How Watching Old Movies with my Grandma Turned Me Gay
We bonded over classic Hollywood, even though we had very different investments in Hollywood's golden age
Note: I’ve been dealing with some family crises this week, so unfortunately there will be only one newsletter this week. Rest assured that I’ll be back on schedule next week!
When I was a kid--somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five years old--I spent a lot of time watching old Hollywood movies with my grandma. She’d take out one of her many VHS tapes, pop it in the old VCR, and in a few minutes we’d be transported to another world, a world of hyper-saturated colors, brilliant decor, zany secondary characters and, the main attraction, the fierce, undeniable chemistry between Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
We watched all three of the films that the two of them starred in together, but Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back are the ones that stand out most in my mind. Though I couldn’t have said why at the time, something about Rock Hudson called to me. Perhaps it was the effortless way that he embodied (old-fashioned) American masculinity, with his chiseled jaw, his deep, yet soft voice, and his warm, welcoming brown eyes. Perhaps it was the way that the films seemed to enjoy showing off his muscled body just enough to whet our appetite for more to see. Or perhaps it was the fact that he was a closeted gay man who made millions from performing “straightness” to an audience of adoring straight fans. While I didn’t know what “gay” meant back then, and while I certainly wouldn’t have identified as such even had I known, there was no doubt in my mind that I was attracted to Rock Hudson and that I would have loved to be Doris Day, particularly when, at the end of Pillow Talk, he picks her up out of bed (still in her, gasp!, pajamas), and marches through the streets of Manhattan before depositing her unceremoniously in his apartment.
Of course, my grandmother didn’t know that any of these thoughts and feelings were racing through my young mind and body. Though she certainly knew that Rock Hudson was gay--this was the late 1980s, after all, and Hudson’s death from AIDS, and the revelation that he was secretly gay, had been all over the headlines since 1985--it wasn’t something that she particularly wanted to discuss or think about. For my grandmother, as for many women of her generation, homosexuality was something best left in the closet; what couldn’t be acknowledged must be repressed. (In that respect, she was the epitome of a certain type of WASP).
While grandma and I loved watching the Doris Day/Rock Hudson films, they weren’t our only viewing pleasures. In fact, one of our other favorite movies was the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, which is one of the queerest musicals that I’ve ever seen (and, considering how queer the genre as a whole is, that’s really saying something). In the film, Day portrays the title character, a butch lesbian if there ever was one, with her bucksins, her short hair, and her formidable skill with a pistol. Of course, given that this is the 1950s, the film has to “tame” her and so, while it toys with the idea that she might have a bit of a romance with the “femme” Katie Brown, she ultimately admits that she carries a flame for the belligerent Wild Bill Hickok (played by alpha male Howard Keel), while Katie goes off with Philip Carey’s Daniel Gilmartin. (For an excellent reading of the film, I highly recommend Robert J. Corber’s Cold War Femme: Lesbian Identity, National Identity, and Cold War Cinema).
However, beneath that tyrannical heterosexual narrative there’s a lot of queer perversity. In addition to Day’s butch performance, there’s also a scene in which a man performs in drag, an entire sequence in which Calamity and Katie set up house together and, perhaps most queerly of all, the film’s best number, “A Secret Love.” As Armond White noted in Out a few years ago, the song is one of Hollywood cinema’s most noteworthy queer anthems. Though the narrative wants us to believe that the song expresses Calamity’s recognition that Hickok is her one true love (rather than, as she had earlier thought, Gilmartin), it doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to see it as referring to her desire for Katie. Though I can’t say for sure, I can’t help but wonder if my little queer self--which, believe me, was very much in evidence, even at that young age--responded to its innate queerness, its story of longing and, just as importantly, its potential reading as a celebration of gay liberation.
Looking back on it, I’m struck by how freely my desire migrated in this movie: there were times when I identified with Calamity and her gender-bending performance, and there were times when I desired her (I’ve always had a fondness for androgyny); there were times when I identified with her “secret love” and, of course, there were times when I felt desire for Wild Bill Hickok. Of course, there’s no surprise about that last one, considering that he was played by Howard Keel, a man who, like Hudson, embodied a particularly potent form of American masculinity. With his bluff male features, his deep, booming voice, and his alpha male persona, Keel/Hickok was everything that I want(ed) in a man (small wonder that I also found him irresistibly attractive in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers). When I rewatched Calamity Jane as a teenager, I found myself struck anew by just how much male beauty there was on display in this film and, given that I’d fully embraced my queerness by then, everything started to make sense. Needless to say, my lust for Wild Bill had only grown stronger in the intervening years.
Howard Keel and Rock Hudson were but two stars that I found desirable as a child (one of the others was Davy Jones of The Monkees, who always did something for me). Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that watching these old movies--with their queer stars and their queer performances and their queer allegories--turned me gay (despite my title), looking back on it seems pretty clear to me that I possessed a certain queer sensibility that allowed me to enjoy these films, even if I didn’t yet have the reading strategies and critical apparatus to understand my own pleasure. And I’m reasonably certain that my grandmother didn’t “know” that I was gay. In fact, right up until her recent passing at the age of 97, she would frequently ask me if I had found a girlfriend yet, despite the fact that I’d been living with a series of men ever since I went to graduate school.
Grandma, like so many other women of her generation and upbringing, simply preferred to think of me as straight, even though it must have been obvious to her that I wasn’t like the other boys. Considering the fact that she was also a big fan of Liberace--one of the most outlandishly queer figures in the history of entertainment--it probably shouldn’t surprise me that she was willing to accept me in all of my flamboyant ways. In fact, I’ll be forever grateful that she didn’t mock or criticize me, despite the fact that I was the polar opposite of the type of rural men that she’d grown up with and that were (and are) the norm in Appalachia. In fact, I can’t help but wonder whether, on some deep level, she appreciated the fact that she had a little queer grandson to enjoy old movies with, someone who could appreciate the screen divinity that was Doris Day. Even though she spent the last few years of her life in a nursing home, we still spent a lot of our conversations reminiscing about the splendors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and I distinctly remember the two of us sharing our grief when Doris Day passed away in 2019. Even almost thirty years after we started watching those comedies and musicals, we both still recognized that there was something special about Day.
It’s no secret that there is a profoundly deep (and often deeply conflicted) relationship between gay men and their mothers, but what is less widely acknowledged is that there also exists a similarly deep (and often less contentious) bond between gay men and their grandmothers. I’m sure that I’m not the only little gay boy who spent many hours of their youth watching old movies with their grandmothers. After all, classic Hollywood was (and for some, still is), one of those precious things that people who disagreed about almost everything else could still enjoy together. Grandma and I disagreed about many things--I am a staunch and proud Democrat, and she was an equally staunch and proud Republican--but we could always agree about the joys of classic Hollywood. For her, they were a reminder of her youth and her childhood, while for me they were appealing because of their innate queerness, something that I appreciated more and more as I got older.
When I saw that both Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back were showing on TCM, I decided to tune in. It was a bittersweet viewing experience, to be sure, but it also brought back a flood of positive memories. Even though my grandmother is gone, watching these old films reminds me of all the happy times we shared and, for just a bit, I can imagine us together, sharing the joy of cinema.