Title

Montgomery Clift: Hollywood Pseudohomosexual

Abstract

One of the silver screen's foremost leading men in the 1950s, Montgomery Clift inspired devotion from his female fans, the vast majority of whom little suspected his homosexuality. Surprisingly, during an era that seemed to exult in conformity and repression, he made little effort to conceal it within the intimate confines of the Hollywood community. Clift's close friends and family knew of his queer sexuality, though some were quick to modify it. In an interview with biographer Patricia Bosworth, Clift's brother Brooks describes his brother's sexuality: "Monty was a bisexual . . . I met two girls he got pregnant. He was never exclusively one thing or the other; he swung back and forth. Because we'd been raised in Europe where homosexuality was more or less accepted, he never felt ashamed - until much later when he grew up" (Bosworth 67). Director Herb Machiz ascribes the anguish of Clift's personal life to his sexuality: "The real tragedy in most homosexual lives and for a person as sensitive as Monty was having to accept the tremendous disappointment of never finding a mate worthy of him" (Bosworth 254). In the closeted world of 1950s Hollywood, however, as well as the outside world, Clift's sexuality could not be openly addressed, despite his abstention from marriage. At the same time, between homosexuality and heterosexuality are various shades of gray, and Clift's characters in his film oeuvre - strong yet sensitive, with a saturnine sensuality simmering just beneath the surface - frequently exhibit a type of masculine sexuality that one might call pseudohomo sexuality. This term suggests the ways in which some men fail to convincingly embody normative sexuality and display characteristics that cast them with gendered suspicion. Barbara Ehrenreich outlines the ways in which marriage defined a man's sexual normativity in the 1950s: The average age of marriage for men in the late fifties was twenty-three, and according to popular wisdom, if a men held out much longer, say even to twenty-seven, "you had to wonder." . . . By the 1950s and '60s psychiatry had developed a massive weight of theory establishing that marriage - and, within that, the breadwinner role - was the only normal state for the adult male. Outside lay only a range of diagnoses, all unflattering. (Ehrenreich 14-15; see also 16-28)1 Falling somewhere between the poles of heterosexuality and homosexuality, such pseudohomosexual men as bachelors, priests, wimps, and, of course, closeted homosexuals could become marked with queerness despite their attempted performances of normative sexuality. Queer male stars such as Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, Farley Granger, and Montgomery Clift frequently exhibit pseudohomosexual masculinities as part of their star personas. Whether in Perkins's murderous maternal obsession in Psycho (1960), in Granger's homoerotic relationship with his fellow killer in Rope (1948), or in Hudson's tongue-in-cheek romp as a straight man playing gay to win Doris Day's affections in Pillow Talk (1959), pseudohomosexual screen personas often obliquely reflect the sexuality of the actor playing the role. For Clift, pseudohomosexuality explains much of his enigmatic appeal as a leading man, in that his dazzling good looks and magnetism drew audiences in, yet his fans rarely saw him in the role of a successful heterosexual romantic lead, and in the few cases they did, he invariably met a tragic or unfulfilled end. Whether arbitrary or by design, Clift's roles conveyed the image of men self-contained and unobtainable. Within the restrictive cultural context of 1950s cinema, such roles in traditionally feminine and masculine film genres (from melodramas to westerns and war movies) deploy the enigmatic coding of the pseudohomosexual to create a man of mystery for audience consumption. © 2010 by Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved.

Publication Date

12-1-2010

Publication Title

Larger Than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s

Number of Pages

18-36

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

Socpus ID

84897318504 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84897318504

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