a grand soap opera
by
Douglas Messerli
Craig Lucas (screenplay), Norman René (director) Longtime Companion / 1989
One of the seminal films of the 1980s, Norman René’s Longtime Companion, was released at the end of that decade in 1989, yet through its chronological structure narrates its action by embracing almost the entire 1980s, beginning on July 3, 1981.
That story begins almost where director
Stan LaPresto left us a decade earlier, on Fire Island in 1970, or when René’s
movie shifts back to Manhattan, the party with which William Friedkin’s cinematic
rendition of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band closed. Yet so very
much had changed since then. The ramifications of the Stonewall rebellion had
percolated through the 1970s to give even the campiest of gay queens pause in
their denigration of the world around them and in their hoots of self-abuse.
Fire Island was still celebrating its
high “teas” with its mix of heavy alcohol, drugs, and dishy putdowns, but there
was a newfound gravitas in gay relationships such as that between the affluent
couple David (Bruce Davison) and Sean (Mark Lamos) celebrating the 4th
of July with friends in their beach house. Sean is a screenwriter for a pop
daytime soap opera into which, during the course of the nine years this film
covers, will gradually introduce gay characters to the American housewives who
sit at home and daily watch his melodramatic plots unravel. His lover David has
inherited a great deal of money which he uses to busy himself with trust fund
investments. Celebrating the holiday with them are their close friends—in the
bond between them, often resulting in people mistaking them as a couple—John
(Dermont Mulroney) and Willy (Campbell Scott).
Yet that morning on his way to the
audition, Howard, having read the first report in The New York Times about
a new “cancer” (Kaposi’s sarcoma) which has killed forty-one gay men, calls his lover to tell
him to read the article, somewhat disturbed by the news. Meanwhile, their next
door neighbor, Lisa (Mary-Louise Parker), who owns an antique shop, calls her
best friend Fuzzy (Stephen Caffrey) to insist that he too read the article.
Back on Fire Island, some are worried by
the news, others suggesting it must have something to do with drugs, another
thinking it is perhaps connected to the use of “poppers” (alkyl nitrites) that
are often inhaled by gay men for the rush and high of sex and because it helps
to increase the blood flow and relax the sphincter muscle which facilitates
anal sex. (I can recall some of my friends suggesting the same thing at the
time.) Some dismiss the entire situation, suggesting that it certainly has
little to do with their healthy
As critic Peter Travers wrote in Rolling
Stone in 1990: “This group tries to laugh off the report that many of the
cancer patients used drugs or had frequent sexual encounters. But the hot
atmosphere on this July day has definitely been chilled.”
Meanwhile
on the beach John and Willy again pass by a friendly but seemingly awkward
newcomer to the Island, Fuzzy, who has apparently waved to them in a friendly
manner for the days they’ve been there. Fuzzy, nicknamed for his hirsute appearance,
shows up at the afternoon “tea,” and, despite the man’s rather clumsy naivete,
Willy, who is attracted to hairy men, makes a pass, and he and Fuzzy begin a
relationship.
Even given the context of those early
celebratory few days, accordingly, we know that Longtime Companion is
not going to be a film focusing on the dating and partnership patterns of these
individuals.
By the film’s 1989 release everyone
watching this film knew what that original “gay disease” really meant, and how
it would radically effect the lives of thousands upon thousands of LGBTQ and
heterosexual individuals. By that year 117,508 cases of AIDS had been reported,
with 89,343 deaths. By 2016 that number of infected individuals had reached an
estimated 1,140,400, with over half of the cases, 707,100, being caused by
male-to-male sexual contact. 58,600 of those men combined with the injection of
drugs.
Only ten months later in the film, April
30, 1982, John contracts pneumonia, which his friends, at first, attempt to
downplay as something he will soon get over. But things have clearly already
altered, not just in the increasing number of deaths reported but with regard
to how the growing “gay plague” has begun to effect people’s lives who have not
even showed any signs of being HIV positive.
Howard,
for example, is presented with a new script written by Sean that reveals his soap
opera character is about to become the first openly gay character on daytime
TV. While it might be seen as a cause for celebration, he is nonetheless troubled
that he will by typecast by playing a gay role which will delimit the other
parts he may be offered in the future.* Willy and Fuzzy’s romance has grown
into a committed relationship, and they move in together. John, diagnosed with
AIDS soon after his being hospitalized, dies.
