When Hollywood screenwriter Paul Rednick wanted to establish for film-going audiences that they were watching a movie set in the least homosexual place imaginable,
he chose a small town in middle America. Specifically, he decided to set his script for Frank Oz's 1997 film In and Out in the fictional village of Greenleaf, Indiana,
which is, just coincidentally, the same state where I currently reside and where I earn my living teaching queer theory and lesbian and gay studies.
My situation notwithstanding, Rednick did this because Indiana and places like it are virtually synonymous in the minds of many Americans with homophobia and provincialism.
And in a number of ways, provincialism is the joke in In and Out.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with it, In and Out follows the mayhem that ensues when Howard Brackett, played by Kevin Kline, a much-beloved English teacher and basketball coach at the local high school,
is inadvertently outed as a great gay American by one of his former students during a nationally televised awards program.
Outing, of course, is problematic for any number of reasons. As such, it served as an ethically and politically charged premise for stories that deal with contemporary lesbian and gay male experience on more than one occasion.
In the context of In and Out, however, the outing narrative is more complicated than usual because Howard Brackett isn't actually gay. At least, he doesn't identify that way at the film's outset.
Rather, Brackett self-identifies as heterosexual and is identified in that way by everyone else in his town, a point that is established quite emphatically during the film's opening credit sequence.
At the risk of spoiling the film for anyone who hasn't yet seen it, which there may actually be no one who hasn't seen it, but it turns out that Howard Brackett has a secret. He actually is gay. He just doesn't know it.
As the film proceeds, we watch him and everyone else in Greenleaf as they struggle to come to terms with this fact, first grudgingly, then cautiously, then peacefully and ultimately quite happily, which is, of course, precisely the sort of narrative resolution we would expect in a film made by Frank Oz, the man who brought us such multi-culti feel-good classics as The Muppet Show.
Along the way, however, In and Out generates its comedy by repeatedly rifting on one basic, and as I will be arguing shortly, virtually paradigmatic theme, namely the idea that homosexuals and homosexuality generally somehow belong in cities in a way that they do not belong in rural or small-town America.
What's more, the film is at pains to suggest that the very concept of gayness is so alien to American provincials that it is virtually unrecognizable to them until it is named as such by an external force.
In this case, Howard's former student turned Hollywood celebrity, Cameron Drake, played by Timothy Hutton.
For example, anyone who's seen In and Out will recall that the film ties itself in knots establishing that Bracket is gentle, fastidious, fashionable, physically fit, and culturally refined.
In short, in failing only a lisp and slightly mincing walk, the err stereotypical gay man of the late 20th century, except for me.
The physically fit part, anyway.
And yet, until he's outed, we are meant to believe that no one in Greenleaf ascribes any particular meaning to any of this, including Howard himself.
This brand of humor, the obsessive demonstration of the obviousness of Howard's gayness and relentless exposition of the naive cluelessness of everyone else in town, suffuses the film from start to finish.
It reaches its comedic crescendo, however, in a scene where Howard is confronted by Peter Malloy, played by the very strapping Tom Selleck, one of dozens of unscrupulous television news reporters who descend upon Greenleaf following Drake's announcement.
Eager to go home to Los Angeles, with the story he has come to Indiana to get, Malloy employs Howard to stop denying that he is gay and just come out already.
When Howard resists doing so, Malloy outs himself as a gay man.
Although this gesture of confidence on Malloy's part seems to soften Howard's resistance to the idea of homosexuality as such, he continues to deny that he is himself a homosexual.
Sympathetic but somewhat frustrated as well, Malloy begins to administer an impromptu quiz, intended to prove to Howard that regardless of his vociferous protestations to the contrary,
everything about him suggests that he is, in fact, a grade A certified queer.
In essence, he tricks Howard into demonstrating that he's gay, even if Howard remains unwilling to say so.
So the line, which you may, if you've seen the film, you may remember this scene. Malloy says, what was Barbara Streisand's eighth album?
Howard says, color me Barbara? Malloy says, stud. Howard, everybody knows that. Malloy, everybody where? The little gay bar on the prairie?
