Watching the camp fire burn

`Interview With the Vampire' is the most candidly gay movie to come out of mainstream Hollywood. But David Thomson has seen that look before The most striking and modern actors of the early 1950s were Brando, Clift and Dean. All three, we know now, were open to gay encounters

WHENEVER Hollywood people gather for a big public event - something defined by network cameras - nearly everyone sports a red Aids ribbon. The little half-knots look like the bite of a politically correct vampire. You won't see the same proud wou nds at the town's restaurants, and you still don't often see Aids owned up to in the Variety obituaries. Alarmingly young people in Hollywood are still afflicted by "pneumonia''. That's odd, for the movie business is also set on those taut, burnished, fa scistically healthy bodies celebrated in the fashion spreads for Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. At the studios and the agencies, there are killer dealers, young men whose goal it is to look so drop-dead cool it's nearly absurd.

Los Angeles is a handsome, sad and worried town: there are fires and quakes; there is O J and South Central; and there's a picture business no one understands or feels safe with. There is also Aids shadowing the business and the art that was founded on sexual arousal. And now here comes a movie - Interview With the Vampire that embodies that gay dread. Whatever you think of the picture, it has historic interest: you can see studs like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt getting it on, drawing blood. From Bram Stoker onwards, the myth of the vampire was a metaphor for female sexuality - but now the guys have stolen it. As I watched the film, I was reminded of . . . Winchester 73.

Winchester 73 came out in 1950. It's the movie in which James Stewart's laconic cowboy wins a one-in-a- thousand Winchester rifle in a shooting contest on 4 July 1876, the centenary of the United States. Then he loses the gun to his wicked brother. As hepursues it, the movie becomes a circling. The gun passes from John McIntire's gambler to Rock Hudson's Indian chief to Tony Curtis's cavalryman. And so on, all in 92 minutes and black and white. When I was nine, in 1950, Winchester 73 seemed an inspiring adventure with which a kid could dream of becoming a man.

It is a celebration of male courage and prowess. (There is a coward in the movie, effectively executed for his weakness.) James Stewart shoots better than anyone - so he deserves the sacred rifle. Nothing gets in the way of action. We go from the shooting contest to Indians v cavalry, to outlaws and a final shoot-out in the precise, bleak, mountain terrain the director, Anthony Mann, adored. I still love the movie for its meticulous imagery and its structure. I watch it with a five-year-old s on who joins in the gunplay and rides a rocking horse to keep up with the hero.

But there is a queer, resonant scene, just before the last bout of heroic violence, a moment of calm and reflection. Stewart's cowboy, Lin McAdam, has a friend, High Spade (played by Millard Mitchell). They are inseparable, and go way back. They were in the Confederate Army together, and High Spade knew Lin as a kid. He understands the family history in which the brother killed the father.

In a lovely day-for-night campfire scene, their silhouettes edged in moonlight, High Spade questions Lin. Referring to the dead father, he asks, "You ever wonder what he'd think about you hunting down Dutch Henry [the brother]?" High Spade feels there's something wrong in hunting men.

He is so poised, intent, gazing at Lin as he poses the questions, that Stewart becomes edgy, ramming bullets into his gun, neurotic and evasive. "Some things a man has to do," he mutters. "So he does them." Great actors can say such lines so we don't stumble on the cliche.

"What happens when the hunt is over? Then what?" asks High Spade, patient but filled with desire. He loves him.

Lin is more besieged than at any other moment in the film: "Haven't given it much thought. Maybe we could get the ranch back together again? Round up the strays. Haven't given it much thought."

"Now might be a good time to think about it," says the gentle but firm High Spade, Lin seems to relax. He looks up with Jimmy Stewart's rapt, romantic eyes.

"You've been real fine people, High Spade, riding along with me."

"That's what friends is for.''

"My father said if a man had one friend he was rich. I'm rich."

They get up and ride on. A fade-out takes us back to action.

This is not a way of breaking the news that James Stewart, Millard Mitchell, Anthony Mann, screenwriters Borden Chase or Robert L Richards, were or are gay. There's no need for the mountainous integrity of robust Hollywood heterosexuality circa 1950 to be threatened. Though I don't exclude the possibility that some of those gentlemen were mature or thoughtful enough to pay some heed to the mixed composition of manhood or even the ironies of staying at the best hotel in Tucson, being limo-ed out to a desolate location, dressed up in western clothes, given make-up and stubble, and asked to be authentically rugged in that old 1876 way.

How easily the melodrama of "outing" smothers the natural place of gayness in the movies. There may be readers rash enough to have put down this article already in horror at the suggestion that Jimmy Stewart is gay. I am not saying that, only that in onescene for Winchester 73 he understood an emotion that was not quite uttered. Similarly, it is less relevant to say that David Geffen (producer) is gay and Neil Jordan (director) is not than to realise that their Interview With the Vampire may be the most candidly gay picture to come out of mainstream Hollywood. You see, it's the medium itself, not its men, that deserves outing.

FOR DECADES, Hollywood re-joiced in the frontier enthusiasm of unrestrained womanising. Amid all the explanations of how movies came into being, we should not forget two linked drives they serve. For the men who made movies, the process was a chance to command beautiful female flesh, to screw it, and to pass on to more of the same with businesslike thoroughness. For many of the millions of men who watched from the dark, the stories on screen might be their only way of watching women take off their clothes. Until the mid-1960s, when censorship broke down, the movies were sustained as popular entertainment by the intricate fusion of fantasy and voyeurism.

