The Homosexual Industrial Complex
The Homosexual Industrial Complex
The Other Cinema Spectacular. A Pre-Woke Guide 1960-1990
In an attempt to avoid the draft, two straight men pretend to be gay lovers and move into an apartment complex overrun with a very welcoming array of raging homosexuals led by Malcolm (Michael Greer).
A capsule review should suffice for this puff piece, but its mere existence leaves you wondering who it was made for and why. Was it to protest an unpopular war or to be sucked into a gay vacuum? Is the movie aimed at draft-age straight men, their girlfriends or for any nance that wants to see herself on the big screen? It doesn’t seem possible that a well-marketed film like this would be made and distributed with no discernible intended audience. Certainly bad decisions are made in Hollywood everyday, but the mystery behind this one is way more interesting than the actual film which is too nauseatingly swish for any denomination.
Released in the same year as the first Vietnam war draft, it’s hard to tell if The Gay Deceivers really is anti-war, anti-military, anti-homosexual, anti-woman or just taking a final opportunity to depict gays as flaming faggots and put them in settings suitable for delicate, trifling homos. I say this depiction is a final opportunity because the social climate was definitely changing and the open criticism of gay lifestyles was quickly becoming verboten, particularly since homosexuality was finally no longer considered a mental illness, a stance that the American Psychiatric Association took in 1973.
Michael Greer adds a semblance of gay legitimacy to this project. He was a regular on the gay entertainment circuit and originated the incredible stage and screen role of Queenie in Fortune and Men’s Eyes. Both of Greer’s characters are very openly gay and exaggerate affectations, but any sustained amount of playing the fairy is hard to take and Malcolm never let’s up. Conversely, if Greer’s Queenie is forever colored with effeminacy, his flaming presence is balanced with vicious and vile behavior that is a true fairy dust killer.
The Gay Deceivers is so unbearably inauthentic, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t made for straight liberals, by straight propagandists doing some early promotion for gays in the military and disguising it as a mindless gay costume party. If it looks like Pink Ops, does that make it Pink Ops? As outrageous as a gay agenda may sound to some, it makes more sense than trying to imagine straight couples going to see this because gay jokes were missing from their lives. Is that presumptuous marketing or promoting an ideology?
A more recent example of presumptuous marketing is the straight/gay bromance Bros, a film that unsurprisingly bombed at the box office, prompting gay producer Billy Eichner, in a now deleted tweet, to suggest that the films failure was because of unsupportive “straight people” and “homophobic weirdos”. Um hmm. It couldn’t possibly be because there was no audience for a film that celebrated making the straight male obsolete.
So if a film has no discernible audience, does that make it propaganda? In the case of Bros, Eichner takes no responsibility for the failure of a film that nobody wanted. Instead, he uses its failure to point out all the phantom homophobes that haunt his entitled world. There’s no doubt that Bros is a product of gender fluid ideology and a death to the patriarchy kind of exercise, so politics is built into it. And with no fathomable audience other than those who have been programmed into thinking it needs to continue emasculating men, Bros really shouldn’t exist. And that’s the way I feel about The Gay Deceivers.
In the end, the big Gay Deceivers joke is that gays are already running the military industrial complex and by making this film look and feel like an episode of I Dream of Jeannie, authenticity could not have been a concern. A colorful Laugh-In style made it safe to include all the offensive gay affectations that define these one-dimensional men as flitting, fantastical fairies cavorting through over-decorated rooms. The party people here are the polar opposite of the more emotional homos audiences were to see the following year in William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band. The Gay Deceivers, for whatever it is—recruitment video or horribly misguided exploitation movie really is a mystery.
