All About EduGaytion
By: Eric Peterson
Tags: Film, Bette Davis, LGBTQ, Liza Minnelli, Gay Culture

All About EduGaytion

While stuck at home, my friends and I have been gathering for movie nights and learning a little more about our culture.

Photo by Sara Rampazzo on Unsplash

A few months ago, before we were all ordered to self-isolate, stay at least six feet apart, and mask ourselves if we dare leave our front porches, my favorite thing to do was have a “wine and puppies night” with my gaggle of gays.

To attend a wine and puppies night, you need only bring three necessary items: yourself, copious amounts of wine, and your dog. And although it wasn’t required, sometimes there would be a board game involved, but most often we’d end up either standing around the kitchen gossiping or we’d find ourselves crowded around a television. Remember crowding around things? It seems like a million years ago.

One variation on the standard wine and puppies nights that began in early February was a series that a friend and I concocted called “Edugaytion.” While I’m not exactly a film historian, I do co-host a podcast about old movies and I was raised right by a pair of lesbian moms and countless gay uncles and lesbian aunties who have shared with me remnants of gay culture that most of my Gen X and millennial friends have not been introduced to, certainly not by their families of choice or peers. Feeling a little out of touch with the cultural touchstones that defined the gay experience, he asked me to curate a series of films that were important to our gay elders, and I was only too happy to oblige.

“Every time you hear a word you don’t understand, dear, write it down. Later, I will explain it.”

(Rosalind Russell as Auntie Mame, 1958)

February’s inaugural Edugaytion night involved the requisite wine and puppies, but centered around a viewing of the glorious 1958 comedy Auntie Mame, directed by Morton DaCosta and featuring Rosalind Russell as the guardian every gay boy dreamed of. The fact that Mame’s young charge Patrick turns out to be heterosexual pretty much destroys the notion that parents make you gay, because anyone raised by Mame Dennis has no business being heterosexual, but there you are.

Our Auntie Mame viewing was such a success that we decided we’d do it again in a couple of months. I decided we’d watch my favorite film of all time, All About Eve (1950), written and directed by Joe Mankiewicz and starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter, Marilyn Monroe, and the only one to actually win an Oscar, George Sanders.

By the time April rolled around, it was clear that an actual gathering was out of the question. We were in the midst of a global pandemic and no one was leaving their homes. But inspired somehow by the ballsy divas of Mankiewicz’s masterpiece, I was undaunted. We wouldn’t be able to gather, but with a wine glass in our hand and a puppy at our feet, the Edugaytion must go on.

Bette Davis & Thelma Ritter as Margo Channing & Birdie Coonan in All About Eve (1950)

A friend has a paid Zoom account through work, and so gathering on the scheduled Friday evening was easy enough. Unfortunately, after an hour of trying, we just couldn’t figure out a way to play the movie so that everyone could watch together, so the first meeting ended up being more of your traditional wine and puppies gathering. But before it was all over, we decided we’d all watch All About Eve over the weekend and meet again on Sunday to talk about it.

It wasn’t as much fun as watching the film together, but in addition to the conversation, there were wine, there were puppies (albeit off-screen), and there was the company of each other — alone, yet together thanks to our tablets and laptops.

No one loved the film quite as much as I do, but I have a slight advantage in that I’ve seen All About Eve probably ten times or more and can quote entire scenes from memory. When one friend lamented that Thelma Ritter wasn’t given very many good lines, I recited four or five of my favorites until everyone begged me to stop. My friends wondered aloud if Margo Channing (Davis) choosing marriage over a starring role on Broadway was somehow anti-feminist, but we eventually concluded that she wasn’t retiring altogether, but simply no longer interested in playing girls half her age while having no life to speak of after the curtain call. We dished a little about how Bette Davis probably lost out on an Academy Award because her co-star (Anne Baxter) refused to campaign for a nomination in the Supporting category.

In our own little way, we kept our little tradition alive — and learned a little bit about our culture — despite the pandemic and the isolation it has wrought.

The next week, we decided to give tandem viewing a try, and discovered that it actually works pretty well if everyone mutes themselves unless they’re making a wry, witty comment to the group about what people are seeing. In those moments, we can often tell that someone is a couple seconds ahead or behind — but for the most part it works out quite well, if you remember to put yourself back on mute, that is (who says we’re not learning new things during the pandemic?).

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in Cabaret (1972)

The third film was Cabaret (1972). I’ve written before about my formative experiences with this particular film, and it was thrilling to share it with some of my closest friends. This film was the first one to feature explicitly gay characters, which gave us a chance to talk about how gay people were so rarely seen in the popular culture of the past, and usually with derision. Michael York’s character in Cabaret isn’t a saint, but then again, neither were any of us on the Zoom call, and we all agreed that the depiction felt real, and respectful. Mostly, we agreed that it’s silly to spend a half hour talking about Michael York when you could spend that time talking about the fabulous Liza — and I believe that my obsession with Ms. Minnelli is finally understood, if not universally shared among my cohort.