At least in the United States, this last quip, Malloy's evocation of an absurdly emblematic little gay bar on the prairie, almost always elicits peals of laughter.
And it elicits them from pretty much everyone who sees the film, regardless of whether they identify as straight, gay, or something entirely different.
The question of why the very idea of the little gay bar on the prairie is so inherently funny and at what intellectual and political costs are two of what Foucault might call historical political questions that animate this essay and my interest in what I will be referring to here as the provincial turn in mainstream commercial film featuring lesbian and gay characters.
What I refer to as the provincial turn in turn in Anglophone lesbian and gay themed film arguably began a few years before In-N-Out was released in 1997.
Specifically, I would argue that it began in 1994 when Australian screenwriter and director Steven Elliott hit a nerve in viewing audiences worldwide with his now classic, multiply award-winning drag queen road movie, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which you can also now see on stage.
Memorable for its campy humor and over-the-top costumes, the film heralded the emergence of a new thematic in American film, namely the queers out of place, homosexuals in the provinces thematic that would become surprisingly familiar to moviegoers over the next ten years.
Indeed, between 1994 and 2005, the year in which Ang Lee's much discussed Brokeback Mountain hit theaters worldwide, mainstream and independent filmmakers alike churned out movies featuring rural homosexual characters or urban homosexual characters who find themselves displaced into rural or small town spaces at the rate of almost one per year.
The list of these films includes, but is certainly not limited to, Two on Food, Thanks for Everything, Julie Neumar, 1995, Flirting with Disaster, 1996, In-N-Out, 1997, Happy Texas, 1999, Boys Don't Cry, 1999, Big Eden, 2000, Red Dirt, 2000, Sweet Home Alabama, 2002, Monster, 2003, and of course Brokeback Mountain, 2005.
This morning I'd like to try to begin to make some sense of this conspicuous movement toward the provincial and turn of the century queerly inflected cinematic narrative.
Specifically, I want to offer some admittedly preliminary thoughts about why I think the notion of queer rurality resonated so powerfully with film-going audiences during this period, especially lesbian and gay film-going audiences.
I also want to think about what this resonance might tell us about sexuality's future as a discourse that seems always to carry with it a set of normative assumptions regarding where certain kinds of people do or do not belong.
The first point I want to make about these films is really a rather simple one, and that is that taken as a whole and despite their significant differences, I would argue that they can and probably should be viewed as constituting something like a distinct cinematic genre.
This is important because, but for the centrally important role that the Queers Out of Place trope plays in each of them, many of the films that interest me here don't really go together in any traditional generic sense.
Some like In an Outer Comedies, others such as Brokeback Mountain are arguably melodramas, though one might even be inclined to go so far as to call them tragedies of narrative tragedies, not cinematic tragedies.
Still others, like Boys Don't Cry, have their claim to meaningfulness bolstered by the fact that they refer with varying degrees of accuracy to actual historical events.
Nevertheless, they were all produced in striking historical proximity to one another, which does suggest to me that they should be read collectively as some kind of reflection on a shift in the zeitgeist surrounding lesbian and gay identity that seems to have begun during the mid-1990s.
The second point I want to make is really an extension of my first point, and that is that regardless of how they differ from one another, each of these films is similar to the others in the sense that they all, at least from my perspective, reflect the general ambivalence regarding the relationship between space and sexuality that is characteristic of the culture that produced them.
What I mean by that is that, on the one hand, each of these films depends upon the unlikeliness of the very idea of queers in rural space as something like its cause for being.
And yet, at the same time, each of them effectively negates this unlikeliness by providing a narrative rendition of precisely the scenario that its premise forbids.
Of course, on some level, one might say that what I've just described is simply the logic of fantasy itself, which is to say the logic of any imaginative gesture made with the intention of putting a proposition in the place of a thing under circumstances where that thing's conditions of possibility have yet to come into existence.
But in this case, I actually think there's something very specific going on because it seems to me that these films are simultaneously imagining something new and mourning a loss that should be impossible if what we think we know about the fundamental asymmetries between queerness and morality is accurate.
