film as] enough to send a liberationist running to the corner drugstore for airspray.” Perhaps as striking as the appearance of a liberationist critique of a Hollywood film in a premier American newspaper was the response that Bell’s takedown elicited from Hyams himself, who defended his film two weeks later in the New York Times as shining a light on socialized homophobia and showing “all of the things that [Bell] and other homosexuals have been trying to bring to the public’s attention.” That such a debate was occurring within the pages of the New York Times speaks to the increased awareness of liberationist criticisms of mainstream filmic representation in the months since the industry meetings in November 1973—an awareness created by both incursions into studio boardrooms and LGBT activists and critics publically challenging the representations seen within Hyams’s film.
For all the increased visibility and broadening of activist tactics seen in response to The Laughing Policeman and Busting, however, it is worth briefly considering some of the tensions and divisions that these amplified actions stirred up within the LGBT community. Public differences of opinion occurred on two fronts. First, gay critics expressed a range of opinions regarding just how offensive the films in question truly were. Second, activists, filmmakers, and community members had pronounced and at times very pointed disagreements over the controversial participation of LGBT individuals and businesses in the production of each movie.
As seen in the reaction to The Gay Deceivers, it is certainly not unusual for film critics—even those operating with broadly shared views on LGBT representation—to disagree about the merits of a controversial film. Given the heightened scrutiny surrounding both The Laughing Policeman and Busting, however, it is interesting to note divergences of opinion surrounding each film’s quality and/or representational value in relation to the other. On the one hand, we have seen Harold Fairbanks’s largely unequivocal pans of both films. Fairbanks criticized The Laughing Policeman for its “insidious [use of] offensive terms in dialog that is supposed to project understanding for Gays.” He dismissed Busting as simply “a dud” and “worthless slop.” Both Beardemphl and Montezuma of the Bay Area Reporter also expressed their distaste for The Laughing Policeman while simultaneously raising an eyebrow at the furor that the film’s representational strategies had caused within the San Francisco LGBT community. Montezuma, in particular, noted that “the only thing these protesters are accomplishing is getting curious publicity for people to plunk down their money to see just what all the shouting is about,” even bringing up (if ultimately dismissing) the rumor that 20th Century Fox was paying the activists to picket the film in order to attract media attention. Arthur Bell, meanwhile, took a different tack. In his aforementioned critique of Busting, Bell defends The Laughing Policeman as “far more successful” than Busting in its “attempt at documentary-type Hollywood filmmaking.” Furthermore, he mounted a provocative defense of The Laughing Policeman’s guntoting queer murderer over more ostensibly sensitive portraits of LGBT characters: “Because I prefer to see gay people as active and accurate parts of a script which deals with matters outside of homosexuality, rather than listen to two-bit psychologists in a drawing-room drama talk endlessly about our sad but noble lives. Therefore, I don’t mind The Laughing Policeman’s killer a bit.” Bell’s comparison was seen again in his capsule reviews of both films for Out, in which he condemned Busting as “glorifying the American homophobe” while assuring would-be viewers that “there’s less to [The Laughing Policeman] than the picket lines would have you believe,” adding impishly that “it’s nice to have a gay murderer, yes, stirring up a little chaos.” Such differing takes—earnest condemnation, shoulder-shrugging pragmatism, winking appreciation—do not disrupt liberationist activism so much as underscore the extent to which the relative offensiveness of a character or film can be seen through different lenses, even within a community of activists and writers whose political goals generally align.
