Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture Luca Prono Greenwood Press ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GAY AND LESBIAN POPULAR CULTURE i ii ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GAY AND LESBIAN POPULAR CULTURE ★ LUCA PRONO GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London iii Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prono, Luca. Encyclopedia of gay and lesbian popular culture / Luca Prono. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978–0–313–33599–0 (alk. paper) 1. Homosexuality—North America—Encyclopedias. 2. Homosexuality— Great Britain—Encyclopedias. 3. Popular culture—North America. 4. Popular culture—Great Britain. I. Title. HQ75.13.P76 2008 306.76'603—dc22 2007032464 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Luca Prono All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007032464 ISBN: 978–0–313–33599–0 First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 iv CONTENTS Entries vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture 1 Bibliography 297 Index 301 v vi E NTRIES Advocate, The Etheridge, Melissa AIDS Everett, Rupert Albee, Edward Franklin Fierstein, Harvey Forbes Allen, Chad Garland, Judy Araki, Gregg Grant, Cary Baldwin, James Haines, William Barnes, Djuna Harlem Renaissance Basic Instinct Harris, E. Lynn Bean, Billy Hawthorne, Nigel Beat Generation Hay, Harry Bernstein, Leonard Haynes, Todd Bowie, David Heche, Anne Boy George Hudson, Rock Brokeback Mountain Isherwood, Christopher Burke, Glenn Jett, Joan Burr, Raymond John, Sir Elton Cage Aux Folles, La Johnson, Holly Califia, Patrick Joplin, Janis Camp Kramer, Larry Capote, Truman Kushner, Tony Celluloid Closet, The Lane, Nathan Chamberlain, Richard lang, k. d. Condon, William “Bill” Leavitt, David Crisp, Quentin Liberace Crowley, Mart Louganis, Greg Cruising Mapplethorpe, Robert Cukor, George McKellen, Ian Cunningham, Michael Mercury, Freddie Dean, James Michael, George DeGeneres, Ellen Moorehead, Agnes De Rossi, Portia Muscle Magazines Divine Navratilova, Martina vii viii ★ ENTRIES O’Donnell, Rosie Streisand, Barbra Pet Shop Boys Sylvester Philadelphia Tewksbury, Mark Pink Narcissus Tom of Finland Queer as Folk Tomlin, Lily Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Troche, Rose Real World, The Van Sant, Gus Reubens, Paul Vidal, Gore Roseanne Village People, The Rudnick, Paul Warhol, Andy RuPaul Waters, John Sargent, Dick Weber, Bruce Schlesinger, John White, Edmund Sondheim, Stephen Will and Grace Stanwyck, Barbara Williams, Tennessee Stein, Gertrude Wong, B. D. Stipe, Michael PREFACE The Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture provides both biographical and thematic entries that map out the presence of queer subjects within American popu- lar culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The almost one hundred entries collected in this volume tell a double story. On the one hand, they attest to the pervasive presence of gays and lesbians in the worlds of film, television, theater, entertainment, popular literature, music, and sport. On the other hand, they also show the constant attempts to marginalize homosexual characters and themes within popular culture and to silence the same-sex desire and identities of many actors, writers, directors, singers, and athletes. This book aims to fight these attempts and to recover the queer legacy within popular culture. It documents the achievements of all those personalities who, with their examples, have started to smash the closet which seeks to render homosexuality invisible. While an increasing number of ac- tors, artists, and singers do not conceal their sexual orientation any longer, popular culture and its institutions have not always been a welcoming place for queers. The biographical stories of Rock Hudson, Raymond Burr, and Cary Grant; the belated coming-outs of Dick Sargent and Richard Chamberlain; and Freddie Mercury’s re- luctance to discuss his sexual orientation, to quote but a few examples, attest to the pervasive force of what controversial journalist Michelangelo Signorile (1993, xviii) has called the “brilliantly orchestrated, massive conspiracy to keep all homosexuals locked in the closet.” A view of the closet as simply repressing artistry would be reductive as the closet can also function as a source of inspiration. For example, directors such as George Cukor inscribed a coded gay sensibility in films like Sylvia Scarlett (1935), The Women (1939), and Rich and Famous (1983). Such works ap- pealed to queers and, at the same time, reached a large audience who was unaware of their gay subtexts. Yet, it is undeniable that the power of the closet to destroy personal lives is well-documented. Popular culture figures that have stepped outside the closet have contributed to give homosexuality more visibility, which was denied for the best part of the twentieth century and that some institutions would like to continue to deny. Many entries in the book tell of the battle fought by gays and lesbians in popular culture to achieve such visibility against the power of the media and Hollywood industry. As Signorile points out, the media work to foster a sense ix x ★ PREFACE of isolation and loneliness in homosexuals, creating the impression that very few public figures are gay and that homosexuality is a grotesque and largely unspeakable matter. For decades, the big popular culture center of Hollywood routinely rep- resented celluloid homosexuals as unhappy and deviant individuals or made them completely invisible. It also forced many film-makers and actors to remain in the closet in return for a successful career. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, queer visibility within popu- lar culture began to increase. As Alexander Doty and Ben Gove (1997) have pointed out, addressing the topic of lesbian, gay, and queer representation and presence in popular culture now implies challenging the identification of so-called mass and popular phenomena as only created and consumed by heterosexuals. They argue that since the 1970s, lesbians, gays, and queers have become active subjects in popu- lar culture addressing increasingly larger audiences. Mass culture does not neces- sarily reinforce dominant ideology as it can also more or less explicitly challenge it. Many entries in the pages that follow document the ambiguous status of mass cultural products. Popular culture artifacts are inextricably linked to the social and political milieu in which they are produced, thus reflecting social stereotypes about lesbians, gays, and queers. Yet, some of them also work to subvert such stereotypes and provide a more affirmative vision of homosexuality. While popular culture is obviously informed by the predominant worldviews of the different historical periods, its authors possess the agency to challenge the social trends of their times. This ambiguity runs throughout the topics of the whole book. Works such as Cruis- ing (1980), Basic Instinct (1992), and even Philadelphia (1993), to quote only film examples, have been praised as cinematographic milestones in the representation of queerness, or charged with concealing gay sexuality and same-sex desire, or re- viled as demonizing. Mainstream popular culture has been conservatively described as reflecting the will of the majority and thus avoiding positive representations of what fails to support dominant ideology. Alternative media cultures, on the con- trary, have been progressively defined as allowing for less censored representations, though reaching a more limited audience. Yet, since the mid-1990s, the boundaries between these two entities have become increasingly blurred as national networks were made more hospitable to programs produced by and for queers, including TV series such as Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, The L Word, and reality shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Films such as Brokeback Mountain (2005) and musicals such as Rent (1996) went on to become top-grossing hits. Contrary to the positive developments in the world of entertainment and showbiz, the world of sport has remained largely steeped in homophobia. The few athletes that have come out, in- cluding tennis legend Martina Navratilova and Olympic champions Greg Louganis and Mark Tewksbury, set important examples that, hopefully, will be of encourage- ment to many more. Queer visibility within popular culture and within society as a whole increased dramatically also due to the spread of AIDS and the ensuing backlash against homo- sexuals. The media’s representations of the virus and the description of the illness as a so-called gay plague prompted the need to speak openly about homosexual- ity. Since homosexual lifestyles were thrown into the limelight, it became increas- ingly important for gay people to offer their own representations of themselves to the larger society to counter the damning views of the media. While the media PREFACE ★ x i presented an image of homosexuals as marginal subjects whose deviant behavior generated the plague, many queers stressed the pride and solidarity surrounding their sexual orientation. The activism produced by the AIDS crisis battled to offer its own images