May 20

John Schlesinger, gay director

Gay film and stage director John Schlesinger (born in London, 1926) won an Academy Award for “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), his first U.S. film. It was nominated for seven awards and won the Academy Award for best picture, the first and only X-rated film to do so. With its coy attitude toward homosexuality, it has became dated, but at the time “Midnight Cowboy” struck a chord with the general public. The scene in which a male gave another male a blowjob is what earned the film its X-rating. In “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (1971), the treatment of homosexuality was more explicit. John Schlesinger regarded that screenplay as a personal statement of his own coming out publicly as a gay man. Many of his films are about gay characters.

Schlesinger had given up his acting career in the 1960s to concentrate on film directing. After several international hit films, in the remaining years of the 1970s and 1980s his reputation suffered from both screen and theatrical flops. However, it was the huge success of the movie “Marathon Man” (1976) that allowed him to regain his international reputation. Two of the film’s main characters are implicitly gay: Doc (Roy Scheider) and Peter Janeway (William Devane).

Schlesinger moved into television and took on another gay theme in “The Englishman Abroad” (1983), which depicted several years of the life of Guy Burgess, a gay British double agent during the Cold War years. His “A Question of Attribution” (1992) was a television play by Alan Bennett about Anthony Blunt, a British art historian working for British intelligence, later exposed as a Soviet spy (as well, Blunt was a cousin of the late Queen Mother). Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were both gay members of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from the 1930s into the 1950s.

Schlesinger was prominently interviewed in the film “The Celluloid Closet” (1996), an American documentary film about the history of how homosexual and bisexual characters were portrayed in films. The documentary (sort of a gay “That’s Entertainment”) is narrated by Lily Tomlin, and the message is that homophobia resulted in movie stars and directors having to remain closeted, and that gays portrayed in films were inevitably misfits who were sick, evil, murderous and/or campy characters. We’ve come a long way in 15 years.

John Schlesinger underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 1998, before suffering a stroke in December 2000. He was taken off life support on 24 July 2003 by his life partner of over 30 years, photographer Michael Childers. Schlesinger died early the following day in Palm Springs at the age of 77.



A film you may not know, available in its entirety on YouTube in 10 parts (link to Part I below):
“Cold Comfort Farm” (1995, trailer above) is a wonderful Schlesinger-directed film with broad inter-generational appeal, based on the comic novel (1932) by Stella Gibbons. The top-flight cast includes Kate Beckinsale, Joanna Lumley (co-star of Absolutely Fabulous), gay film legend Sir Ian McKellen and gay British actor Stephen Fry. I dare you to view the short “Church of the Quivering Brethren” scene just once. Likely to enter your banter is the phrase, "I saw something nasty in the woodshed."
Available on DVD (and should be more widely known).

COLD COMFORT FARM Part one of ten:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozhb3ytlyVg