Movies that made me gay
In this exclusive extract from his new memoir, Movies That Made Me Gay, out on October 2, landmark American writer and queer black icon Larry Duplechan celebrates the power of cinema in shaping queer identity.My very first published piece was a little memoir about the handsome young actors I watched on TV (and vaguely crushed on) as a child – Tony Dow, Billy Gray and Johnny Crawford, among them – entitled “Good Night, Rick Nelson, Wherever You Are”.
It was published in 1983, in the beefcake magazine In Touch For Men, between an interview with John James (the handsome young actor then playing “Jeff Colby” on the ABC nighttime soap opera, Dynasty), and four pages of candid photos of surfers flashing bare booty as they changed into and out of their wetsuits.
And through the remainder of the 1980s and into the ’90s, again while I was writing those little novels, I was asked to write the occasional book review (Christopher Street magazine) or pop music essay (In Style For Men magazine); but neither my idol Vito Russo (author of the seminal work on gays in the movies, The Celluloid Closet (1981) – more on that book, and Vito, later) nor David Ehrenstein (Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1927-1997 (1998)) were fearing for their jobs.With the advent of social media, wherein everyone (literally, everyone) is a critic, I found an outlet for my desire to write about pop music, television, and movies – especially movies – on Facebook.
Since 2008, I have spent what many might consider an inordinate amount of time on Facebook; posting photos of things that catch my eye on my daily morning walks with my husband through our suburban Los Angeles neighborhood; photos of our Chartreux cat, Mr.