A pricklier issue came to light over LGBT individuals and businesses that participated in the production of both The Laughing Policeman and Busting. Three San Francisco gay bars—the Frolic, the Barber Shop, and the Ramrod—were featured in The Laughing Policeman, along with the Ritch Street Baths. The San Francisco Tavern Guild supported the production by “rounding up both the locations and the extras, who were paid about fifty dollars apiece for agreeing to be filmed.” Busting, meanwhile, filmed its controversial bar sequence in an actual Los Angeles gay bar, the House of Ivy, and local LGBT people again accepted fifty dollars each for participating in the scene. The subsequent public discussion surrounding this participation offered a complicated look at the intersecting notions of visibility, solidarity, and authenticity at stake with any LGBT individual representing him- or herself on-screen. Some took a laissez-faire attitude toward the businesses and individuals who appeared in The Laughing Policeman, as when Beardemphl wryly noted that “a job is a job, as a famous drag entertainer is always pointing out.” Those against the LGBT population’s participation in the film lamented that their involvement undercut activists’ attempts to challenge the stereotypes they saw as endemic within the films. “If gay people themselves are going to cooperate in making films like Busting,” Gold told The Advocate, “then what can any of us do?” Similarly, Harold Fairbanks insisted in his review of The Laughing Policeman that gay establishments demand to read the script before agreeing to participate in any film production. “Otherwise, if the location rental fee is more attractive than the protection of their customers from slams in movies,” Fairbanks wrote, “they can become fulltime movie sets and their patrons can seek friendlier atmosphere elsewhere.”
Activists were even more scathing in their criticism of bars and bar patrons who appeared in The Laughing Policeman, viewing their involvement as willingly participating in larger systems of bigotry and political oppression. GAA of San Francisco and other liberation groups called for a picket and boycott of the Ramrod and the Ritch Street Baths, claiming in a flyer that the owners of both establishments were “guilty of a moral crime, that a [sic] participating either knowingly or unknowingly, in the production of a racist and sexist film that feeds the hunger of racists and anti-Gays all across Amerika.” A December 7, 1973, press release from GAA of San Francisco widened the scope of the protests to include any LGBT people who attended the film at all. The release pulled no punches in expressing both GAA members’ low opinion of these theoretical filmgoers and the activists’ plans for making their displeasure known:
And GAAers realizing from past pickets that there is a high degree of fascist piggery in the Gay world, know many many thousands of Gays will cross the picket lines to attend the film, and for those of note who do, the GAA suggests that names be taken, and published, and as well, if the person owns a business that the business be zapped as well, or even a business where they work. The GAA central committee is on record as beleiving [sic] no action would be severe enough to bring about a successful boycott of this film.
Recalling (albeit in stronger terms) the activists outside the screenings of The Gay Deceivers who admonished known gay patrons not to be “plastic pansies” as they entered the theater, this public branding of individuals and businesses as traitors to the larger community through either their involvement with or their viewing of The Laughing Policeman reveals the extent to which some activists linked the perpetuation of harmful cinematic representations not just to filmmakers, Hollywood studios, and city officials but also to the capitulation of the LGBT population at large.
Those involved in each film’s production, meanwhile, used the participation of LGBT people and establishments as a means of defending their own representations on the grounds of authenticity. Hyams insisted that LGBT individuals who appeared in Busting “constantly gave me advice during the filming of the scene and later they all said the scene was accurate.” Bruce Dern, costar of The Laughing Policeman, adopted a similar tactic when he told The Advocate that “the homosexual extras and gay businessmen cooperated fully,” although he did admit that they were not aware at the time that the film’s killer was portrayed as homosexual.
Beyond acting as simply a cover for the filmmakers, however, the presence of LGBT people was also defended by the participants themselves. Fat Shirley, the editor of the Los Angeles bar paper Data Boy, appeared along with several other drag queens in the gay-bar scene in Busting. Shirley stood by the choice unapologetically, noting that all participants did not change their usual bar-time behavior for the camera. “All of us were faggots, and we acted like it,” Shirley said. “Don’t let anybody tell you different. Queens aren’t idiots, you know.” Shirley complemented this defense of the participants’ self-awareness and honesty in selfpresentation with a riposte against Pat Rocco, the director of gay pornographic films who complained about local LGBT participation in the film: “I’d like to ask Pat Rocco if he thinks his films make Gays respectable. I’d like to ask those other people if that sixty-foot dildo they dragged down Hollywood Boulevard in a Pride Day parade made Gays look any better.”
