English studies

Decoding gay messages in film and literature

Michael Eberle Sinatra has a keen eye for spotting the suggestion of something homosexual in a film.

The UdeM professor recognizes the hallmarks of a movie’s subtly drawn gay character or lesbian theme. He has seen these allusions in movies like the 1995 comedy Clueless, in which one of its male characters professed his love for Barbara Streisand’s music, and in Mansfield Park, where two women get caught in the rain and later help each other change into dry clothes.   Spotting the veiled and not-so-veiled references in movies plays an important part in Prof. Sinatra’s work, which has him looking at 19th century literature, as well as queer themes in pop culture. Currently completing a study of film adaptations of 19th century novels, the Oxford graduate who began teaching at UdeM four years ago says understanding gay undercurrents in a 19th century novel or a 21st century film means digging into the subtleties of the time.

While sexual norms can swing from repressive to liberal, there are changing codes that Western culture has used in novels and films to allude to homosexuality, according to Prof. Sinatra, who sees ‘decoding’ as the tricky part to fully understanding the author’s sexual message. But there are several gay signposts that catch his eye, underlying a character’s specific activities or nicknames that would have suggested a homosexual bent at the time. “That might mean anything from flamboyant clothing or the absence of female characters,” says Prof. Sinatra, whose courses at UdeM’s English Department include a new one this semester on the representation of sexual identities.

The homosexual representation that might be unearthed in a 19th century novel could come in the form of someone being referred to as musical, which Prof. Sinatra says was code for effeminate. In an English novel, if someone talked of a character suddenly taking a trip to London, which would have been painted as an odd activity, the reference likely alluded to the man having a gay affair. Taking a novel with an unspoken homosexual theme and bringing it to the screen can result in a more explicit creation, says Prof. Sinatra, who sees film as a more in-your-face medium. He uses the example of director/actor Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version of Frankenstein. While it’s not clear what author Mary Shelley intended with regard to the relationship between Dr. Frankenstein and his male creation, Branagh’s delirium, along with the climaxing music, gives the adaptation a more sexual tone than its source material.

Prof. Sinatra appreciates how looking at both these early materials and their cinematic offspring teaches us about changing sexual mores. “They allow us to look back at the original material and rethink the assessing of sexual identities.” That look back can sometimes take into account recent changes in gay culture. In his course, Prof. Sinatra will chart the social history of gay politics through the prism of various media. One example will be the plays of two gay writers of the 1980s, Angels in America by Tony Kushner and Poor Superman by Brad Fraser. Both scripts give a view of gay culture, one American and the other Canadian, during both the Reagan years and the onslaught of AIDS.

With today’s wider acceptance of homosexuality in the West, gay themes in film have been changing. Prof. Sinatra says many gay directors are simply telling stories. “Recent movies go beyond the debate of having characters with a defined sexuality,” he says, adding that more militant gay activists worry that queer culture is losing its political identity. Nevertheless, those gay themes may simply be changing. He cites the example of the 1998 movie, Relax… It’s Just Sex, a 1998 comedy that he says was a polemic that managed to annoy hetero- bi- and homosexuals in equal measure.