IT’s NOT HETERO, IT’s HBO
Home Box Office is the most successful pay-cable channel, with the number of subscribers hitting the 28 million mark in September of 2001. Over the years, HBO has earned a reputation for its high quality original programming, which includes hip, offbeat comedies
(The Larry Sanders Show
(1992-1998),
Sex and the City
(1998- )); dark, edgy dramas
(The Sopranos
(1999- ), Oz (1997- ),
Six Feet Under
(2001- )); and big-budget made-for-cable movies and miniseries. In 2001, HBO’s programming budget exceeded $400 million. The network reportedly spent $125 million alone on the ten-hour World War II miniseries,
Band of Brothers
(2001).
With a larger subscriber base to retain, HBO has been generally less aggressive than Showtime in targeting specific demographics. Although HBO has yet to create a gay series like Showtime’s
Queer as Folk
(some believe
Sex and the City
comes pretty darn close), the network’s original series and made-for-TV films are not lacking gay content.
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Over the years, HBO has remained committed to social, political, and historical issues, such as racism, the women’s movement, abortion rights, and various gay-related issues, particularly AIDS.
In addition, HBO has showcased some of the best gay-themed documentaries. In 2001, HBO aired the award-winning
Southern Comfort
, a moving portrait of male-to-female transsexual Robert Eads, who has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Eads is a witty, insightful individual who lives with his girlfriend Lola Cola in a small Georgia community (which he refers to as “Bubba Country”). In celebrating Eads’s power and spirit, director Kate Davis challenges our preconceived ideas of transgender people and the Deep South. More importantly, the filmmaker treats Eads as an individual, rather than an oddity.
HBO also co-financed several documentaries by filmmakers Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, including
Common Threads
(1989), a moving tribute to five AIDS victims and their loved ones;
The Celluloid Closet
(1995), an entertaining and informative look at the history of homosexuality in Hollywood based on Vito Russo’s groundbreaking study; and
Paragraph
175 (1999), a harrowing account of the persecution of homosexuals as told by a few remaining gay survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Epstein and Friedman are skillful filmmakers who tackle complex social, historical and political issues affecting the lives of gay people around the world. In the process, they give their subjects, whether they be people with AIDS or Holocaust survivors, the opportunity to tell their stories.
Their Academy Award-winning
Common Threads
opens our eyes to the emotional toll AIDS has taken on the family and friends of its victims. The filmmakers also challenge our preconceived ideas about P.W.A.S and the disease itself by focusing on five very different individuals (a young hemophiliac, a drug addict, an Olympic medalist, an entertainer, and the lover of gay author/activist Vito Russo), who are all commemorated by panels on the AIDS quilt.
Around the time
Common Threads
premiered, the commercial TV networks started to produce a series of made-for-TV bio-pics about public figures and celebrities who died of AIDS or whose HIV status was the subject of a national news story (see inset). The majority were “doubly closeted” gay men who hid their illness as they did their sexual orientation. These films expose how homophobia is at the root of the American public’s indifference toward people with AIDS.
HBO produced two of the best:
Citizen Cohn
(1992), starring James Woods as the closeted conservative attorney Roy Cohn, who served as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Communist witch hunts; and
Gia,
starring Angelina Jolie in her Emmy-winning portrayal of supermodel Gia Maria Carangi, one of the first public figures to die of AIDS. Both films have an edge most commercial network films lack because they concentrate on the complex personalities of their title characters, rather than on the disease that ended both their lives in 1986.
Cohn was a maniacal, self-loathing, closeted Jewish homosexual who made a career of destroying the lives of known and suspected Communists and other “subversives.” Significant moments in Cohn’s life are seen through flashbacks, including his early success as the prosecutor who sent Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair; his association with McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover; and his disbarment and financial downfall in the 1980s. In a remarkable performance, Woods captures the essence of a walking contradiction. Although
Citizen Cohn
doesn’t go deep enough into certain aspects of his story, such as his sex life, it ultimately makes no apologies for the son of a liberal Jewish judge who was vindictive, self-serving, and responsible for smearing the names and ruining the lives of many innocent people.
