In Patrick E. Horrigan's Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies, the reader is taken on a cinematic tour of the films that shaped the author's psyche. Get out your popcorn and read on ...
Jill Dearman: Talk to us a little bit about the connection (for you) between movies and your sexual identity.
Patrick Horrigan: Movies and sexual identity are connected, for me, on several levels. Whatever else they do, movies always speak about gender (what it means to be masculine and feminine) and sexual orientation (who is to be desired and why). Movies were among the first objects of art that stimulated my imagination as a child. The people that most attracted me in the movies tended to be disruptive female figures—often the heroines of musical comedy (Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand). Music was a key element here, because I also played the piano from a young age, so my mental life was full of music and movies. I was always being bullied or shunned in school for being a sissy, a “faggot,” and there was no one I could talk to about what was happening. Going to the movies or watching them on TV offered an escape, but not enough of an escape, since a movie only lasts a couple of hours and then it’s back to real life. I soon found that by fantasizing about movies, about making movies, starring in movies as myself, all day, every day, whatever else I was doing (walking to the bus stop, mowing the lawn), I could exercise my creative muscles and protect myself from real life. I went deep into a fantasy world inspired by movies. A kind of self-medication. It made life bearable for me as a queer kid.
JD: You and I share a love for the Poseidon Adventure. What did you think of the remake or the era of remakes that soon followed our formative years?
PH: My feeling about turn-of-the-century disaster movies (Twister, Titanic, Poseidon) as opposed to the 1970s disaster movies we knew as kids (the Airport movies, the original Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, even Rollercoaster) probably has more to do with me than with the movies themselves. I became head-over-heels obsessed with The Poseidon Adventure when I first saw it in 1972 because, as a nine-year-old, I could easily put myself in the shoes of those passengers, particularly the women and children, making their way through a world gone haywire and finding in themselves reserves of strength and creativity they didn’t know they possessed. When the house is upside-down, normal rules about who has authority and how we should live our lives are suspended. I had a lot of suppressed rage as a kid, and movies in this genre allowed me to feel and think about suffering in ways that seemed, at the time, incredibly liberating. Once I became an adult and started making my own rules, I didn’t “need” this kind of movie in the same way. When I saw Titanic as a 34-year-old, I remember being fascinated by the ship, both intact and in distress, but feeling the Leo-Kate love story was just in the way. Of course, all those adolescent girls who swooned over the movie had a different experience. But that’s my point.
JD: How did you decide which films to include in Widescreen Dreams?
PH: The films I included in Widescreen Dreams were among the films that mattered most to me as a kid. But I also wanted to use them to mark stages in my development, to tell a coming-of-age story. So, for example, The Sound of Music represents childhood memories of growing up in a big Catholic family in the 1960s. Hello, Dolly! is the entry point for thinking about Barbra Streisand and why she became my alter-ego starting around age ten. The Poseidon Adventure allows me to look at my adolescence in the context of the Vietnam era. The Wiz becomes a story about hearing the call of New York City as far away as suburban Pennsylvania, eventually getting to the city, and learning to live with what I found there. And Dog Day Afternoon addresses head-on the complexities of coming out. I could have chosen other films, but it was a question of being true to my experience and of finding a way to tell a story that other people can identify with.
JD: What films have had a major impact on your psyche more recently?
PH: Many films have made a strong impact on me since the period I wrote about in Widescreen Dreams. Maurice, for example, based on the E.M. Forster novel about a gay man’s search for love in Edwardian England, gets the full Merchant-Ivory treatment, and I appreciate it more every time I see it. Some find the happy ending to be dishonest, but I think it shows how few opportunities for wish fulfillment gay people are given at the movies. I also love the film version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. It explores the destructive side of a gay man’s psyche so beautifully (amazing European locations!), all the while showing how Tom’s homicidal rage is both personal pathology and a product of time and place. Most recently, I’ve become enamored of Chris and Don, a documentary about the decades-long relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. It envisions love between gay men as a meaningful part of the total life cycle. There’s also wonderful footage from a home movie of the two of them on their first trip to Venice in 1956. Looking back over this list of movies, I see that each one has literary roots (I’ve been teaching English for seventeen years), each one offers the vicarious thrill of travel (I guess movie-going for me is still very much about the need for escape), and each deals substantively with the inner lives of gay men before Stonewall. I think the politics of gay liberation has, obviously, brought us countless necessary and good things, but it hasn’t always helped us to see our full complexity as human beings. That’s where literature and film come in.
JD: You've written plays and nonfiction and are now working on a novel. How is your writing process similar or different for each of these mediums?
PH: My writing process always seems to begin with an irrational, burning desire to explore some object, whether it’s the movies I loved as a child (as in Widescreen Dreams) or the set of answering-machine tapes a former boyfriend saved and which I inherited after his death (the basis for my play, Messages for Gary) or the old Penn Station (the inspiration for the novel I’m currently writing). The object gives me something to sink my teeth into—it provokes research where one question opens out into another and it seems to hold never-ending intellectual possibilities. But it also makes me want to create stories around and about it. In Widescreen Dreams, there are narrative “moments,” some only a paragraph long, some going to several pages. It’s like a collage made up of narrative blocks alternating with blocks of analysis all arranged in a general, sweeping movement from childhood through adolescence. When I write drama or fiction, the balance between research-based analysis and story-telling shifts. The need to tell a compelling story takes pride of place, and research comes in to support the demands of the story. In a way, the story, its structure, its proportions, becomes the object I puzzle over. And whether it’s autobiography, film criticism, drama, or fiction, writing always seems to send me off on a personal quest. Maybe that’s where the “burning desire” comes from. I often think of myself as someone who can’t see himself, who doesn’t know himself sufficiently. Writing helps me to know my own mind a little better.
JD: Thanks to Patrick and Happy Gay Pride month to all. A new documentary about the birth of the gay rights movement opens today: Stonewall Uprising. Before the credits roll I invite you to up the narrative ante in your work by checking out my new book, Bang the Keys and visiting my website, http://www.bangthekeys.com.
And I leave you with this question: what films from your youth have most affected how you view the world?
