Some Came Running

is perhaps Vincent Minnelli’s gayest film, even though he also directed Tea and Sympathy (closer to being about homosexuality than any other film of that era). Trying to gather information about his life is frustrating. It turns out he was a window dresser in New York City before he moved to Hollywood. In NYC he was out-of-the-closet and hung out with the Dorothy Parker crowd. When he started directing films they had to ask him to stop wearing makeup. One can’t possibly construe what was going on between him and Judy Garland (they were married) — love possibly, and of course sex, as they had Liza. Watching Some Came Running there is — first of all — the ubiquitous boy gangs that populate the background. I counted at least three times when Frank Sinatra stood centre frame with a bunch of young men kibitzing and prodding each other playfully behind. I couldn’t help wondering if they were absolutely necessary to the plot (they weren’t) or the ambiance (possibly) but it seemed more likely that if Minnelli was not screwing them he wanted to have them around just to make him feel better. But it is the content of the film that is completely gay — in a way, of course, that we’re not supposed to be anymore -- that is, it’s all about outsiders. I just heard Fran Lebowitz in Killing Patient Zero (Laurie Lynd, how are you? Great film, I miss you!) speaking of how amazing it was when gay marriage came along, that all these gay men suddenly moved to the suburbs and started acting like straight couples — (Kinder, Küche, Kirche). No it’s not really amazing at all, because gay men are just as stupid and boring as straight people (possibly more so) and their lives are unfortunately not devoted to promiscuity, drunkenness, and drug taking, but instead to ‘fitting in’ and being approved of. Just before all this COVID-19 nonsense I attended a protest the Palmerston Public Library when Meghan Murphy was speaking: Murphy is simply a feminist who tells it like it is — she thinks women are people with vaginas, and that the no-gender movement is anti-female. She is right; but that didn’t stop the dozens (possibly hundreds) of fags from congregating in front of the library to demonstrate against her. They were all, in my recollection, kinda bespectacled, and theatrically unattractive, in that ‘I’m-gay-but-not-a-faggot’ way, funny-looking and fat — even when young — waving signs and chanting cliches to show how much they loved trans people. They of course have no idea that trans culture will bury gay men, and that some (not all by any means) trans people hate gay men, and especially drag queens — because the trans movement is anti-sexual (60% of all trans people identify as asexual). I'm digressing, sorry.  At any rate, I come from a generation of outlaw homosexuals, we are all supposed to go away and die now. Okay, don’t worry, we will, soon (I’m trying my best, abusing my body mercilessly during COVID-19 — it won’t be long now, so calm down). But we, like Vincente Minnelli, learned how to be outsiders from our oppression (which is still on by the way, how would you feel if your son told you he was gay, not trans, and liked to wear dresses and suck on you-know-what?). This movie is in the romantic tradition of presenting writers as outsiders. Frank Sinatra is a boozing novelist, we know what’s up when the first thing he takes out of his suitcase is a few bottles of booze and his copies of Faulkner, Steinbeck and Wolfe (where’s Hemingway?) and sets them on the table together, as if they are some brilliant decadent team. Let me just state  for the record that even though I drink too much -- and now and then do poppers -- and am a slut from hell -- I do not romanticize my abjectness (I know you don’t believe me) and by that I mean I don’t use it as an excuse for being a bad person. I am simply a bad person on my own — not because I'm an artist. Martha Hyer plays a prudish (quite repellant actually) school teacher in the film, she keeps rejecting Sinatra’s advances (did she know he had the biggest penis in Hollywood? Ava Gardner said “He weights 110 pounds and 90 of it is dick”). When Sinatra kisses her, she says “I’m not one of your barroom tarts!” which means of course, Shirley MacLaine (whose gorgeous performance in this film as a ‘dumb prostitute' — Dean Martin calls her a ‘pig’ over and over in the film — won her an Oscar nomination) . And when trying to explain the 'writer Sinatra,' she mentions some writers practice “neurotic promiscuity” and says of their personal lives: “Literary men have different standards” and “Good writers feel more deeply than the rest of us, they have greater appetites for life.” And finally, my favourite: “I would have been repelled by Poe’s drinking but I would have tried to understand.” I can’t help noticing that she also says of Sinatra “Big men, bigger in weakness, bigger in strength” (but I will disdain repeating the dirty joke). I have had several friends who imitated Tennessee Williams in their personal lives, I will not mention their names here. One of them — I remember lolling in the grass with him — I was in my late 30s, he somewhat younger. Now you must know I was never alarmingly handsome, just passably attractive, but still….  he said -- “Everybody’s always coming on to me because I’m so beautiful, but you wouldn’t know what that’s like.” Wow. Now he looks like the back of an old couch, his stuffing appears to be falling out. My other Tennessee Williams imitator friend is now drugless, thank God, because his addiction almost killed him. I remember Irving Layton (my once teacher) excused his profligacies by reminding everyone that artists feel more. We may in fact feel more; I’m not sure if that’s wonderful or even desirable, but it’s nothing to be proud of, and certainly nothing to excuse our atrocities. Our atrocities stand on their own, as does this film — a monument to the dead, tortured, excluded and marginalized;  exemplified by Shrley MacLaine, who is in this film divinely needy. So I imagine was Vincent Minnelli. I hope some boy loved him -- but we will probably never know.