While Cohn hid his insecurities and self-hatred behind his vengeance, Gia followed a more self-destructive path, which the film suggests stemmed from her abandonment by her mother (Mercedes Ruehl) at an early age. Novelist Jay McInerney (
Bright Lights, Big City)
and the film’s director/co-writer Michael Cristofer trace the model’s meteoric rise to stardom, her tumultuous relationships with both men and women, and her battle with heroin and AIDS. Jolie manages to embody the rebellious beauty who knew how to push everyone’s buttons, yet deep down was a frightened child.
HBO’s most ambitious project to date about AIDS is
And the Band Played On,
a two-hour-plus adaptation of Randy Shilts’s best selling account of the AIDS crisis. The project had been in development for several years, passing through the hands of two major networks (ABC and NBC) and several directors. Once the producers added some stars to the cast list (Richard Gere, Lily Tomlin, and Steve Martin), the $8 million dollar project finally received a green light. Director Roger Spottiswoode and writer Arnold Schulman approached the events leading from the earliest cases to the discovery of the virus as a detective story with government virologist Don Francis (Matthew Modine in a terrific performance) in the “Sam Spade” role.
The roadblocks Francis and his associates at the Centers for Disease Control encounter are numerous: bureaucratic red tape, lack of funding, an apathetic Reagan administration, a self-serving medical researcher, and members of the gay community, who fought the closing of the bathhouses in San Francisco in the name of sexual freedom.
Band
demonstrates how homophobia and greed were the underlying reasons why it took so long for public and private institutions to take action to prevent the spread of the virus. In one standout scene, Francis meets with representatives of the major blood supply companies, who object to spending money on testing the blood supply because only a few people received contaminated blood. “How many people will it take?” Francis asks. “Give us a number, so we can stop bothering you.”
With its large ensemble cast and multiple story lines,
Band
was an ambitious undertaking. The docudrama effectively links a series of events (some occurred simultaneously) that preceded and, in some instances, lead to the discovery of the virus. But the dramatic tension is somewhat diminished when the film pauses to focus on one of the many minor characters, like a successful choreographer (Richard Gere), who, upon learning he’s sick, utters one of the film’s memorable lines, “The party’s over!” Another subplot involves AIDS activist Bill Krause (Ian McKellan), who jeopardizes his relationship with his lover Kiko (B.D. Wong) by devoting all his time and attention to his work. When characters, relationships, and situations like these are not sufficiently developed, certain moments never achieve their intended emotional impact. Consequently, Krause’s death from AIDS at the end of the film is overshadowed by the powerful final montage, which intercuts clips of the media’s early coverage of the disease and the faces of those lost over the years.
According to Raymond Murray, author of
Images of the Dark, Band
was also criticized for promoting “the general perception that it took the intense work of a group of straight men and women to come to the rescue of the helpless gay community.”
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Apparently Shilts and members of the gay community were displeased with Spottiswoode’s cut of the film because it didn’t present the gay community in a positive enough light. HBO fired Spottiswoode, who kept his name on the film, but publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the final edited version, which he felt was “sanitized.” “It was supposed to be a tough film,” he remarked, “but equally tough on everyone.”
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And the Band Played On
is not a perfect film, but like Shilts’s book, it is a powerful indictment of the individuals and public and private institutions who failed to respond to the crisis during its infancy, out of apathy, greed, fear, and homophobia.
In addition to fact-based dramas, HBO has also produced fictional works about families preparing for or dealing with the death of a loved one. One early entry was
Tidy Endings
(1988), an adaptation of actor/playwright Harvey Fierstein’s one-act play (originally presented on stage as part of a series of one-acts under the title
Safe Sex).
Fierstein stars as Arthur, who has just buried his lover, Colin, after a long battle with AIDS. Grief-stricken over his loss, Arthur is in no mood to contend with Colin’s ex-wife Marian (Stockard Channing), who still has unresolved feelings about losing her husband to another man.
