I Know a Queen Bitch When I See One
A (Kinda) Dualist Approach to The Gay Deceivers (1969)
The Gay Deceivers (1969) – Dualist
Happy Pride Month, darlings! I hope everyone has had (or makes) an opportunity this first week to lean into love and practice an act of service to your community, honouring not only your true self but also a community in which you feel safe expressing that truth. Whether you identify with a non-heteronormative label or identity or not, I hope we can all take the lead of queer pioneers whose fearlessness in the face of visceral hate made this a world in which being yourself, in whatever way that means to you, is something to be celebrated. Protect those targeted by that same hate today so that we all may live in the world they so courageously make.
Before getting into the film review – which as you can see is Bruce Kessler’s The Gay Deceivers (1969) – I want to take a moment to talk about attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community. Queer people exist. That has always been true (by another name or label in any given time) and always will be true. No matter how much an individual may wish that were not true for whatever extremely invasive personal reason, queer people will always exist. Despite that indisputable fact, attacks on trans people and the wider queer community have escalated dramatically in recent years in the US especially with the Colorado Republican Party tweeting this week that all Pride flags should be burned. As of right now, 332 bills introducing anti-trans legislation are actively being considered in the US of a total 593 bills that have been considered since the start of 2024 six months ago.
Two years ago this June, the United States Supreme Court issued an opinion reversing abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson. Egregiously, this decision also implicitly called into question a number of other court cases on which the original Roe v. Wade case relied or for which it served as precedent. These cases were named directly:
Nor does the right to obtain an abortion have a sound basis in precedent. Casey relied on cases involving the right to marry a person of a different race, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967); the right to marry while in prison, Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78 (1987); the right to obtain contraceptives, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965), Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972), Carey v. Population Services Int’l, 431 U. S. 678 (1977); the right to reside with relatives, Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494 (1977); the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923); the right not to be sterilized without consent, Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U. S. 535 (1942); and the right in certain circumstances not to undergo involuntary surgery, forced administration of drugs, or other substantially similar procedures, Winston v. Lee, 470 U. S. 753 (1985), Washington v. Harper, 494 U. S. 210 (1990), Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165 (1952). Respondents and the Solicitor General also rely on post-Casey decisions like Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts), and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (right to marry a person of the same sex). (p 31-32).
I’ve bolded the four you may have heard about recently or be more familiar with, but truly all named are simple rights we should not fear being named in an opinion stripping healthcare rights from people who are capable of getting pregnant. While their naming in the opinion is not necessarily an immediate cause for concern, actions of the GOP in recent years reinforce why we should be concerned about each one of them (actions such as many of those anti-trans bills that target what children can and cannot be taught in schools or the Senate Republicans’ near unified refusal to enshrine the right to contraceptive medication two days ago).
We must take these threats at face value and part of that is in asserting that queer people will always exist. Through every hate-filled rant, every torturous “therapy”, every Christian’s worst nightmare, every SCOTUS decision, every genocide, every attempt at beating, maiming, threatening, stifling, hiding, and killing, queer people will always exist because nothing in this world is more natural than feelings of love and attraction, no matter how much learned behaviours of hate try to snuff them out. Love may not always conquer all, but it will always survive, and it will thrive in any spaces where trust and safety are fostered. That’s the significance of the queer community as I know it.
Let’s turn to the review. You might not know this film by name, but I do hope many of you have seen this 40-second clip that goes viral every so often. It pops through my head every once in a while, but I had never seen the full film, so for this Pride month, I thought I’d give it a full watch. The Review Roulette wheel landed on dualist as our approach and I think, as I’ve already started to lean into the personal outing, this review will be a bit more reflective comparing myself with a protagonist and us both with the film’s real star.
The Gay Deceivers follows two young men, Danny Devlin (Kevin Coughlin) and Elliot Crane (Lawrence P. Casey) who are ostensibly straight individuals who tell the US Army that they are gay and therefore, in 1969, unfit for military service. The film plays out as they attempt to keep up their ruse by moving into a one-bedroom house in a gay community overseen by the film’s shining star, Malcolm (Michael Greer), and his husband Craig (Sebastian Brook).