One of the few faults of Craig Lucas’
masterful script for Longtime Companion is that as we grow to know more
and more about this group of eight close friends and get to like them as
characters, we also begin to perceive them also a bit like we might perceive
soap opera characters, watching their caring, loving, and sometimes hostile
interchanges only to wonder who will be the next to suffer the effects of AIDS,
either physically or mentally as the demands it puts upon on gay men, who are
now often seen as outcasts in the society in general become almost unbearable. To
have, after Stonewall, come out proudly, demanding the respect and equality with
the heterosexual majority, only to be once more become shunned and ostracized
for a mysterious disease that many feared might be spread by contact was absolutely
devastating.
Just two years full years after the first
scene of the film, on July 17, 1983, Sean is constantly terrified at the
slightest changes of his body, a mole that he previously had not noticed, a
loss of appetite, etc., seemingly fantasy fears of possibly having contracted
the disease. Even personal relationships come under scrutiny, as David tries to
comprehend his companion’s fears. Since he himself is healthy, he has to wonder
has Sean had sex with someone outside of their relationship? Has he injected
drugs? He laughs at what appears to be his mate’s newly-developed nosophobia.
Yet both know of a sick neighbor on the island who has become a pariah, people
going out of their
Willy, Fuzzy, and Lisa, along with other
friends Michael and Bob, gather with David and Sean to watch Howard’s character
reveal his gay sexuality on the soap opera, Lisa revealing that the actor who
Sean believes is heterosexual is her neighbor who she knows to be gay. It might
be a meaningless aside in normal times, but we recognize in her observations
that she has perhaps ended Howard’s acting career.
A
little more than a year later, the film dating events as September 7, 1984, the
writer of Howard’s script, Sean is hospitalized, Willy visiting him has become
so terrified of contracting the disease that he not only wears a surgical mask
and gown which in those days were available since medical science had still not
determined precisely how AIDS was contracted, but after Sean kisses him on the
cheek, quickly making his way to the bathroom to scrub the spot where his
friend had planted the kiss. It is an almost surreal scene as René captures the
absurdness of everyone’s, including gay men’s, often unfounded fears and
terrors.
Howard’s lover Paul is also
hospitalized, diagnosed as having toxoplasmosis, an infection associated with
an infection through parasites. Surely this can have little to do with AIDS the
two attempt to assure themselves, without perceiving that the disease most
often occurs when the patient’s immune system in ineffectual. Almost like being
gay without willing to openly admit it, the two lovers also subliminally
realize the reality behind his illness, Howard breaks down into sobs, the victim
attempting to comfort his seemingly healthy companion.
By this time, anyone in this film’s
audience with even the smallest shred of empathy, let alone those many who
lived through this era (and for some continue to still today in 2020) are in
tears. I certainly was. The next scene, dated March 22, 1985, represents some
of the most dramatically compelling events in this unforgettable movie. The
previously witty and sometimes catty gay man, Sean has fallen into dementia,
with his friend David helping to deceive Sean’s studio—they have conspired to escape
the observation of his colleagues by creating the myth of Sean taking a
temporary retreat to the Island in order to write—by his companion cluing him
into what to say, reminding me a bit of the comic scene from the I Love Lucy
series in which Lucy, meeting her husband Desi Arnez’s grandmother and
relatives for the first time hires a translator hooked up to her hidden
headphones to help her pretend to speak Spanish. Yet there is little humor
about this film’s scene wherein David tries to get Sean to say simple words
like “yes” or “no” in response to far more complex telephone comments from the
studio exec. Later, back in Manhattan, David takes Sean for a walk, but when
his lover, who has lost nearly all sense of the “real” world in which he loves,
urinates in a park fountain, he must speedily whisk him away when an angry
nanny caring for her young charge becomes outraged.
Fuzzy, Howard’s lawyer/agent, argues on
the phone with a producer who refuses to hire his client for a movie after
having heard that the actor has AIDS, the same rumor that has lost him his job
playing his gay role in Other People. Paul has been re-hospitalized
after a seizure. Without a
On that Friday evening, Willy observes
his lover Fuzzy checking for swollen glands. The two briefly talk about their
fears and possible deaths. Fuzzy asks “What do you think happens when we die.” to
which Willy quips, “We get to have sex again.” Soon after Fuzzy will turn his
skills as a lawyer into a force which will help to cope with the epidemic by
offering his time in a local AIDS clinic trying to offer the little help
available to the hundreds of dying men during this period.
René and Lucas do not use their film as a
tool to openly criticize the society in general for ignoring the crises its
characters are facing, often alone or with equally suffering friends. But in
hindsight it is important to remind ourselves that as of the date of these
scenes, then President Ronald Reagan had not yet even publicly mentioned the disease
killing so many gay and bisexual American men. It wasn’t until September 17 of
that year that Reagan finally uttered the acronym, in responding to a question
from a reporter. He described it as a “top priority,” defending his
administration’s response and funding of research (surely reminding us of
another lying President still refusing as I write this to deal with another
pandemic, COVID-19). It is perhaps no accident that on that same day Regan’s actor/friend
Rock Hudson died of AIDS. A month later Congress allocated almost $190 million
for AIDS research, $70 million higher than Regan’s administration had requested.
