Out the Movies is a bi-weekly newsletter about queer film for AF+ subscribers written by Drew Burnett Gregory.
“The two girls stood in front of that big wide window in broad daylight and began blatantly and passionately embracing and kissing each other. In defiance of their eviction, they were doing their thing so everybody in the bar could see them. It was a rift I was witnessing right there and then between these two separate worlds: the brazen girls outside who were the very essence of liberation and those old guys at the bar who were sitting there somewhat shell-shocked by something they’d never seen before.”
This is not an excerpt from a lesbian pulp novel. It’s an excerpt from Al Pacino’s recent memoir Sonny Boy. To the famous actor, this expression of queerness was a declaration of a changing time. To him, it was akin to the revolutions happening on the streets and at the cinema.
The 1970s are often discussed as a golden age of American cinema. The Hollywood studio system — and its Hays Code — had been destroyed and in its place were a collection of radical auteurs. Books like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls helped to mythologize this era as a grand artistic achievement of drugs, genius, and masculinity.
Only in recent years, has the cultural canon broadened this American cinematic moment to include a wider range of voices. The artistic freedom allowed during this time didn’t just birth Scorsese and Coppola — it also included female voices like Barbara Loden and Elaine May, Black voices like Bill Gunn and Ivan Dixon, and queer voices like John Waters and Andy Warhol.
But I always say my goal is to expand the canon not replace it. I still love many of the films found on the AFI Top 100 and I believe they, too, can benefit from a broadening of perspective. The Godfather, arguably the mainstream Hollywood achievement of this era, is used to signal toxic film bro taste in both Barbie and the recent show Overcompensating. But its lead, Al Pacino, had a life and career touched by queerness. In fact, go through his filmography and you’ll start to wonder if every Pacino movie is gay.
A couple months ago I watched And Justice for All…, Norman Jewison’s late 70s courtroom drama about a defense attorney named Arthur Kirkland. Throughout the film, Kirkland (Pacino) tries to hold onto his principles while working in our inhumane justice system. The film is a critique of this system where winning and losing are prioritized over right and wrong, where overworked judges and lawyers make rash decisions that result in ruined lives for the most vulnerable.
One of these most vulnerable is a trans woman named Ralph Agee played by gay actor Robert Christian. This subplot is painful to watch due to the realities of how the law treated and treats Black trans women and due to the limits of even the most well-meaning 20th century depictions of trans people in Hollywood. But throughout the film Kirkland pleads for compassion for Agee in the courtroom and in life. There are no deep talks about gender identity, just a suggestion that if wearing a wig makes her happy, why can’t everyone accept it and treat her with respect?
I didn’t watch this film expecting a trans character. Despite years dedicated to the study of trans film and queer film history more broadly, I’d never seen mention of this subplot. Pacino’s greatest film, Dog Day Afternoon, finds his character robbing a bank to get the money to pay for his girlfriend’s sex change operation. But few people seem to mention that Dog Day was only one of Pacino’s movies that decade where he tried — and failed — to help a trans woman.
This revelation led me to watch his first on-screen appearance in Me, Natalie, a movie where a young woman moves to Greenwich Village and has gay neighbors. Then I watched The Local Stigmatic, an adaptation of a play by Pacino favorite Heathcoate Williams, about two gay sociopaths wandering the streets of London looking for violence. Then I finally watched Serpico, a film that isn’t gay but does emphasize Frank Serpico’s effeminate personality and appearance and their connection to his status as outsider in the NYPD he aims to legitimize.
Speaking of the NYPD, have you seen Cruising? It’s a movie where Pacino plays a cop who goes undercover as a gay man. He does poppers at the gay club and then all horned up goes home to fuck his girlfriend. It’s probably the best of his more problematic gay films — certainly better than The Humbling where he has an affair with a lesbian played by Greta Gerwig or Gigli another film with a male-amorous lesbian. (Also better than Jack and Jill if that counts. Pacino is obsessed with a woman — a woman played by Adam Sandler in bad drag.)
