Gay Books As Films

By Patricia Nell Warren, A&U Magazine. Posted January 23, 2001.

For twenty-five years, people have asked me: "When is The Front Runner movie coming out?" "Wasn't Paul Newman going to star in it?" My 1974 novel about a gay athlete's effort to make the 1976 Olympic team has a checkered history in Hollywood. In turn, I've had the chance to study another checkered relationship: the one between gay books and gay movies. It's a subject of special interest to independent publishers, who now publish the vast majority of gay-themed books.

Despite the gay world's love of film, despite mystique around books adapted for the screen, not much gay-themed U.S. fiction or nonfiction has made it into the rolling credits. Some did, but the book list is short, compared to that long celluloid line of original gay-themed scripts that get produced.

While major U.S. releases with gay-male, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (glbt) themes are few -- homophobia still rules some of American society and fierce closetedness of some gay people in the film industry is partly to blame -- the problem is more complex than that.

Not until the late 1970s, when a few dissidents bucked the all-controlling studio system to produce subjects that studios wouldn't touch, did the independent-film movement spark the first real surge of glbt-themed films. The next indie wave was stars starting their own productions, so they could do parts that studios wouldn't let them touch. New financial resources flowered to bank these non-studio films. Today, glbt themes are grabbing a growing share of that artistic film market. We're also more visible on TV, especially as cable blurs the old line between Hollywood and television. At every level of the industry, glbt people are now firmly entrenched -- from agents to top executives and financiers -- and their attitudes and tastes are factors in what glbt projects get green-lighted.

In 1997, as my business partner Tyler St. Mark and I revived our effort to get The Front Runner into development, we began to notice the monopoly of "new" and "cutting edge" in gay films. If a new book doesn't sweep immediately into development it might be quickly forgotten. Many in gay Hollywood would rather write a sparkly new screenplay than take a book in print, even a classic or a best-seller, as a starting point.

One reason why so few glbt titles get filmed is that many are studies, theory, activism, health, pornography, or self-help books and inappropriate for the screen. Even a documentary has to tell a good story. Not for nothing does A&E advertise its expanded movie menu as "getting back to good stories." In mainstream film, countless nonfiction books have been made into gripping films, yet the list of gay-themed features based on nonfiction books is short indeed. To name a few: And the Band Played On, Breaking the Surface, Serving in Silence.

When it comes to fiction, often gltb books focus on style, issues, or inner angst, rather than taking the classic storytelling approach of portraying realistic people who live and struggle in a realistic world -- past or present -- created by the author. It is this classic realism that always made mainstream fiction an enduring resource for filmmakers. In our gay world though, there is a growing prejudice against gay fiction. The first time I heard a young gay director contemptuously dismiss fiction as "something that never happened," my jaw dropped. Many booksellers tell me that sales of gay fiction are down. Most glbt activist and service organizations actually exclude fiction from their reading lists.

So intense is this prejudice against anything "non-happening," especially with plots set in the recent past, that one gay director's question to Front Runner producer St. Mark was: "Why now?" This man wanted to know why any moviegoer would pay $8 to see a gay runner at the '76 Olympics. He suggested that we change it to the 2000 Olympics -- forgetting that a '90s setting would change all the social and personal dynamics of the original story. Films that update stories often don't work well for that very reason.

The old struggle over creative control also keeps books off the screen. In the publishing industry, "control" is largely negotiated between author and publisher. In a film, control is more complicated -- powerful people can exert pressures at any point -- and with gay-themed books it usually hinges on how sexual orientation will be handled. In 1990, Dave Pallone's autobiography, Behind the Mask, was put into development by an independent film company and Bruce Willis was interested in playing the lead. The project fell through (Pallone told me) when Willis' managers refused to let him do it. Ultimately, creative control is held by whoever owns the negative of the final cut. One heartbroken director told us how he lost control of a film that he'd developed and scripted. A contract loophole allowed the producer to nab the negative and do a new final cut, which removed most of the gay content.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »