“The Birdcage” Made Me Gay
BY Eric Gonzaba ON January 26, 2015
John D’Emilio’s recent post on James Baldwin and the writer’s impact on gay youth in the early sixties got me thinking about what cultural products “made me gay.” It didn’t take me long to realize that the cultural item that changed my whole way of seeing the world was a film, not a book. Today, when friends ask me my favorite movie, I unashamedly answer The Birdcage.
Ok, stay with me here. I don’t mean to suggest that I think the Mike Nichols’ 1996 comedy is, artistically, the greatest film ever made. It certainly looks like an odd choice when compared to a brilliant work such as Baldwin’s Another Country.
For reasons I can’t fully explain, my parents were not much into censoring my and my brother’s media habits. They freely dragged us along to the movie theater to watch films that I only later realized were off limits to my school friends. I’d like to think my parents wanted their kids to be more cultured; realistically, they probably just wanted to see the latest blockbuster movie and munch on buttery popcorn (by far their favorite snack) I was just six years old when I first saw The Birdcage, a movie absurdly rated “R” (for more on the craziness of the MPAA’s homophobic rating system, see This Film is Not Yet Rated).
From the opening, when a group of gorgeous drag queens sing the chorus of We Are Family, I was transfixed. Granted, I was six and probably more entertained by watching men dressed up in elaborate female costumes than by Elaine May’s witty one-liners. But as I got older and began to more fully understand the jokes, I began to laugh; I’ve been laughing ever since.
As the popular documentary Celluloid Closet explained, Hollywood depictions of LGBT people have been, well, problematic at best. Movies taught us that lesbians were sexual menaces while gay men were always sissies and flamboyant, dehumanized comical sidekicks. In some ways, The Birdcage fits this model. Albert, a drag performer played by Nathan Lane, is as colorfully and stereotypically feminine as ever. That, it turns out, is precisely the problem for Val, the son of Albert’s partner Armand (Robin Williams). Armand aids Val in trying to hide Albert from Val’s future in-laws as they make a visit to South Beach. Val’s future father-in-law, played by Gene Hackman, is a conservative (make that Limbaugh-ian) United States senator. In fact, he’s the vice president for the Coalition for Moral Order, a lover of God, guns, but not so much gays.
When the film was released, some mainstream critics agreed that the Birdcage had “little footing in the real world,” as NY Times columnist Janet Maslin explained. To them, the film continued to rely only on stereotypes of gay men and refused to show actual romance between the two main gay characters at the risk of isolating a more conservative 1990s American audience (this kind of criticism continues to this day, including the gay couple on ABC’s Modern Family). To Maslin, The Birdcage exists “in a tame, AIDS-free universe where homosexuality simply means wacky fashion sense.”
But Maslin’s critique only goes so far. Sure, the film didn’t depict the reality of the AIDS epidemic, but in many ways the film isn’t about gay people at all; it’s about the political weirdness of the 1990s. For LGBT Americans, the decade was transformative, often finding themselves the main topic around the dinner table when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was debated or when Ellen DeGeneres came out on her primetime sitcom. For conservatives, the decade was the battleground of Pat Buchanan’s culture wars, when public acceptance of homosexuals threatened to destroy “the soul of America.” In the Birdcage, director Mike Nichols showed us that gays weren’t deviants bent on moral degradation. Rather, Nichols targeted the conservative right for their hypocrisy and fear mongering. Why shouldn’t a group obsessed with notions of “family values” approve of Armand and Albert Goldman, a committed couple of twenty years with a child, far less dysfunctional than Senator Keeley.
At just six years old, even if I didn’t really know what being gay meant, it had a profound impact on me to see gay men happy and fearless. Both Mike Nichols and Robin Williams passed away last year and, with them, so did part of my childhood. Even if it’s not their most celebrated work, to me The Birdcage is a masterpiece. If nothing else, it taught me to not ever care that I pierced the toast.
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