Both Fierstein’s writing and performance capture the anger, frustration, and isolation many people feel after losing a loved one, particularly to a debilitating disease like AIDS. Marian is a bundle of mixed emotions, all of which the terrific Channing unleashes as she attempts to bring closure to her relationship with her ex-husband and make amends with Arthur. The result is a subtle, well-crafted drama that explores why we need to turn to others to gain the strength we need to move on with our lives.
Unresolved feelings are also at the center of
In the Gloaming
(1997), a sentimental drama starring Robert Sean Leonard as a gay man with AIDS who returns to his parents’ home to die. Danny spends his remaining months getting reacquainted with mom, Janet (Glenn Close), who feels guilty for keeping her son at a distance. We witness Danny’s rapid deterioration over the next few months, but also see someone coming to terms with his own mortality. Leonard and Close are terrific actors and their exchanges, in which, for the first time, they share their thoughts on everything from movies to sex, are touching and nicely written by Will Scheffer, who based his teleplay on a
New Yorker
short story by Alice Elliot Dark. First time director Christopher Reeve is effective at creating an atmosphere that grows increasingly more tranquil and serene as Danny prepares for the inevitable. Some moments, like an outburst from Danny’s yuppie sister (Bridget Fonda), who is jealous of the attention her dying brother is receiving from Mom and Dad, don’t ring quite as true. Still,
In the Gloaming
exemplifies the type of original programming that has earned HBO its reputation for quality drama.
Over the past five years, the network has introduced several critically acclaimed dramatic series. At the top of the list are Oz, a provocative prison drama that takes an inside look at life behind bars, and
Six Feet Under
(2001- ), an offbeat drama about a family-owned funeral home. Both series, to varying degrees, deal with mature themes and contain adult language, nudity (frontal female and male), and graphic violence. In terms of gay content, both Oz and Six
Feet Under
feature gay male characters in their respective ensemble casts and deal with gay-related issues, such as homophobia, AIDS, rape, and anti-gay violence.
Oz paints a dark, realistic portrait of prison life from the inmates’ point-of-view and, to a lesser extent, of the prison staff and administration. Oz, short for Oswald Security Penitentiary (and renamed Oswald State Correctional Facility in the third season), houses an experimental cellblock known as Emerald City. The inmates assigned to “Em City” are required to follow a regimented schedule that includes physical exercise, work detail, classes, and drug and alcohol counseling. The cell block’s diverse population consists of tightly-knit groups of Muslims, Italian wise guys, White Aryan Supremacists, Bikers, and Latino and Black “gangstas,” who resort to violence, murder, and rape to gain and maintain control.
All three vices come into play in one of the series’s central storylines involving Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a corporate attorney sentenced to fifteen years for killing a woman while driving drunk. Beecher enters Oz as a mild-mannered, heterosexual male with a wife and children. Over the course of four seasons, we witness his transformation into a hardened killer who develops a deep, obsessive love for another inmate, Chris Keller (Chris Meloni).
In the series’s premiere (“The Routine”), Beecher arrives at Oz and is befriended by Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons), an inmate who, unknown to Beecher, is the sadistic leader of the White Aryans. Schillinger forces poor Beecher to be his “slag” (slang for slave) and subsequently brands a swastika on his ass and rapes him. Consequently, Beecher grows increasingly unstable and suffers a breakdown.
At the start of season two, Beecher starts to fight back, first by biting the tip off of the penis of an aggressive cellmate, James Robson (R.E. Rodgers), when he makes the mistake of demanding oral sex. He then shares a “pod” (slang for cell) with a new prisoner, Chris Keller, who pretends to hate the White Arayans, but is actually helping Schillinger seek revenge on Beecher for nearly blinding him. To complicate matters more, Beecher falls in love with Keller. In a conversation with one of the prison’s resident spiritual advisors, Sister Pete (Rita Moreno), he tries to sort out his feelings: