Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo

by Michael Bronski

Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo, Michael Schiavi’s new biography of the noted LGBT activist and film historian, is an important addition to queer and film scholarship. It is also one of the most complex and compelling historical narratives of gay male life and culture in the later decades of the twentieth century. Schiavi, a professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, creates a deeply- textured and rich tapestry that brings together the details of Russo’s personal life, the enormous success of the LGBT rights movement, and the emergence of a distinct and powerful queer sensibility that has had an enormous impact on American culture. The interconnectedness here is, although enhanced by Schiavi’s expert narration, not surprising: for gay men and lesbians who came of age in the 1960s and helped form this new burgeoning politics, culture, life, and sex were inseparable from art and culture. And certainly, for Russo, each of these pursuits were primary drives that drew inspiration and nourishment from one another.

Russo’s life was not atypical for a gay man of his time. Schiavi has been incredibly lucky that Russo’s biological family—as well as his queer family—have been so forthcoming with details about his life. (Given the number of men in Russo’s circle who died of HIV-AIDS, as Russo did in 1990 at the age of forty-four, Shiavi’s detailed research is even more astounding.) Born in Manhatan in 1946, his working-class Italian family moved to Lodi, New Jersey in 1961. Russso’s Italian cultural background—some students in his high school joked that Lodi stood for “Lots of Dumb Italians”—shaped his stance as an outsider in American culture, a status that was doubly enhanced when, in high school, he began to understand and act upon his homosexual desires. While hanging out with gay high-school friends, first in local New Jersey bars and then venturing to Greenwich Village and Fire Island, Russo learned firsthand the campy references of pre-Stonewall gay male culture, which included quoting lines uttered by old female film stars and reading gay-themed novels such as Jay Little’s 1952 Maybe-Tomorrow or Kenneth Marlowe’s 1964 memoir Mr. Madam: Confessions of a Male Madam (both of which were easily available in bookstores and newsstands). But more importantly, Russo began thinking about how popular culture—in particular Hollywood films—interacted with the myths and realities of being gay in the world. Schiavi is spectacularly good at explicating these intersections and the early chapters of Celluloid Activist are a model of a clear, analytic approach to cultural identity. In particular, his reading of Russo’s response to notorious madam Polly Adler’s best-selling 1953 memoir A House is Not a Home (as well as the 1964 film adaptation), which brusquely critiqued conventional morality, is on-target and illuminating.

Russo’s early years as a gay man, and his immersion in this culture, were formative. In 1968 he moved to Greenwich Village and—aside from finding a boyfriend and discovering the benefits of a very busy and fulfilling sex life and a deeply committed queer community—began seriously thinking and theorizing about how movies, especially Hollywood movies, interacted with both LGBT culture and mainstream America. After the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the formation of gay-liberation and gay-rights groups, Russo became increasingly committed to analyzing these ideas. By 1971, Russo was hosting film showings for queer audiences, and by 1974 began giving lectures about how lesbians and gay men were represented in Hollywood films—most strikingly as either pitiable victims or hideous villains. This preoccupation would eventually evolve into The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981). In this period, his career as a working critic and journalist propelled him into the entertainment world he had previously viewed only as an outsider; he met and became friends with performer such as Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler, and a raft of Hollywood power brokers.

While Celluloid Activist is an accurate and riveting panorama of urban gay male culture of the 1970s and 1980s in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, it’s also an excellent overview of the evolution of LGBT politics during this era. Russo’s esthetic judgments and interests were inseparable from his political commitments and activities. Yet it’s important to note that Russo was not a member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group that took feminist, antiwar, and economic justice issues very seriously, formed immediately after the Stonewall riots. And Schiavi makes it clear that while he may have been “chafed by their leftist doctrinaire politics,” it was more because he was, by his own admission, relatively apolitical at this point in his life. He became involved in Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), a group that sponsored GLF-like confrontational politics, but also promoted less “radical” efforts such as passing antidiscrimination bills in Manhattan’s City Council and running openly gay candidates. GAA was composed of mostly white gay men and, although Schiavi documents some attempts by Russo to challenge this approach, the organization was not particularly open to women or people of color.