Far from just debating the propriety of participation in a film with potentially offensive content, Shirley’s comments underscore how disagreement over representation in mainstream film revealed deeper divisions within the mid-1970s LGBT community regarding the kinds of images that activists and others felt were proper to project out into the world. This once again links us back to the activists protesting The Gay Deceivers, with some defending the traditional masculinity and patriotism of local gay men impugned by the film while others demonstrated against the same work dressed in extravagant drag and loudly chanting liberationist messages of visibility and pride. Even as liberation activists made strides in their protests against mainstream filmic representation, these same protests, time and again, revealed marked differences in opinion over what representations should be on screen, who should control them, and whether a single, definitive, and “nonoffensive” picture of LGBT experience could ever be decided on.
Conclusion
Certainly, this article does not cover all the ways in which gay and lesbian liberation activists interfaced with cinema throughout their early years. The collective viewing of Hollywood films from various eras, for instance, could serve as a source of humor, emotional release, and community building within newly forming LGBT groups, as seen in the “Firehouse Flicks” film series put on by Vito Russo in the Wooster Street firehouse that became GAA’s New York headquarters in May 1971. Nor does the mid-1970s ascendency of NGTF imply a disappearance of earlier, more confrontational activism throughout the latter half of the decade. Lesbian activists, in particular, continued to employ direct-action protests against titles deemed offensive. A member of the lesbian-feminist group DYKETACTICS!, Barbara Ruth recalls rallying against the release of Snuff (Michael Findlay and Simon Nuchtern, 1976) in Philadelphia using such methods as encouraging public condemnation of the film via petitions, protesting outside the theater with ten-foot-tall witch puppets, and storming screenings to warn patrons of the film’s depictions of violence against women. While the monitoring of lesbian representation on television became a more consistent priority for groups like NGTF over the course of the 1970s, more research needs to be done concerning the strategies and efficacy of protests by lesbian and lesbian-feminist groups—indeed, by the full range of the era’s LGBT activist organizations—with regard to filmic representation throughout the same historical period.
Nevertheless, by historicizing the early developments in both the strategies of liberation activists in relation to the film industry and the ideologies underpinning such protests, we not only can understand the roots of LGBT media activism more fully but can also track with greater nuance its changes over time. The welldocumented protests surrounding Cruising, for instance, gain in historical resonance when placed alongside the earlier activism surrounding Busting and The Laughing Policeman. Scholars and historians have noted the intense wave of demonstrations, public condemnations, and production disruptions created by LGBT activists during the making and subsequent release of William Friedkin’s film, a murder mystery that offered a controversially sordid depiction of the gay BDSM and leather scene in New York and implied (according to its critics) insidious links among gay sex, violence, and criminality. Placed alongside earlier activist efforts, however, one can see how protesters in the late 1970s and early 1980s continued certain tactics and arguments from previous demonstrations while shifting strategies to respond to new images and social contexts. The protests surrounding Cruising’s representation of LGBT experience as inherently violent and perverse resonate with concerns over the gay killer in The Laughing Policeman, even as subsequent reevaluations of Cruising’s potential as a celebration of disruptive queerness find a precedent in Bell’s reveling in the unruly chaos caused by the earlier film’s shoulder-bag-toting murderer. Activist disruptions of the film’s shooting constituted a new turn from the tactics of the early to mid-1970s, yet the controversy surrounding the participation of New York City leather bars in the production recalls the anger over San Francisco and Los Angeles bar owners and patrons agreeing to appear in Busting and The Laughing Policeman. And certainly, one could not appreciate the irony of GAA protesting Cruising through more formal channels (and even petitioning Mayor Ed Koch), while NGTF spearheaded acts of street protest and civil disobedience, without knowledge of the groups’ previous arguments over the nature of LGBT media activism. By examining the entire history of liberationist protest and activism in relation to filmic images of LGBT experience and identity, then, we can attend with greater care to the audacity of these activists’ aims, the complexities of their responses, and the legacy of their work.