A surprising movie star plays gay in ‘Parting Glances,’ a charming slice-of-life indie from 1986.
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting 1986’s Parting Glances, an indie dramedy and one of the first film’s to address the AIDS epidemic.This January marks the 40th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival.
Founded by actor Robert Redford as an attempt to elevate and highlight independent voices in film, the festival has become one of the most important cultivators of new filmmaking talent, as countless directors, writers, and other talent have gotten their start in the snowy Utah mountains.
Ever since its inception, programming by and about queer people has been an essential part of the festival; films like Desert Hearts (1986), Paris Is Burning (1991), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Hedwig And The Angry Inch (2001) and Call Me By Your Name (2017) all got their jumpstart in Park City.Subscribe to our daily newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.This week, we’re looking back at one of the queer films that premiered at the festival in 1986, the comedic drama Parting Glances; a heartfelt and unwavering look at the 1980s gay scene in New York, when AIDS was making its way through the community, and the community was unwilling to give into it.Parting Glances follows Michael (Richard Ganoung) and Robert (John Bolger), a gay couple living in New York City, over the course of the last evening before Robert leaves for a work trip to Africa for two years.
In the twenty four hours that the movie tracks, Michael and Robert journey through a goodbye party thrown by their friend Joan (Kathy Kinney), and a dinner with Robert’s boss Cecil (Patrick Tull) and his wife Betty (Yolande Bavan), who seem to be living in a lavender marriage, as Michael stops by to look afterr his ex-boyfriend Nick (Steve Buscemi in one of his most subtle and yet daring performances), a young musician living with AIDS.There is very little plot or narrative stakes.
