Older gay men movies
Louis Mayor Slay in 2014, before same-sex marriage was legal. He and John Durnell were among the four couples married by St. He dated women publicly and men, on the side.įor years, Eaton, 78, couldn’t imagine having a partner, much less a husband. Among those is Richard Eaton of Soulard, who grew up in the 1940s and '50s. Several people who aren’t in the home movies can testify to what it was like to be gay in mid-century St. Louis, and what it was like to lead a double life. Richard Eaton talks about being a gay man in mid-century St. “But I don't I don't know if we'll actually find them.” “We naively set out thinking, ‘Oh, these men might be in their mid-90s, they could still be alive,’ and that might be true,” Prusaczyk said. He and co-director Beth Prusaczyk have found several family members besides Seagraves but so far no living pool-party guests. Story began learning about their world when he found Seagraves through a jagged journey to locate anyone who appears in the films, or their relatives. Walton and his partner Sam Micatto were known for their lavish gatherings by the pool on a property owned by the Micatto family.
Bry’s nurse Carol and Walton’s partner Sam Micatto. Erwin Bry sits in front of, from left to right, Buddy Walton, Samie Cohen, Mrs.
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“Queens and presidents wives and movie stars - he was always around fancy places and fancy things,” Seagraves said. Louis’ “hairdresser to the stars.”įrom Eleanore Roosevelt to Ethel Merman, whenever celebrities and dignitaries came to town, they all went to Walton’s salon at The Chase, said Walton’s niece Susie Seagraves. It was at the Lindell Boulevard home of the now-deceased Buddy Walton, widely known as St. Story stumbled upon the films in the mid-1990s, a half century after the pool party, at an estate sale. Watch a clip from the 1945 home movies of gay men at a pool party. “I kind of couldn’t believe I was seeing it.” “There was such a beauty in that moment,” Story said. Louis filmmaker Geoff Story has begun weaving the films into a documentary, “Gay Home Movie.” It offers a rare glimpse into a largely invisible world, a time when same-sex relationships were not only looked at as immoral - they were illegal.Īs a gay man, Story is fascinated by the brittle, flickering scenes that include a uniformed World War II soldier kissing another man. Almodóvar's portraiture of gay aging will be compared to the life stories collected in a number of focus groups with Spanish older gay men, which will provide equally complex, varied, and often contradictory narratives.St. This shows aging not only as a life-course experience, but also helps redefine it as a “queer” rather than linear or “straight” experience (Halberstam), allowing for both “pain and glory” to coexist in old age. While Almodovar's protagonist and alter-ego, Salvador Mallo, appears as “prematurely aged” ( Curtis and Thompson, 2015) due to bodily pain and disability, the film also travels back and forth from Mallos's childhood and youth to his maturity. Crossing the traditional divide between the Social Sciences and the Humanities, the study will draw on both life stories and film representations of older gay men in Spain, focusing on Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's (2019) latest film, Pain and Glory, as a (semi-)autobiographical re-vision of traditional representations of gay men's aging. Starting off from the assumption that bodies are shaped and reshaped in complex interactions between physical and symbolic dimensions, the paper will demonstrate, however, how (auto)biographical narratives of older gay men, what we call “egodocuments,” may be useful to rethink such traditional (mis)conceptions. Given these negative images, it is no wonder, then, that both youthism and ableism have become part and parcel of contemporary gay culture, which may also be linked to the few positive cultural images available of aging or disabled gay male bodies ( Goltz, 2014). Quite often, as Goltz reminds us, the two stereotypes intersect, as in classic films such as Death in Venice, Gods and Monsters, or Love and Death on Long Island, to name but a few, where ageism and homophobia combine to judge intergenerational relations as inappropriate and gay characters as “dirty old men” eager to recover their lost youth. If (older) gay men have recurrently been stereotyped as hypersexual and as sexually voracious, they have also been represented as weak and effeminate, miserable and lonely, and as less manly than their heterosexual counterparts ( Goltz, 2014 Freeman, 2010).