One of Pacino’s greatest on-screen performances is his turn as Roy Cohn in the limited series adaptation of Angels in America. Another one of his crowning achievements is Scarecrow, a film about two male drifters who form a homoerotic bond that has complex, explicit depictions of queerness. Then there’s Pacino’s Salomé passion project, a film based on Oscar Wilde’s play shot in conjunction with a run of the piece and a documentary about both. In the documentary, his obsession with Oscar Wilde takes him to the LGBTQ bookstore that holds Wilde’s name and inspires Pacino to play Wilde in recreations. When asked by a producer if his interpretation of Salomé’s King Herrod is bisexual, Pacino says, “Of course.”
In Sonny Boy, Pacino talks about how his performance in The Godfather films was inspired by a line in Mario Puzzo’s book. Michael is called the “sissy” of the Corleone family and that’s how Pacino decided to play him.
Al Pacino got into the Actors Studio with an audition scene where he played a gay sex worker. There he continued to learn method acting, participating in the tail-end of a revolution in the art of performance.
Since I started this viewing project, I’ve been joking with friends that Al Pacino is bisexual. The truth is Pacino’s real-life sexuality and gender mean less to me than the importance of queerness throughout his career. I don’t care if there’s a personal reason why Pacino was so drawn to these characters and stories — I care that in the previous paragraph when I mentioned method acting at least someone reading it rolled their eyes.
Method acting, like 1970s American cinema, has been twisted by its worst fans. Somehow Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix have convinced people “the method” is acting like an asshole rather than a series of teachings that encouraged actors to practice emotional replacement as a way to get closer to their characters. The method was about a reduction of artifice, a commitment to realism. Sometimes people mumble, sometimes images are dark.
By the time the method was fully adopted by Hollywood in the late 60s, the movies were responding to a moment in American history where the hope of progress was being crushed by American imperialism. The Hollywood films of the 70s weren’t a celebration of drugs, genius, and masculinity — they were a commitment to artistic purity and clear-eyed reality in a world desperate for both.
The queerness of Pacino’s filmography is a reminder. While the media and your worst uncle claim the newness of queer and trans people, the truth is we have always been here. This cinema belongs to us as much as it does any straight film bro. (Though I would like to note re: Overcompensating, when I went to film school at NYU in 2012, I was one of the only people in my class who had actually seen The Godfather. Film bros of a certain age really preferred Nolan and Fincher.)
To me, the most important film in Pacino’s queer canon is actually a much-maligned straight love story. During a Q&A in 2019, Pacino shared that his favorite of his films is Bobby Deerfield, the tale of a depressed racecar driver who falls in love with a terminally ill woman. While in some ways it’s a sort of prototypical Nicholas Sparks/John Green weepy romance with a dash of early Manic Pixie Dream Girl, there’s a real tenderness to Pacino’s performance that makes it all work.
Early in the film, Bobby’s brother mentions that as a kid Bobby would dance around doing a Mae West impression. Later in the film, the woman he falls for calls him feminine and asks if he’s a homo. At another point, he sits at a bar where he talks to a gay magician and two women dance behind him. (Is this a gay bar? Or just Europe?) Eventually, to show the woman he loves his vulnerability, he will do the Mae West impression he previously denied remembering.
During that same Q&A, he said of the scene, “I was criticized for that Mae West scene, because when I did it, they were saying, ‘Why is he really acting like Mae West?’”
Like Bobby, Al Pacino isn’t gay. But there were always gay people around, and he connected to them as someone with a type of masculinity that left him also feeling like an outsider. This is the history of method acting. This is the history of 1970s American cinema. It’s about connecting across difference. It’s about celebrating the personal. It’s about working outside the system until the systems themselves are forced to change.
When art and history are claimed by those with power, it’s tempting to dismiss the work and seek inspiration elsewhere. But I’m so glad I made my way back to Al Pacino. As we enter into another era of cultural conservatism, it’ll be up to us to hold on to our place in cinema. I refuse to be discovered again in thirty years. I refuse to lose art to its most shallow interpreters.
Already read this in my inbox and adored it! Also feel this is where I’ll receive sympathy for the fact work just scheduled our (mandatory) summer party across my screening of Dog Day Afternoon
Thank you!! And oh noooo that is cruel. Too bad the work party can’t be a trip to the movie. haha
I feel like he would love to read this. Someone get it to Al!
And that last line, whew. Right there with you.