As such, I would argue that these films allow no easy mode of identification to anyone, least of all the lesbian and gay male viewers whose visual and narrative desires many of them seem to want to fulfill.
Of course, the phenomenon I'm describing here, films that allow only partial or strategic identification, isn't particularly unique to modern lesbian and gay cinema or even modern cinema generally.
In fact, it's arguably as old-fashioned as film itself.
For example, in Babylon Babylon, her 1991 study of film spectatorship in the United States during the silent era, film historian Miriam Hansen describes a spectatorial movie-going experience of newly arrived European immigrants in a very similar fashion.
Of particular interest to me is Hansen's contention that immigrant audiences were drawn to the theaters partly out of the hope that they would be able to catch a glimpse of something they had lost or thought they had lost.
In this case, an angle of vision that included nature in some way, only to discover that the manner in which American filmmakers imagined this lost object resembled their memory of it only slightly or not at all.
Right, Hansen, the cinematic fantasy compensates for the deficiencies of the outside world, the pressures of survival and success, the experience of aliens, the loss of familiar surroundings.
But the space of fantasy is no less alien, no more continuous with the traditions from which they have been dispossessed.
As Hansen goes on to explain, it was precisely this disjuncture, this space of ambiguity and ambivalence that created room for unexpected and arguably political things to happen through and around silent film.
For instance, Hansen argues that the images of nature that often appeared in early 20th century silent film were sensible enough in terms of their nostalgic appeal to allow anyone to justify an interest in the cinema.
Yet they were also different enough, fantastical and idealized enough, that is, that they seemed to be making no particular social, political or cultural comment worthy of anyone's concern.
What they did do, however, was provide socially aspirant immigrant women with a plausible reason for wanting to be out in public, usually in one another's company rather than in the company of men.
And given how elusive such justifications had been for women historically speaking, the political import of this shift was enormous.
And I have to say this, I just finished teaching a whole bunch of Frankfurt School material in my class, and I don't know if you're familiar with Janet Wolff's work on Flannery.
So she has this wonderful article called The Invisible Flanners where she's talking about women's exclusion from the public sphere historically, and she has this fabulous list of things women could be if they wanted to be in public, including like lesbians and prostitutes or dead.
Those are sort of the options for women if they want to be unaccompanied in public in the early 20th century.
So in any case, Hansen's argument is essentially that there's something political about the fact that silent film gave women a reason to be out in public.
So what does all that have to do with the films I'm talking about here?
Well, in the same way that Miriam Hansen argues that there was something amorphously political and suspiciously historically significant about immigrant women watching silent film at the beginning of the 20th century,
I want to argue that there's something amorphously political and suspiciously historically significant about lesbians and gay men watching film after film about homosexuals in unexpected places at the 20th century's end.
Lesbians and gay men don't really need a good reason to be out in public these days.
As I've already suggested, however, they do need a good reason to think about rurality, since in the United States, at least, contemporary lesbian and gay identity has come to be seen as virtually synonymous with a particular style of worldliness and cosmopolitanism, or, barring that, metropolitanism.
This association is partly a consequence of social history.
After all, cities have played a very particular, even particularly important role in the lesbian and gay community's emergence as a visible social, cultural, and political minority.
But I would argue that the association is also a result of the fact that many lesbians and gay men have taken a special measure of pride over the past few decades in imagining their world, the world they created,
as being more enlightened, more sophisticated, more civilized, and in a multitude of other ways, simply better than the world of rural idiocy that many of them claim to have worked very hard in their use to escape.
Of course, on some level, this particular brand of urban queer arrogance bordering on outright classism is both understandable and unobjectionable.
After all, and contrary to the rosy view we often feel obliged to take of those who suffer under various forms of social and political oppression, it isn't like homosexuals are somehow obligated to take the ethical high road by choosing to understand their own history of disenfranchisement and persecution as part of a broader history of inequality that includes an irrational and sometimes quite fanatical hatred of people simply because they are poor, or poorly spoken,
or simply too apparently boring and provincial to merit anyone's interest, let alone their sympathy.
