MovieChat Forums > In & Out (1997) Discussion > Why I think this film is ignorant

Why I think this film is ignorant

posted 16 years ago by Scooby52
6 replies | jump to latest

It's probably been said before, but the ending. It's not the fact that he's straight but turns out to be gay... It's the fact that because the main character is slightly effiminate it means he IS gay.

It's like he thinks to himself "Oh yeah, I'm a bit effiminate, I'm a bit camp, well I MUST be gay after all".

The film takes away the link between his actual preference for attraction to a male instead of a female, and relies on his effiminate qualities as a reason for him being gay.

The ending would have been fine had the subject been handled a lot better in the beginning and middle, but it just plays as if it such a big deal to be a homosexual and plays like homosexuality is just a fad about effiminism.

[–] Harold_Robbins 16 years ago

I'm watching the film for the first time since 1997, and while I'm enjoying it very much, I still have the same reservation I had about it back then: the premise is kind of ridiculous, because no man reaches the age Howard is and doesn't know about himself - he may be in denial, but by then he knows. Even though this was written by a gay man, it's essentially a "gay" film for straight people, just as Will & Grace was a "gay" TV show for straight people.

"Somewhere along the line the world has lost all of its standards and all of its taste."

[–] 16 years ago

[deleted]

[–] kylopod 15 years ago

You totally missed the point. Howard was not stereotypically gay. People only perceived him that way after Cameron planted the idea in people's heads. Cameron never explained why he believed Howard was gay, and my hunch is that he sensed from subtle behavior that Howard was attracted to men, or at least not attracted to women. Once the rumor started, however, other people made the connection that it had something to do with his being sensitive and clean-cut, even though those things had never led anyone to suspect him before. Howard, for his part, became self-conscious about anything about himself that could be construed as a "gay" trait. But his displaying "gay" traits was largely a self-fulfilling prophecy that he couldn't escape from, no matter what he was like. If he had been a gym teacher, people would have seized on the idea that he was hyper-masculine and hence "gay." Stereotypes are often like that--they say a lot more about people's perceptions than they do about the actual traits of the groups in question.

[–] chael38 15 years ago

What's offensive about this movie is that we never get inside his head/heart. It's not told from his point of view but everyone else's. It's like he has no interior and "gay" is all exterior and that's why everyone "knows" he is gay. Gay people are not empty of themselves.

[–] garrettok31 15 years ago

It seems like two movies, a man with a sexual identity crisis and a straight man trying to prove that he's not gay based on his behavior. Having him be in denial like he IS ACTUALLY STRAIGHT doesn't seem to work.

[–] fidelio1980 14 years ago

Since when are there no 40-year-old men in the world who haven't admitted their gayness to themselves? There are men who haven't accepted it until much, much later in life than that. Sure, they had to know on some level before they were 40...but every gay men out there knew as early as puberty that, on some level, he was attracted to men. That doesn't mean that they admitted it to themselves when they were in junior high. Denial is ridiculously powerful, and a lot of people with same-sex attractions manage to convince themselves that everyone has those feelings, and they don't mean anything. Or they convince themselves that they're attracted to the opposite sex, too, and their (non-existent) straight feelings outweigh their gay ones.

Besides, it wasn't that long ago that virtually no one came out. Weren't there as many people back then who were gay deep-down? Are we supposed to believe that none of them got married, because they all had to know?

I also completely disagree with the poster who said that the movie didn't portray Kevin Kline's character's effeminacy as being relevant. I wish that was the case - but this movie made about a gazillion jokes about how effeminate equals gay. The makers of the movie never would have made the character macho, and then shown the townspeople concluding that he was macho because he was gay. That would have killed most of the jokes in the movie. Plus, the people in his town were using stereotypes, and since there aren't many stereotypes about gay men being macho (or at least they're not known to many people), that wouldn't have worked.

Yes, it's true that no one (besides, presumably, Matt Dillon) suspected he was gay until the Dillon character outed him...but we were supposed to believe that these small-town Midwesterners were so unaware about homosexuality that it never would have occurred to them that someone was gay until they were told it flat-out on television.