Male advantage determined Holly-wood lifestyles. These were the days of the casting couch, the propositioning of any woman in a subordinate position, of stag movies made for parties. For the outside world, Holly-wood helped sanction divorce, serial marriage and sexual pleasure. Guy power dominated the business, as it still does: to this day it is rare to have women running studios or directing films, and unknown - for here lies the voyeurs' magic - to let them photograph a movie.

But life proved too diverse for this anxious code. Gay men "infiltrated" Hollywood (if that's how you want to think about it). Alternatively, the tradition of homosexual prowess in theatre flowed into the new medium. Maybe there was always something conspiratorial and kitsch in movie-making that appealed to gay irony and its mocking state of semi-secrecy (for to be gay in Hollywood then the practitioners were supposed to stay in camera - it was like being a Communist).

We are still discovering how many Hollywood people were gay, or bisexual. But in naming names, we must beware of casting a false blight of shame. Rock Hudson once had to get married so that his studio could promote him - and a woman had to marry him. Still, we know that such professionally reliable directors as George Cukor, Vincente Minnelli and Mitchell Leisen were gay (or admitted to what Gore Vidal asks us to call homosexualist parts of their nature). Those directors also brought to the screen the searching male-female love stories in The Philadelphia Story and A Star is Born (Cukor); The Clock and Some Came Running (Minnelli); Swing High, Swing Low and Remember the Night (Leisen). Good directors can make imaginative journeys beyond their "home" territory. Such movies also comprise a richer portrait of heterosexual relations than one may find in several famous men's work - John Ford, say, Fritz Lang, or Charles Chaplin. (Sidebar: the very male movies are sometimes a cover for fear and loathing of women.)

Many gay talents worked fruitfully within the womanising attitudes of old Hollywood. They may have been stimulated, as if in a resistance movement. But we should not simply condemn the hypocrisy of Hollywood custom. There are arts that work best in secrecy or when forbidden. Movies were more urgent and potent in the age of censorship. Doesn't sex itself function best with reservation, duplicity and darkness?

There may have been a greater pressure on those artists who valiantly upheld the male legend. Some manly directors seemed torn by doubt. Nicholas Ray is a hero- worshipping film-maker, yearning to find a man he can believe in. But Ray had some homosexualurgings - enough to prompt a re-reading of, say, Rebel Without a Cause in which the adoration of a kind of male anguish is fuelled by Dean's bisexuality, Sal Mi neo's gayness, and Ray's probably suppressed infatuation with Dean.

With so much on the surface on the screen, subterranean life flourishes. This was never more so than in the decade or so between A Streetcar Named Desire and the end of censorship. Streetcar is a seminal work, a play and a film in which Tennessee Williams composed a gay allegory (with Blanche and Stanley as opposed but needy halves of the male persona), only for the very heterosexual director Elia Kazan to trump the concept by boosting the revolutionary, sweaty T-shirt masculinity of Marlon Brando. Yet both messages were felt, and Brando became an icon for both gay and hetersexual audiences.

The most striking and modern screen actors of the early 1950s were Brando, Clift and Dean. All three, we know now, were open to gay encounters. And as images, their beauty, their eloquence, was a daring mixture of the masculine and feminine. Yet they played heroic heterosexuals - for Brando, everything from Stanley Kowalski to the boxer in On the Waterfront. For Clift the range went from the gunslinging cowboy who takes over the herd in Red River to Prewett, the loner in From Here to Eternity; while Dea n was Huck Finn for Eisenhower's America.

The movies didn't present homosexual roles in those days - unless you want to trace the roots for Clifton Webb's Waldo Lydecker in Laura, George Sanders' Addison de Witt in All About Eve . . . or Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. I know, that's heresy: Swanson was a terrifically normal sexy lady . . . and so on. But hasn't there always been some hint that Norma might be Norman, a Movie Queen who lures a spineless young man to her house?

At least consider this: movies when they are made can pass as just their stories. And so, in 1950, no one said out loud, "What was that?'' as the scene from Winchester 73 played. But as movies grow older and their myths and plots are forever re-made, so they turn camp. Once upon a time - for 50 years - it was our general faith that movies were as real and accurate as their photography. Audiences bought the fantasy and identified with the story. Then self-consciousness dawned. It was hastened by many things: the explosion and cheapening of story material on TV; the decline of censorship; and the sense that for people like Monty Clift it was unbearable to go on playing the straight game.

Movies now have very little direct claim on reality for us. They refer only to other fiIms, other ways of telling the story and to special effects only possible in film. Once a set of genres, the American film has now become one vast, sly genre, a way ofkidding reality. The subsequent campness is only one attribute of the gay sensibility, but it is so widespread now that you could sometimes fancy everyone in Hollywood was gay, just as Los Angeles seems a city built by witty, cynical decorists. So Interview's belated candour seems like a relic of an honesty that never was and never could be. Once tough men might have been gay, too - just a little. But now no one is more than an actor. That's our way of being the undead, the vampires who cannot rest.

! `Interview With the Vampire' (18) is on nationwide release from 20 Jan.