Far from the Closet?

Todd Haynes' fabulously overwrought melodrama Far from Heaven is getting that Hollywood "perfect storm" mix of near universal rave reviews and unending Oscar buzz. Perhaps most interesting is its timing, literally having opened in theaters in the same week that election returns were altering the political (and, no doubt, cultural) landscape. The film is set in the sexually buttoned-down Eisenhower era, the early part of which was the only other time prior to now in which the presidency, the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate were under the control of the Republican Party. It meticulously mirrors the films of the German-born Hollywood director Douglas Sirk, weaving together the race- and sex-charged storylines of two of Sirk's grand sagas of the 50s, Imitation of Life and All that Heaven Allows, with Haynes' own retro-future plot twists.

Dennis Quaid plays a married businessman with two kids residing in a Hartford, CT, suburb, circa 1957, leading a storybook hetero lifestyle?while secretly satisfying his undying homo urges. He looks for sex on dimly lit street corners, in the dark recesses of movie houses and in a discreet, smoke-filled backroom gay bar. He gets arrested, presumably for loitering, and eventually is caught in his office late at night engaged in a passionate 1950s Hollywood screen kiss with another man (yes, as the Elmer Bernstein score reaches orchestral orgasm) by his always perfectly coiffed blonde wife, played by Julianne Moore.

Shortly thereafter, he heads to a shrink, hoping to be "cured" of what psychiatry at that time classified as an illness. The good doc offers him the prospects: We have a more modern, "scientific" approach to this today, he tells the guy. This type of "conversion" is only successful in 5 to 30 percent of cases, he says, but assures the patient nonetheless, and mentions electroshock treatment, too. When I saw the film, the mere reference to "conversion" therapy (and of course electroshock) got a laugh from the folks in the hip downtown Manhattan audience, most of whom probably view homo conversion therapy as a ridiculous-sounding artifact of the 50s.

Even some conservatives?perhaps not wanting to be reminded of the sexual repression their more zealous compatriots hath wrought during the McCarthy years?might want to believe that the topics broached in Far from Heaven are from some ancient time. And tellingly, they appear to find it rather useless to bring these issues up now. New York Post commentator John Podhoretz, writing on National Review Online, asks, "What possible difference does it make to an audience watching Far from Heaven in 2002?" He firmly answers, "It makes no difference, of course." The idea being that we've all become so much more enlightened today, so looking at these things now within a 50s context serves no real purpose.

But Haynes isn't highlighting these issues as a way of showing us how enlightened we've become. On the contrary, like all great Hollywood melodramas, Far from Heaven spins out a cliche, which in this case is: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Conversion therapy, for example, might seem like a wacky thing from a half-century ago, but in actuality it has more momentum today than it did in the 1950s?even though homosexuality was declassified as an illness in 1973. In the 90s, "ex-gay" groups, consisting of confused and tormented homosexuals and the pseudo-therapists who attend to them, sprung up in response to gay rights victories, often financially backed by religious conservatives. They, too, don't promise 100 percent results, trying to lower expectations for their self-loathing clients. In recent years these groups have taken out full-page ads in The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post and have held conferences around the country. A month ago the editor of Psychology Today shocked a great many mental health professionals when he voiced his support for conversion therapy for some people. That a publication like Psychology Today?founded in the late 60s during those "find yourself" years, and, in many ways, a reaction to the repressive decade prior?would now backtrack toward the 50s says a lot about how ideas and ideologies move (or don't really move) in culture over time.

And that seems to be what Haynes is saying, bringing us back to the 50s to see what has and has not changed. Though there are undoubtedly so many more individuals leading openly non-hetero lives since the onset of gay liberation, for a lot of married Connecticut businessmen and others the closet exists today as it did 50 or so years ago. Married guys looking to screw around with other guys might be less likely to be cruising the dark corners of theaters, looking for blowjobs in the men's room (though that's still going on), but that's only because they've found much safer outlets. Today, they're all over America Online and Gay.com, to name two of many online places where married men hook up. The online sexual revolution, some say, is a good thing in terms of breaking down the homosexual closet, allowing people to explore their sexual desires on their own terms, discreetly and legally, doing things they might not ever have done. But one could also argue that the safe and easy Internet keeps the closet doors tightly shut, too. The only things that bring Quaid's character in Far from Heaven out of the closet, after all, are his getting arrested and his getting caught by his wife.

Buckingham Palace, meanwhile, is currently embroiled in a gay sex scandal that is all about the closet in its most classically shameful and destructive sense, with charges of a covered-up male rape and of "rough trade" being brought in for sex with palace staffers (some married) and given tours of the Queen's apartment?all of which has sent London into tabloid overdrive. No matter how far gays come politically as a group (often by desexualizing themselves, pushing forward on issues like gay marriage and parenting), male-on-male sex itself will always cause a few coronaries, from the British monarchy to the Vatican to suburban Connecticut. (Woman-to-woman physical contact, on the other hand, is a big turn-on for a lot of straight men, and just doesn't threaten in the same way?which is perhaps why we see more lesbian smooching in popular culture than gay male nuzzling of any kind.)

There's something else that Far from Heaven is displaying about the closet and the times we live in as well. Homosexual desire, because of the closet, actually is and perhaps always has been a bit easier for some to navigate than other kinds of forbidden sexual desire, even of the heterosexual variety. The hubby in Far from Heaven eventually leaves his wife, joining his young, hot, similarly masculine (read: "straight-acting") boyfriend, blending in when necessary in a conservative time. The wife, meanwhile, has fallen in love with their gardener, an African-American man. But that proves to be much more of a violence-provoking scandal in town (including to her secretly queer husband!), among both whites and blacks?precisely because it is so visible. There's not a closet for race in the way there is for sexual orientation (not to mention that a woman taking her own sexual path is still looked down upon in many places, Sex and the City notwithstanding). With no way to hide their as yet unconsummated romance, they decide not to proceed. That scenario is probably as common today in much of America as it was in the 50s.