It is the January 4, 1986 episode of this
moving drama that helped Davison to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar
nominating, a Golden Globe Award, the Independent Spirit Award, a National
Society of Film Critics Award, and the New York Film Critics Circle award for
acting.
Now incontinent, in constant pain, immobile,
and nearly stuporous, Sean attempts to cry out to David that he wants “to go,” his
companion positively interrupting it that perhaps the patient wants to go for a
walk, but inwardly knowing the truth. Sending the attending nurse on an errand
for which he provides a handful of money in order to sit down alone with his
lover. With utter calm and solemnity he tells his friend of so many years that
it is all right to let go, and repeating the phrase over and over, soothes the
troubled patient into allowing himself to die, holding his hand as Sean
breathes his last breath. No tears are shed, no moans or regrets. David simply
sits watching his “longtime companion,” as the newspapers will later describe a
relationship that has not yet found the language of marriage, seems finally at
peace. We know that there are been far too many days and nights of tears and
regrets. Now is the time to accept the end that will come to us all sooner or
later.
Willy
and Lisa stop by to help out, but David, wanting to be alone just a little
longer with Sean, sends them into the other room to select a suit the dead man
might wear for his cremation. The ever useful Fuzzy calls the Gay Men’s Health
Crisis line to find a suitable funeral home. And together the two attend to the
large closet full of the writer’s clothing, discovering in the process an item
that surely belonged in the closet, a beaded red dress, which they both grinningly
determine would be perfect for the cremation except that it requires, they
agree, a hat, “A big Bea Lillie thing!” which Sean evidently doesn’t own. This
moment of levity in the midst of so much sorrow is a perfect closing to this
character’s life.
A week shy of two years after Reagan
finally spoke the word AIDS, September 10, 1988, friends Fuzzy and Lisa are
busy with answering phones at the Gay Men’s Health Center for which they
volunteer their time. Willy serves as a “buddy,” buying food and cleaning up
for one of the Center’s clients, Alberto (Michael Carmine), who when Willy
suggests that he get up and take some exercise is ready to “fire” him until he
recognizes that his unpaid “buddy” is simply trying to pull him out of the
depression from which he’s been suffering.
Paul has presumably died, and Howard has now
been diagnosed with AIDS. What “public recognition” he has left he offers to an
AIDS benefit he hosts in which we witness a loving formal chamber music version
by The Finger Lakes Trio of the Village People’s song “YMCA.”
In an apparent Coda to the tragic events for
which the film has asked us to be witnesses, the three remaining longtime
friends of the original group of eight, Willy, Fuzzy, and Lisa are walking
along the Fire Island beach, talking about an upcoming ACT UP demonstration and
recalling—as many of us do today living under the restraints of COVID—a time
before AIDS while expressing their hopes for a cure.
Suddenly in their fantasies of the past
and future all those friends and others from their times at the Island
reappear, laughing, cavorting, camping, dancing on the beach about them (a character
montage that was stolen, I’d argue, by Terence Malick in The Tree of Life).
Just a quickly they vanish, as the survivors hug one another in solace.
After the release of this film which took
an almost Herculean effort to get made and produced, many criticized it for
concentrating its focus on a small group of white and financially privileged individuals.
And there is little question that the group portrayed in this work do not truly
represent the broad diversity of those who suffered and continue to become
infected and die. Obviously, an argument can be made that such a film would
have been weakened had it attempted to show the far broader spectrum of
individuals who died and lived through the worst years of the epidemic; the
very charm of this particular perspective is that it focuses on only a few
people who we come to know and do not simply stand as stock figures. But,
perhaps, we might also perceive it as a way of demonstrating that even those
who were fairly well-to-do, living what might be described as fortunate lives,
were not spared the devastation of this leveling disease.
Fortunately, this work was only the
beginning of a great number of films (along with earlier and contemporaneous
plays such as Larry Kramer’s A Normal Heart of 1985, which wouldn’t reach
the screen until 2014, and William Finn’s March of the Falsettos [1981]
and Falsettoland [1990]) which presented AIDS from numerous perspectives
that revealed individuals and the societies in which they lived who were far
less able to deal with the ravages of AIDS.
If the figures of Longtime Companion seem,
in the end, able almost to gracefully accept the consequences of the scourge facing
almost everyone in the LGBTQ community, many other artistic expressions argued
a far more argumentative view of people unwilling “to go gentle into that good
night.”
