Victim (1961)
Dirk Bogarde is amazing in this film about a prominent closeted barrister; he himself was a prominent closeted actor. It’s hard to love Victim because (as Pauline Kael observed) it’s portrayal of gay life is somewhat seedy. My problem with the film is that its heroes are as hectoringly self-righteous as the villains the movie condemns. Bogarde is in love with a young man who kills himself out of love for him; the most haunting scene is one Bogarde apparently wrote himself, in which he admits to his wife that he was in love with ‘Boy Barrett '— "I stopped seeing him because I wanted him!” — the words are ripped from his gut, and Bogarde is poised, aging gracefully and with such intelligence— very unlike the rest of the seedy homosexuals being blackmailed around him. The movie is clear that it is not their fault; many speeches sound like sociology papers on the problem of homosexuality. An affectionate underwear model (Mavis Villiers) defends ‘her boys’: “They’re just not normal that’s all — if they had gamey legs you’d be sorry for them.” (This defence is one used today by the trans community, which has allied itself with the disabled.) The homosexuals are sick, and it’s not their fault. One cornered old queen defends himself by saying “The invert is part of nature…….I find love in the only way I can. ” And just so remind us they aren't child molesters: “Youth must be protected.” I know I should defend this movie (because it was revolutionary) but it’s very difficult when I realise how far we haven’t come. Reviewers in 1961 said of this movie: "While the subject is disagreeable, it is not handled distastefully." In 1985 I received the same review: “Gilbert rises above his subject matter." I will not be forgiven -- I am certain, -- for saying that things have not changed that much, and further, that civil rights don’t mean a thing. But civil rights, unfortunately, is what this movie is all about. The thesis of Victim is: laws about homosexuals cause blackmail, so they should be taken off the books.’ That sounds very well-reasoned and dignified but it’s not going to cut it when everyone’s mind is on one thing and one thing only: the sexual acts that we engage in night after night, in alleys, bath houses, and worst of all, in beds. I have always taken the position that it isn’t enough to say that we deserve rights; it is instead incumbent on gay liberationists to speak of our love as -- not just as equal to heterosexual love -- but as much, much more beautiful. Lytton Strachey was on the right track with ‘higher sodomy.’ I had a column called 'The Pink Panther' in Eye Magazine years ago. I chose the title for a reason — because I have the same politics as the Black Panthers did around racism; we’re not just equal, but better. Don’t worry, I don’t want to take away your jobs, I don’t like to replace heterosexuality, I just want you to recognise that our love is prettier, more civilised, more human, and more humane than yours will ever be. If that’s overstepping the mark then that’s the bloody idea. The only people who don’t like homosexuality are people who object to sex in general, and so the fact that we define ourselves by the sexual acts that interest us makes them angrier than you can imagine. Noel Coward wrote one play about gay love about five years after this movie, in which he pretended to play Somerset Maugham, but he was actually playing himself (like Dirk Bogarde in Victim). Both were portraying — and also in fact were, in real life — uptight, old, British men shamed by their own sexuality. Once, before he died, Coward was asked by one of his biographers to speak openly about his sexual orientation. He declined, saying “There is, I think, one old lady in Stokington-On-Trent who does not know.” In Song at Twilight, Coward's character says “You can change laws, but you can’t change the human heart.” This is what I would say about transgender washrooms. Though you can make them de rigeur,you cannot make people think that there is no such thing as gender. All this sounds hopeless, I know, and reminds me somewhat of a film many of us are watching during these dog days of COVID-19: Planet of the Humans (produced by Michael Moore). My environmental activist friends hate it because it exposes the capitalist forces that are behind the green movement (I told you, capitalism eats everything). But I like it, it’s almost art, because it doesn’t give you an answer — just tells you the truth. The objections raised to homosexuality in this film are the same ones that are raised against trans people, and those objections will not go away, with or without Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The pinched faced puritans in Victim say: “If this was allowed other weaknesses would follow…It’s a rotten part of nature ….If they ever make it legal they might as well license every other perversion!” When The Pope came to TORONTO about twenty years ago I interviewed the Catholic faithful dressed as my drag character Jane, and many told me homosexuality was ‘unnatural.’ It’s about what we get up to, and about how we’re not supposed to get up to it because it’s the same thing you get up to (only backwards), and you know you’re not supposed to do it, and the only way you can justify all the undignified things you do -- either in or out of bed -- with someone else’s body, is by pretending it’s all about making babies and not pleasure. It’s the reason Donald Trump is president: his huge demographic knows that he's the ticket for crushing Roe vs Wade, which they must do, so that women’s bodies will no longer be desiring things, but merely baby incubators. These views are ingrained and it does no good to make talky movies against them. I never wrote plays about how noble homosexuals are, because I think we’re just as awful as straight people, and who wants to see a play about nice people anyway? What do we do with this indefatigable, unpersuadable, inarguable thing called the human heart? I’m crazy enough to believe that art can soften it — not with arguments, not even with tears, but with a humanity that we all share — one that comes from looking at that which is different from us and feeling something despite ourselves. But also simply from gazing at beauty. Dirk Bogarde plays a somewhat awful man in Victim, but his quivering brow and lean cheekbones, his flawless hair and gentle delicate hands -- say more of importance about homosexuality than any weak old lecture about civil legislation this film has to offer. He is human — we are touched by him — and we know we shouldn’t be. That says quite enough.
