dancing the blues away
by
Douglas Messerli
Robert Lee King (screenwriter and director) The Disco Years / 1991
Although Robert Lee King’s half-hour long film The Disco Years disguises itself through its title, the film’s introductory voice over about the dance craze of the late 1970s and it’s final clumsy disco dancing, this gay “coming out” film is really about homophobia, a far more important sub-genre in LGBTQ film-making than is dance—although there are several important gay, lesbian, and transgender films that focus on the latter.
The young soon-to-be out gay boy in this
film, Tom (Matt Nolan) does indeed suffer the stings of the homophobic
reactions of his fellow students and even his doting mother, but the real victim
in this work is the English schoolteacher Mr. Reese (the adult actor Dennis
Christopher, not nearly as cute and charming as he was in an earlier 1979 coming
of age film—although not gay oriented— Breaking Away). Yet the film does
not focus on him and gives us little evidence for his later actions since it presents
his character almost as the stereotype of an immediately recognizable gay man
who even as he introduces himself to his class leads one female student Denise
(Robin Stapler) to quip “Looks like we’ll be reading a lot of Walt Whitman.”
This in an English composition class.
The real focus is on the character of
Tom, obviously a version of director’s younger self. Tom’s major problem seems
to be that he looks and acts straight in a world that basically protects him
for his impersonation, while utter frustrating him in his attempts at self-identification
and, of course, in finding someone with whom he might—let’s put it bluntly
since most “coming of age” films describe it as love—have sex. Honestly,
although many a high school romance has ended in marriage, most 16 and 17 years
old are really seeking someone with whom to relieve their hormonal tensions. For
Tom the only available gay peer is the highly effeminate and outrageously “out”
Teddie (Robb Willoughby), the kind of nelly gay boy that many young homosexual
boys fear, as Tom does, that they will become—as if some fairy godmother held a
magic wand over their heads in readiness—the minute they declare their
sexuality. My husband Howard has long asserted that he shared that very fear as
a 17-year old. Fortunately,
in King’s version of this phenomena, the hero sort of envies this queen for his
openness and by the end of the film invites him to dance.
Yet there is always in any high school a
beautiful jock lurking in the locker room just waiting to find the right boy to
rub up against. In fact, the high school gay athletic hero having sex with shyer
intellectually-inclined gay boys might almost be yet another sub-genre to the “coming
of age/coming out” movies. My weather bell model, Get Real (1999) features
just such a figure, as does John Butler’s 2016 film Handsome Devil. As I’ve
written elsewhere, when I was a 15- or 16-year-old I might have had sex with the
gorgeous captain of my hometown football team if only I’d been more a bit more
mature and ready for the experience. Certainly, I wanted it and kick myself to
this day for having jumped out of the car when he took out a cigarette.
In Tom’s case it’s the beautiful fellow
tennis player, Matt (Russell Scott Lewis). The two began playing matches which
turn quickly into a camaraderie that ends up with them playing the kind of “touching
games”—arms around the shoulder, mock wrestling bouts, and head-butting drinks
from the water fountain—that ends up one night in a neighbor’s swimming pool
where they play a kind of strip-tease game with one another before jumping in
naked to swim their way into each other’s arms and lips.
Tom remains silent as they sport their
homophobia by decorating Reese’s classroom with the usual chalkboard slurs of “fag”
and pasted up pictures of naked gay porno models. Which of them, one wonders, purchased
the magazine from which the photos were lifted? Or did he already have them
hidden under his mattress? It’s common knowledge that the most homophobic of
beings are those who are most trying to deflect attention, but in this case it
appears the girls are far less tolerant about gays than the boys. Are they
afraid of being of losing their power over their boyfriends, terrified of their
own loss of sexual prowess?
What also truly surprises one in this otherwise
typical portrayal of high school bullying is that the teacher is almost
immediately ready to pack up everything and transfer to a less volatile school.
Throughout, this film hints at the spirit of the times, with TV footage of California
State politician John Briggs speaking for State Proposition 6 which would have
prevented gays or those who supported gay rights from working in the public
schools.
Shortly after the classroom desecration,
Tom visits his teacher, who is packing up to leave, asking him why he has
become so easily intimidated. Reese explains that he knows all too easily to
where this will lead, the kids reporting his homosexuality to their parents,
the parents putting pressure of school authorities, and from there on having
school administrators watching over his shoulders. Tom attempts to change his
decision, suggesting he find out who committed the act. But Reese argues that’s
not really important since the inevitable series of events has already begun to
unfold. When Tom argues that it’s “unfair,” his beloved teacher snaps back, “Life
is unfair...you better get used to it.”
Suddenly Tom’s concern has been converted
into his own personal involvement, and he is startled by the implications, quickly
responding “I’m not like you,” presumably a denial of his being gay. Reese
gently puts the matter to rest by denying his statement had suggested anything
about shared values.
When Tom returns to the klatch of perpetrators
he tells them that he has seen what they did to the room, asking them “Why didn’t
you invite me?” as if, for a moment, he too has become determined to hide
behind homophobia. Yet you can see he is troubled by the event, and the camera follows
him as he wanders about the campus in a moral quandary.
By the time he returns home we realize,
through the phone calls his mother has been receiving calling her son a “faggot,”
that he has reported them to the authorities as Reese should have done. He has
acted, and in so doing has “come out” not because of a crush on another guy but
because of his moral convictions, because of the “unfairness” of it all.
His mother’s reaction is even more
disconcerting than his schoolmates’ cruel derisions. Throughout the film Tom’s
divorced mother (Gwen Welles) has seemed like a kind of caring, open-minded,
and even free-wheeling—she insists that Tom take disco lessons with her at the
studio where she used to teach hula dancing—woman. But having received those
calls, she meets her returning son with near desperation for an answer to the epithets
hurled at her over the phone. Tom admits that he is indeed a faggot,
that he is gay, explaining to her how he first met his swimmer friend and had
sex with him (“It was so wonderful.”) and reporting what happened after. She
refuses to believe that son is a homosexual, and even suggests that if Matt was
gay and now has a girlfriend then perhaps Tom can also become straight—hinting
even of the possibility of conversion therapy.
It is her reaction finally that drives
Tom out of his own home. For the first time he bravely enters the gay bar,
named Oddity, not only being delighted with a room of people who might accept
him for who he is, but upon encountering the school outsider Teddie, asking him
to join him, finally having the opportunity to put his new-found dance skills
to use.
Too bad King and his crew couldn’t afford
a better foley man to fill in the sounds of the disco dancers, which in this
rather charming little film sound more like clomping feet rather than fevered hoofers.
No matter, as the narrator explains in the final voice over “In time the world
of gay dance clubs proved to be a trap of its own,” but in 1978 and for a few
years after it was like heaven, where you could meet up with other guys and
have sex without the fear of dying. I should imagine that eventually even his
mother, Melissa, will get over her worries for her son—after all she had found
their obviously gay disco teacher to be “fabulous”—and join her son from time
to time at the local club.
Los Angeles, February 12, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February
2021).
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