Finally, while seeing this film again, I
was struck by my comments in My Queer Cinema: A Prelude: “[My husband
Howard and my] early deep commitment to a basically monogamous relationship
meant that we not only saved ourselves from the terrible scourge of AIDS, but
we were somewhat isolated from the sufferings of the rest of our lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transsexual, and gender unidentified friends.” Almost totally
accepted by the heterosexual worlds of the university, art, and literary
worlds, we seldom visited gay bars and had little time (or desire for that
matter) to cloister ourselves in a gay-exclusive environment.
While many of my gay acquaintances such
as Aaron Shurin, Vance George, Horácio Costa, Jeff Weinstein, and John
Perreault—as well as straight friend living in major urban centers involved in
music, dance, and theater—commonly expressed guilt for having survived the
deaths of so very many of their friends, Howard and I knew hardly anyone who were
HIV positive or died of AIDS. I heard rumor that one young student of Howard’s
with whom I had once had sex had later died of AIDS, and one day my Sun &
Moon Press shipper Mike (who had been a temporary lover of Allen Ginsberg) received
an inappropriate and unthinking call from a nurse at Kaiser Permanente announcing
that he had been diagnosed as being HIV. He left his position at Sun & Moon
about a year later, and I never heard from him again. If I remember correctly a
couple of Howard’s colleagues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art died of
AIDS, but they were only acquaintances, not close friends. The only friends who
died of AIDS were rather famous for their writings and gay activist activities,
Roger Horwitz and Paul Monette.
In short, I did not precisely feel the “survivor’s
guilt,” but perhaps an even more gnawing one, the guilt of being a gay man who was
a kind of outsider even within my own community. I think that not only
explains, as I previously suggested, my late-life commitment to reconstructing
LGBTQ life as expressed through cinema, but my attempts to record, relying on
the immense contributions of people like Vito Russo, Jenni Olson, and many
others, the history of queer cinema. Maybe a totally sympathetic outsider
looking back on what he and she missed can be of some significant value to
those who have worked so hard all along from within.
If nothing else, I can admit to having
no protective layers of insider cynicism with regard to this movie, shedding
copious tears while I viewed it and even so when writing the words you read
above. I think it may be appropriate to openly weep, since I’d argue Lucas’s
work, in part, is itself a kind of grand “soap opera,” in the best sense of
that genre—an ongoing saga that provides us with enough of the history of its
characters and their meaningful interactions with one another that we both
anticipate and dread each new episode in a purposeful transference of our own
lives to those upon the screen, no matter how outrageous or unbelievable their
behaviors or lives might seem to be. It’s more than a “willing suspension of
disbelief”; it’s far more like an almost unwilling witnessing of what we must
believe in order to atone for our societies’ previous refusal to accept the
facts. AIDS didn’t need to have such devasting effects any more than COVID did,
except that our government and a large swath of our populace allowed it to kill
those so many felt were simply unimportant, even deserving, and surely
expendable—lovers and sinners who received their just rewards.
*The same year, 1982, heterosexual actor Harry Hamlin played a gay man in Making Love (reviewed above.) As an article in The Hollywood Reporter from 2020 reported: “Harry Hamlin says playing a gay writer in the 1982 big-screen drama Making Love put his career on ice for several years.
The
actor, looking back now, says the film ‘was too early. It was 10 years too
early, I guess, and it completely ended my career. That was the last studio
picture I ever did. The door shut with a resounding smash.’"
In the British paper The Daily Telegraph
gay actor Rupert Everett commented that being gay stifled his acting
career. "There’s only a certain amount of mileage you can make, as a young
pretender, as a leading man, as a homosexual. There just isn’t very far you can
go. You can only understand the disaster of your own case yourself. You can’t
ever expect the world to see everything about yourself in the way that you do –
certainly in terms of conducting a career as a homosexual in show business. Not
so much now, maybe, because I’m older. It’s not such a threatening problem. But
all through my career it was a huge issue.”
Oddly, one of his most notable on-screen
gay roles was in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), in which he played
opposite Dermont Mulroney who plays the gay man John in this film. Evidently
even a decade after Lifetime Companion playing a gay man (let alone being
a gay man) did clearly have an effect on an actor’s career.
A fascinating coincidence is that in that
same year in which the character Howard is fearful for his role being
transformed in a gay figure, the heterosexual outsider Michael Dorsey (Dustin
Hoffman), unable to get an acting stint, put on a dress to become the
transsexual actor Dorothy Michaels as the new star of a soap opera in Sydney
Pollack’s film Tootsie (1982).
Los Angeles, December 18, 2020
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December
2020).
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