Critic at Large: Finally, we’re escaping days of gays staying in closet

Remember “Rebel Without a Cause,” the 1955 movie that teens flocked to see in droves?

More than any other movie of its ilk, it epitomized and fostered the recurring image of the troubled, disoriented adolescent hero with a weak, effete father and domineering mother.

Film buffs may also recall that like the recent and devastatingly popular “The Dark Knight,” Nicholas Ray’s movie enjoyed an eerily sensational box office success when it was released after the death of its star, James Dean, who still remains the archetypal adolescent American hero.

Today’s young audiences still respond to Dean’s Jim Stark, the brooding high school senior who yells at his parents, screaming in agony that “You’re tearing me apart.” More than any other popular movie, “Rebel” signaled the break from the bland Eisenhower ’50s. It was, one might argue, the clarion call to the more turbulent ’60s, and thus a precursor to the cultural revolution that soon would envelop and encapsulate the era.

One might also recall the two friends, also troubled in their respective environments. There was Natalie Wood’s Judy, living with a self-righteous daddy; and Plato, the shy, reclusive loner Judy and Jim befriend and protect. He is played tenderly and beautifully by Sal Mineo.

Not talked about

In 1955, no one dared mention that Plato was obviously gay, for this was no time to write or talk in such frank terms. It’s interesting that although he became a kind of teenage heartthrob, Mineo himself later acknowledged that he was bisexual. Biographies indicate that he was just plain gay in a time when you just did not talk or write about these things.

If, when I was a teen, someone were to tell me that I would have a homosexual friend, I would have regarded the messenger as a creature from another planet. I grew up in a neighborhood in which all gays were regarded as “queers” who accosted you in public bathrooms. Now, I think of classmates who could not come out until long after they reached maturity. We all have friends who because of social pressures faked their way into marriages and maybe still are dissembling.

I will never forget sitting at an interview table across an Army veteran and symbol of sturdy masculinity named Rock Hudson. It was shortly after those rumors began to circulate. He was sweating and shaking lest one of us ask him about a suspicion we all knew was based in fact. It was a time we should all regard with some kind of shame and regret.

Yet, even though some Neanderthals out there think you can change natures with prayer and that sort of thing, that closet era came to pass, even if it took decades for my gay friends to acknowledge that fact in casual conversation with “outsiders.” In a kind of ironic reversal, we are now in a kind of environment in which some straight couples promulgate relationships with gays. It’s a way for certain heterosexuals to show they are with the times. Au courant, as they say.

Still, despite the nuances and the ironies associated with this welcome assimilation and the arrival of TV shows like “Will & Grace,” teen movies have not depicted this assimilation with ease.

Real buddies

Hence, I was pleasantly taken by depictions in “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist,” due out next week. In the standard story line, Michael Cera and Kat Denning play the title characters about to fall for each other. What’s new is that Nick’s best friends and fellow band members are three gay guys played by Aaron Yoo, Rafi Gavron and Jonathan B. Wright.

These boys are real buddies, eager to cheer Nick up and get him on a different path, away from a catty female and toward a healthier relationship with a different sort of girl, who of course comes into the picture as Nora. It’s all depicted as natural, even to the point of good-natured kibbbitzing about their respective natures.

There is one character who rags on Nora for hanging with gay “losers,” and I got a real kick out of a scene in which one of the trio greets our bigot with a head but. It wasn’t the scene itself, which struck me as gratuitous. It was the reaction of the audience members who let out a big cheer.

So that’s what got me to thinking of Mineo and his portrayal of Plato and how in another era a gay persona had to be refined out of existence. I thought of those prejudices I grew up with and of those kids, including an all-county halfback and Division I university baseball star, who had to pretend. Pretend and suffer.

I’m glad we have escaped or are beginning to escape those days; I’m heartened that we are living in a time when straight teens can hang with openly gay friends and acquaintances, because that’s the way things should be and because we are living in a world in which there are more important things to worry about than the perils of one’s sexual orientation.