But the demonstrable antipathy that many American lesbians and gay men feel entitled to express towards things rural, and things boring for that matter, does come at a cost, especially these days given the fact that the American far right has basically rebranded itself as the 21st century standard bearer for a new political creed that resembles nothing so much as 19th century agrarian populism.
Specifically, such expressions of anti-rural sentiment can appear to corroborate right-wing claims that homosexuals and those who defend them are, as a general rule, urban coastal elites who despise on principle anything that has even the vaguest whiff of the traditional about it, including the family Main Street and Apple Pie.
I quite like Apple Pie.
There are a number of historical ironies worth acknowledging here. First, as I've already noted, the lesbians and gay men who were most vociferously disgusted by rurality today are quite often the same lesbians and gay men now of retirement age who made some of their most significant social and political strides during the era of gay liberationism, an era when homosexuals were known for existing that gay is good, not better,
mobilized under the banner which asserted we are everywhere, not just in New York and San Francisco, and when coming out was considered one of the movement's most effective political weapons, ostensibly because it was presumed that there actually were closeted homosexuals everywhere and that if they would only reveal themselves to friends and family, they had it within their capacity to alter Americans thinking about sexuality forever.
The second irony is that even as many lesbians and gay Americans were consolidating their belief in their own constitutional urbanity, many were becoming more moderate and traditionalist in their own social and political inclinations.
So, for example, many of the activists who went on to found the modern lesbian gay movement all but abandoned the pointed and explicit critique of patriarchalism that had, at one point, figured prominently in the rhetoric of gay liberation.
Instead, they set as their primary goal earning the right to marry, which is, when all is said and done, not a particularly radical, modern, or even downtown thing to want to do.
The third irony is that as 20th century homosexuals were building a distinct and distinctly visible culture that is, in some respect, premised upon its urbanness, some of them, especially some of the men, made absolute fortunes by first defining and then popularizing a new culture of genteel country living and quaint traditionalism that puts any vision of the moneyed good life ever described in a 19th century novel to complete and utter shame.
As quick but compelling evidence of this, I invite you either to check out the fabulous Beekman Boys on the Discovery Network. I don't know if any of you have seen that. I don't know if it's syndicated in Germany, but it's really revolting.
Or, alternatively, just spend a weekend in Provincetown, Massachusetts or the Hamptons on Long Island.
I can assure you that no experience will do more than the latter to convince you that the old maxim is true.
When formerly radical heterosexual men turn 40, they become Republicans. When formerly radical gay men turn 40, they become bed and breakfast owners.
My point here isn't just that lesbians and gay men are capable of being classist or hypocrites. Both of those things are true, but neither conceit is particularly shocking in and of itself, and neither is any more true of lesbians and gay men than it is of the American population at large.
Rather, my point is that I think an engagement with morality lurks at the heart of modern lesbian and gay male culture, even, or perhaps especially, when that culture is at its most metronormative, to use one of Judith Halberstam's more useful neologisms.
I would argue that it is a very particular, very abject form of engagement, but it's definitely there.
What's more, it requires some kind of expressive outlet, some culture of queer pastoralism and or anti-pastoralism that can serve to remind lesbians and gay men that we are everywhere, that we can be in rural America too, even if we are no longer of rural America.
Time constraints prohibit me from going deeper into what I think the function of the queers out of place film, or what function I think queers out of place film serves for heterosexually identified viewers.
But where queer or homosexually identified viewers are concerned, however, I would argue that it is precisely these films epistemological function to allow lesbians and gay men to imagine once again that they are everywhere just as they were before homosexuality and metropolitanness came to be welded inseparably together.
Additionally, though, I would also argue that the trope's generic appeal, which is ultimately the reason it can be and has been repeated over and over and over again since the mid-1990s, is the fact that it is always articulated in extremis and in ways that either result in heartwarming laughter at the very idea of homosexuals in rural spaces, or in ways that end in death.
Both of which, it is worth noting, effectively confirm the prudence of conceiving of queerness and morality as mutually exclusive categories, even as these films imaginatively belie such a conceit through the narrative and visual fantasy work that they do.