Russo at an AIDS rally

GAA did have a commitment to providing an open space to LGBT people who were not particularly political and GAA’s headquarters in an old firehouse functioned as a city community center for queer people. Sponsoring dances, lectures, and films, the Firehouse was one of the first places—particularly on evenings where he screened and commented on films—that Russo found a platform that fused his love of movies and passion for politics. While GAA lasted as an organization only a few years, it was clearly formative in shaping Russo’s thinking and his ideas about art and politics. Beginning in 1978, LGBT life in America would be devastatingly changed. The right-wing backlash of the religious right, as personified by Anita Bryant and John Briggs, was quickly followed in 1981 by the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, which struck at the heart of Russo’s social and political world. Fear of AIDS, and homosexuality, became so pronounced in the media—in particular The New York Post’s attack on gay male bathhouses—that, in 1985, Russo, and others, formed Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) , a group which challenged print and electronic homophobia. Two years later, Russo was an early, and very vocal, member of ACT UP—a group whose frenzied, theatrical street actions and nonnegotiable political demands were far closer to GLF than GAA—and remained as active as he could despite his failing health.

So much of Russo’s later political career was connected with ACT UP and this has, in some sense, overshadowed his earlier political commitments and even deflected from his achievements as a film theorist. Schiavi beautifully maps out Russo’s growth as a political gay man—a path that was neither as obvious or clear-cut as it may at first appear—and the book seamlessly demonstrates how the growth of gay male culture during this time was inextricably intertwined with the emergence of series of overlapping, sometimes conflicting, LGBT political movements. Art, sex, and politics are always connected, and the gay male world is the perfect place to track these connections since they are, in many cases, wonderfully evident and often celebrated. To his enormous credit, Schiavi never disguises or plays down the importance, or prevalence, of sex to Russo and his circle. Sex for Russo, and many gay men of this era (and now as well) was not simply liberating, but sustaining. Russo unabashedly praised promiscuity, even after he had been diagnosed with AIDS, and even wrote Bette Midler an admonitory note when she apologized for her early years as a singer in a gay male bathhouse.        

Russo's seminal book on images of homosexuals in Hollywood

While Russo’s legacy as an activist is unmatched, and his place as a pioneer of LGBT film studies is indisputable, his influence as a theorist is less clear. The Celluloid Closet was a vastly important book when it was published. It easy to see why Russo’s live presentations of this material was transformative for audiences in the 1970s: few thinkers were making these connections or presenting this material as part of a sustained political argument. (It is also important to remember, and this is hinted at in the book, that theoretical discussions concerning and politics were also springing up in feminist and African-American communities, as well as among other writers in the newly emerging LGBT national press.) Yet read today, The Celluloid Closet often feels naive and at times simplistic. Of course, it has been thirty years since its first publication (and fourteen since the revised edition of 1987) but it is instructive to examine why and how the book emerged in its historical context and what has changed.

Many of Russo major arguments were generated by the evaluation of “positive” and “negative” images. These were also the terms often used by critics looking at issues of gender and race as well. Much of Russo’s analysis of “positive” and “negative” relied on (often vaguely defined) cultural perceptions of acceptability or the deployment of death as a plot device (by murder or suicide) to punish lesbian or gay characters. Schiavi quotes Russo as claiming, with some irony: “The history of gays in the movies from the Thirties to the Seventies is a trial of blood leading up to The Boys in the Band!” As important as it is to identify a historiography of representational tropes or trends, Russo’s—as well as early feminist and race critiques—were often more limiting than illuminating. Using this restrictive lens, Russo reads films such as John Schlesinger’s 1969 Midnight Cowboy as homophobic because the main characters are never identified as lovers and the self-identified gay male characters are self-hating. Schiavi is cognizant of this limitation and discusses at some length Russo’s complicated relationship with William Friedkin’s 1970 The Boys in the Band (as well as the Mart Crowley play on which it is based), which he eviscerates in The Celluloid Closet as self-hating and homophobic, but privately enjoyed for its bitchy humor and camp references. (Readers interested in a more nuanced view of Friedkin’s film should read Schiavi’s excellent article “Teaching the Boys: Mart Crowley and the Millennial Classroom” in Modern Language Studies, Fall-Winter 2001.)

