Good Gay, Bad Gay

A lesbian serial killer and her vampiric, crafty lesbian lover are the main characters of Monster, an acclaimed recent film that also seems, incongruously, to have won the blessing of the gay and lesbian media and activists.

Gay magazines and newspapers around the world have given the film positive reviews, raving about Charlize Theron's famous physical transformation, Christina Ricci's pyrotechnic turn in a key supporting role, and director Patty Jenkin's understated, effective approach to the sensational storyline.

Planetout.com, a multimillion-hit-a-month online gay magazine, describes the film as 'riveting, bleak and exceptionally intuitive' and praises its 'emotional complexity.' The Advocate, America's leading gay glossy, says the film is 'brutal [and] brilliant.' The film hasn't been called a masterpiece, but no gay publication I've seen has expressed irritation, concern or resentment over the gritty homo-killer tilt of the film, irks that have characterised gay relations with cinema for almost 30 years.

Things seem to have changed enormously from the days when murderous, negative or stealthy gay movie characters triggered geysers of vitriolic spittle from gay groups, who have a history of sensitivity to their big-screen representation. Most famously, they disrupted the location shoots of Cruising (1980) with whistles and mirrors, protested inside and outside the 1991 Oscars ceremony over the crowning of 'gay negative' The Silence of the Lambs at the expense of 'gay positive' My Own Private Idaho, and picketed cinemas showing Basic Instinct (1992), furious over the film's murderous lesbians and ruining it for moviegoers entering the cinema by waving placards that revealed the surprise ending.

Vito Russo's influential book The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981, set the tone for gay film appreciation right up to the present, arguing that Hollywood maliciously and deliberately ensured that gay and lesbian characters were destructive, suicidal, threatening and dangerous, and by doing so, taught moviegoers to be homophobic. The Russo doctrine was extremely influential. It was a strong base to the early 1990s gay movement called 'Queer Nation', who outed celebrities on the basis that if homosexual Hollywood actors were revealed to be gay then the moviegoing public's cautious opinions of homosexuals would magically and immediately relax.

The current crop of gay films and TV shows feature gay characters that are inoffensive, American Dream-friendly and, above all, nice. Gay activists got their Russonic message across: Unflattering gay characters will cause you more trouble than they're worth, and happy shiny gay characters sell -- you can make money.

So, in this Queer Eye context, the calm gay media response to Monster is anachronistic and confusing. We see Aileen Wuornos (Theron) get seduced by needy-yet-wily Selby (Ricci), a young lesbian kicked out of home for being gay who manipulates and uses the hopeless Wuornos to gain a bit of off-the-wall life experience. While Wuornos is out pulling Johns off the Interstate, unemployed Selby lounges at home watching TV, only getting up to complain about how bored she is when Wuornos - usually covered in blood - gets home from a hard day's work.

Selby sells Wuornos up the river when the police close in, retreating back to her conservative family and sending her one-time gay lover to her fate (and, eventually, to the lethal injection room) as part of a favourable plea bargain. For her part, Wuornos corrupts and recruits Selby as an accessory to her prostitution, petty crimes and murders.

In short, if ever there was a movie about vampiric killer lesbians and stealthy, untrustworthy homosexuals who form secret pagan bonds yet who never forget how to slide, unnoticed, back into the suburban fold, Monster is it. The killer lesbians in Monster make those in Basic Instinct look like the lesbians in The Color Purple, and while one of them ends up condemned and executed by the state, the other is emotionally and psychologically destroyed after giving in to hetero-normativity. On paper, Monster is a gay activist movie nightmare -- so where's the gay media backlash?