After Cabaret, one of our crowd was yearning for something a little more recent, and maybe something they’d seen before, and even though this was not at all the point of our EduGaytion nights, I relented. The fourth film I selected was The First Wives Club (1996), which most everyone had seen, but it’s hard not to enjoy it, especially when Bette Midler turns to Goldie Hawn and asks, “Don’t you have any feelings?!” — to which Hawn replies through tears, “Of course I do! I’m an actress! I have all of them!”

From this point on, I decided to get back to the original mission of the group, but I also understood that everyone could have a voice in the films we watched. So I didn’t choose the film for our fifth EduGaytion night; rather I chose four — and put them up for a vote. The winner of our first poll was Far From Heaven (2002). At eighteen years old, it was the “youngest” of the old movies we’d watched thus far, but I included it because it’s Todd Haynes’s brilliant throwback to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk in style and tone, but touched on themes (like homosexuality and interracial romance) that films from the 1950s could only hint at.

Mia Farrow & Ruth Gordon as Rosemary Woodhouse & Minnie Castavet in Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

Everyone loved the film, but I wanted to make sure that the gatherings, which had become a weekly pandemic tradition, didn’t start to feel monotonous — so I decided the next film would need to pick up the pace a bit. I decided to build my next poll around a theme, and selected four horror films that had inched into the gay pantheon. The winner was Rosemary’s Baby (1968), featuring Mia Farrow as a young woman impregnated by Satan and Ruth Gordon’s Oscar-winning turn as the nosy, devil-worshipping next door neighbor. The bad news was that everyone (but me) hated it. The good news was … well, they had voted for it (over classics like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Carrie), so I didn’t worry about it too much. The point, after all, was not to necessarily enjoy everything, but to learn from it. Perhaps one day, they’ll meet an old queen who calls his annoying heterosexual neighbors Roman and Minnie, and they’ll get the joke. Perhaps not. What I can say for sure is this: during the post-show conversation, I got to tell my favorite Rosemary’s Baby joke, that it’s a movie about Mia Farrow’s second worst baby daddy. (It killed.)

Despite the chilly reception of Satan’s spawn, the group was still eager to meet the following Saturday. Grateful for this, I decided to sweeten the pot by making the theme for our seventh outing (inning?) the movie musical. The winner was Victor/Victoria (1982), featuring Julie Andrews as a woman pretending to be a (gay) man who becomes the most celebrated drag queen in Paris. James Garner plays a Chicago gangster who falls for Julie but cannot be with her unless he joins her ruse, which will require him to pretend he’s gay as well. So yes, there’s closetedness, toxic masculinity, shame, and the politics of gender in there, but there’s also delightful songs and dances, and a line I get a lot of mileage out of every February: “There’s nothing more inconvenient than an old queen with a headcold.”

Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale (with Paul Heinreid) in Now, Voyager (1942).

I will admit that I had hoped we’d be watching more films from Hollywood’s Golden Age, but I was happy enough to have a weekend tradition with my family of choice, and the conversations after each movie had been delightful — so while I wasn’t complaining, I will admit that I was delighted when my gaggle of gays answered the subsequent poll and picked the oldest film available to them: Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (1942). The theme that week was “makeovers,” and it was wonderful to take my eyes away from the screen and watch the faces of my friends take in the sight of the beautified spinster aunt boarding the transatlantic cruise that will eventually introduce her to the dishy Paul Heinreid. After the movie, we discussed the inherent metaphor that speaks to every gay man whenever an ugly duckling becomes a swan on the silver screen. It can’t help but remind us of our own journey from denial to being our fabulous authentic selves — and besides, makeovers make things pretty, and we like that.

The next film on the docket is A Room With A View (1985) — which still feels new to me, even if it was released thirty-five years ago. Produced and directed by gay men, based on a novel written by a gay man, it’s a heterosexual love story on the surface only, teeming with themes of self-discovery and social pressures that E.M. Forster knew all too well as a closeted gay man living in Edwardian England. Also, there’s Dame Judi Dench declaiming about flowers. “The reckless rose,” she intones. “The tempestuous tulip!” It doesn’t get much gayer than that.

And after that, I’m thinking about a good old-fashioned comedy, or perhaps a film based on the plays of Tennessee Williams. I’ve got to figure out how to get Mahogany (1975) in there somehow, even though I’m sure at least two of my EduGaytion study group are … not … ready.