The gay attacks on Pauline Kael

In fact, sifting through the dozens upon dozens of references to homosexuality in Kael's work, I find only one that really bothers me. In the 1961 British film "A Taste of Honey," the unmarried and pregnant young working-class heroine sets up household with a sissy friend who sees her through her pregnancy and helps her care for the infant, until the girl's hateful mother shows up and throws him out. Kael likes the material (but not Tony Richardson's direction of it), finding an "old-fashioned but sweet pathos" in the friendship that takes her back to the pictures of an earlier era: "The sweet man is now a motherly little queen who looks after the heroine, but the basic emotion is the same as it was in the gentle sentimental love stories of the twenties and thirties -- the hero and heroine, friendless babes in the woods who need each other." But this "beauty-of-pathos stuff," as she once called it in reference to Chaplin (and the end of the picture reminds her of Chaplin), also puts her on her guard:

"Audiences longing for a hero to lavish their sympathies on have a new unfortunate they can clasp to their social-worker hearts: the ideal 'little man,' the homemaker, the pure-in-heart, childlike, nonthreatening male, the man a girl can feel safe with -- and who could be more 'deprived'? They can feel tender and tolerant, and they can feel contemptuous, and in-the-know at the same time: the man a girl can feel safe with is a joke, he's not a man at all."

Rather than brush these words aside, I'll concede that I wish she hadn't written them, or written them this way. Are they homophobic? No. She isn't making a pronouncement about gay men; she's referring to a specific weakling, and she never had room in her heart for weaklings. The problem with the passage isn't homophobia but sexism; "not a man at all," with its implication that effeminacy (or, by extension, femininity) represents a failure of worth, is a locution no right-thinking writer would use today, and one that Kael herself would have shunned in her later years. It reflects the tenor of the times better than it does the tenor of her thought -- there's no other evidence that she considered women inferior to men. But, but ... if she really was the model of tolerance I knew her to be, then why did she become a symbol of bigotry to a group of gay critics? Part of the answer lies in her tone. I don't mean simply the pugnacity, though the pugnacity always inflamed readers and made them want to argue back (which was part of what made her addictive). It's also the lack of piety and especially the contempt for liberal pieties. Kael assumed that she didn't need to profess her goodwill. She would have found it offensive -- to her readers and to herself -- to assure them she was enlightened. But her failure to assure them had consequences, and not just around gay issues. Recently I met a young woman who admires Kael but, to my surprise, faulted her for a deficiency of feminist consciousness. Kael, she argued, passed up too many opportunities to offer a feminist analysis in her reviews. No doubt she's unaware that years ago Stanley Kauffmann noted the "persistent feminism" in "I Lost It at the Movies," that Andrew Sarris decried Kael's "misapplied feminist zeal," or that the young men who composed the editorial board of Movie accused her of "fanatical feminism." This young woman wasn't entirely wrong. Kael had firm politics, but she was wary of what firm politics could do to criticism. Although she could be ferocious in pointing out how a coffee-table book or a movie like "Straw Dogs" demeaned women, she was equally ferocious in demonstrating, in her reviews of "The Stepford Wives" and "One Sings, the Other Doesn't" and "Entre Nous," how a shallow and self-serving feminism could distort dramatic thinking. Ditto her views on sexual orientation: what she called special pleading irked her not because the plea wasn't just but because too often it outbalanced verisimilitude, character development, art. Without artistic integrity, "intentions" were useless -- worse than useless.

Kael was direct. If she had disliked homosexuals, she would have said so; she wasn't, as she wrote so disdainfully of Stanley Kramer, running for office in the arts. But the enemy wasn't gays. The enemy was fraud, the enemy was cant, and she had an almost visceral need to expose it. If the tone in some of her earlier reviews now strikes us as less than sensitive, it hardly seems fair to hold a critic writing in the early '60s to post-Stonewall standards of delicacy. And it should be remembered that she wrote those reviews at a time when the rest of the press typically referred to gay men and lesbians in terms that survive today only on the far-right fringe. Her attitude is gay-friendly in her reviews of such explicitly gay-themed movies as "By Design," "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "Law of Desire." In 1982, she showed how the cross-dressing comedy "Victor/Victoria" was actually reactionary in its sexual attitudes; the movie's popularity with gay audiences mystified her.

The gay attacks on Kael are obviously painful to me, and not just because, as a gay friend of hers, I feel injured by assaults on her good name. To me they represent something far more destructive. They embody the same hopeless script that progressives have enacted again and again for the past century. Why does the left persist in exhausting itself by attacking its allies instead of its enemies? Why do deviations from orthodoxy provoke so much bitterness that the left winds up shifting its energy, its passion, away from the true threats? What was gained by creating a straw villainess out of Kael at a time when homosexuals had so many real antagonists who were virulent, indefatigable and gleefully out in the open?

There was something horrible in the way a group that had once been persecuted by smears turned itself into a smear factory. But the '80s was an ominous era for gay men and women. The backlash that had begun in 1977 with Anita Bryant's successful campaign against an anti-discrimination ordinance in Dade County, Fla., seemed to be gathering strength. In 1986, the Supreme Court shattered any hope for constitutional justice when it endorsed, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the continued criminalization of sodomy. And then, of course, there was AIDS -- the epidemic that was to claim both Byron and Russo among its countless casualties -- and the indifference of the Reagan administration to the death toll. The necessity of militance was clear, and the rise of Larry Kramerism was probably inevitable. Activists felt, as they always have, that if a few bystanders fell under the bullets, they always have.

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