Michael Greer is of particular note as this was his film debut despite already having captured the eyes and hearts of Hollywood icons such as Judy Garland with his stage presence. Greer’s success in queer spaces as a singer and performer led to director Kessler and the film’s writer Jerome Wish entrusting the role of Malcolm to Greer and allowing him to make an overtly gay and flamboyant character such a beloved figure in a 1969 production. Greer said of Malcolm:
I made [parents] think a little more if nothing else. I made them think it is possible to like a fairy simply for himself, rather than his sexual preference. They don’t have to worry about it or fear it. I made it as harmless as it actually is. The only thing they’re worried about are their children and it’s been proven again and again that more heterosexuals do more damage to more children than homosexuals. It’s a fucking hard row.
Malcolm’s role in the film is exactly as innocent as that. A queer person existing.
Inspiring thought and reflection were Greer’s goals with the film, and I do not doubt he achieved it before going on to even more wonderful queer roles and inhabiting even more queer spaces. The Gay Deceivers did spark reflection in me personally and I will not spoil this film as I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone interested, but I will offer my own reading of Elliot especially in a vague and mercurial way.
I think Elliot is bisexual, just like me. Fair warning, that might be projection on vague implications, but Elliot is quite clearly struggling with a hyper-masculine identity and perceived heterosexuality. He seems quite comfortable with his presentation of self, but when prompted to actually question his sexual identity for the first time, Elliot falters to commit to a strict binary of one or the other. His hesitancy sometimes manifests as angry outbursts at his own desires or lack thereof, and personally, I see a pained person confronting an identity he himself mocked and jeered at that now is starting to feel accurate in the mirror.
I never had that experience in any extreme way with anger or violence, but the pained confrontation of the self in relation to society is something all queer people definitely experience at some point. A fear of whether that identity will be accepted when spoken aloud and lived. Even as a privileged white woman in the 21st century who identifies as bisexual and is by no means the target of the majority of the attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community, I do think that fear (to whatever extent) is present in every queer person at some time. I see in Elliot a glimmer of the feeling of inclusion when he is welcomed so warmly into a queer space by Malcolm without any trappings or knowledge of people outside that space, including Danny. When Elliot is allowed to be fully alone in that queer space, he is inaugurated into it, a member of it even after fighting back, and he embraces the community by keeping certain secrets he is invited to be part of. He blossoms, although still thornily as he fights against learned behaviours of hate, when he is surrounded by love, trust, and safety in Malcolm’s queer space.
Not to force a metaphor, but that 40-second viral clip might be the most important part of the film. In that clip, a woman representing forced hetero-normativity in Elliot’s life stomps through Malcolm’s beloved flowers he mistakenly believes are peonies. The woman corrects him, saying they are marigolds to which Malcolm responds, “I may not know my flowers… but I know a BITCH when I see one.” Malcolm makes a point of saying that nurturing his peonies is a significant part of his life. He loves bringing life and nourishment to flowers that have no defence in the world and which are labelled so strictly by the woman who moments earlier forced her way into Elliot’s bedroom interrupting his developing inkling of a potentially queerer identity. Malcolm does not care what the world labels his flowers, he only cares that they are given every opportunity to flourish and blossom and thrive in an environment, even a precarious one, of love and nourishment and care. It is one of the best delivered jokes I have ever seen, but it is also a profoundly beautiful metaphor for the space Malcolm makes for his fellow queer people and reinforces that Malcolm’s arms are open to Elliot (and not to Danny) for a reason. Malcolm’s trust in Elliot and space for him even after his angry outbursts are the biggest indicators of Elliot’s potential queerness.
This film has so many fascinating angles and developments and relations to late 1960s America. The plot of dodging the draft with homosexuality, the framing of the film with an implicit queerness to Uncle Sam’s “I want you” poster, the twist at the end that I really do not want to spoil but would love to write several books about, the timing of its release just a week after Stonewall, it is American to its core. Greer, a US Air Force veteran himself, shines in this film as a courageous, unapologetic, proud American with an identity that is all too often purposely excluded from that larger umbrella term. For all the things he stands for, Malcolm (because of Greer) is the kind of person to create the spaces in which people like me and Elliot were welcomed to question our desires and impulses and natural feelings of love without ever feeling judged or derided, just wholly welcomed; spaces of protection and care that oppose the hate and violence levied at the LGBTQIA+ community and fight back against it with love; spaces that nurture individual and communal development whether for peonies or marigolds or any other flowers one might identify as.