Schiavi subtly implies that one of the most compelling sources of Russo’s analysis, and the cause of some of its problems, is his relationship to discourses on gender. Much of Russo’s analysis of “negative” homosexual images are rooted in depictions of men who violate gender norms. The Celluloid Closet is ripe with critiques of the classic “sissies,” from Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn in 1930s comedies to the character of Emery in The Boys in the Band. The reality is that the classic “sissies” tell us more about gender than sexuality. Tellingly, there are several passages in Celluloid Activist in which lesbians bitterly complain about gay male culture’s stereotyping of women—Schiavi recounts a near riot at the New York 1972 Gay Pride march when many women present were deeply offended by drag performers, as well as another incident when lesbians complained about Russo’s showing, and extolling, George Cukor’s 1939 The Women, which they considered, understandably, highly misogynist. Russo was apparently both sympathetic to these women and a little bewildered; he even felt that the complaints about The Women verged on censorship. This is because, in large part, Russo lived in a mostly gay male culture that was, in the 1980s (and to a large degree now), unaffected by feminist analysis. The culture of Russo’s teen years—the campy movies, the adulation of Hollywood actresses—while extraordinarily sustaining to his identity as a gay man, was not particularly invested in the lives or representation of women. This was also true of many, mostly male- dominated gay-rights groups such as GAA; while GLF had a more articulated feminist analysis, even there lesbians had to fight for every inch of social and political space.

The Celluloid Closet began a scholarly conversation about gay-coded performers, like Franklin Pangborn, that continues to evolve

Since the early Eighties, film criticism and analysis that centers on sexual and gender representation has been significantly shaped by the work of feminist writers such as E. Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn, and Laura Mulvey. (Kaplan’s groundbreaking “Is the Gaze Male?” was published in 1983, after the publication of The Celluloid Closet, but Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which address some of the themes with which Russo was grappling, was published in 1975.) But even before this feminist, psychoanalytically-based work was available, there were women who were constructing a nonacademic, feminist mode of analysis. Marjorie Rosen’s 1973 Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream and Molly Haskell’s 1974 From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies were extremely influential in shaping ideas about sex and gender in popular culture, but Russo mentions neither in The Celluloid Closet (nor do they appear in Celluloid Activist). Schiavi gives us a glimpse of how Russo, as well as his gay male world, was grappling with issues of gender—“playing with his own gender identity”—in the irony of the “clone look,” the gendered artifice of the gay male S&M esthetic, and the various uses of traditional drag. But The Celluloid Closet itself is less concerned with a sustained, or feminist, analysis of sex or gender.

In the final analysis, Celluloid Activist is a startling book for all that it brings together. It makes us think about the connections between sex and art in ways that illuminate LGBT political cultures of the 1970s and 1980s. And it also gives readers a sense of the monumental physical, emotional, and psychological losses that occurred because of AIDS. One of the greatest losses was not simply the sheer destruction of individual lives, but the creative potential of those lives. The Celluloid Closet may now feel incomplete or unpersuasive in its analysis; interestingly, many of the films that he condemns for homophobic content, such as The Children’s Hour, Cruising, and The Boys in the Band, are now taught in LGBT film courses on college campuses. Yet, as Schiavi notes, Russo was constantly having a conversation with himself about his work and preconceptions. If he had lived, who knows what he would have written next and where his creative, political impulses would have taken him?

Michael Bronski, Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College in Women's and Gender Studies, has written extensively on film, culture and politics, and is the author of A Queer History of the United States.

To purchase Celluloid Activist, click here.

Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.4 2011

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