Straightwashing: An Epidemic
Illustration by Aleah Antonio
The first time I watched "Breakfast at Tiffany’s", I thought it was a bore apart from Audrey Hepburn's performance as Holly Golightly. And the cat. The second time I watched it, I got it.
Reading the book by Truman Capote only made me love the story and the characters more. I remember being enchanted by Holly Golightly’s take on minimalism, "I don’t wanna own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.” I admired, too, how she thought lovers were great and all, but what she really needed was a friend, and the top candidate was the writer downstairs because he looked most like her brother.
Truman Capote, who writes the narrator of the book after himself, was gay before gay was trendy. He writes Holly and the artsy gigolo-writer as platonic foils who love, fight, and love all over again. The Motion Pictures Production Code, aka the Hays Code, began being enforced in 1934 and controlled what could be seen in American cinema until 1968. This is why an innocent eye could easily watch the film without picking up that Holly and Paul (played by George Peppard) are selling sex for money.
The Hays Code is also responsible for the fact that in the book, the narrator (who Paul in the film is modeled off of) had male and female clients. Because of the restrictions that cast a shadow over the time, one of the most nuanced relationships in the original story, and the true uniqueness of the characters, is missed. Rather than create their own obscure relationship in the world of the normal, these characters did the opposite: they created their own normal in a world where they are both spurned off as hopelessly obscure.
The Hays Code was often responsible for straightwashing. The Tennessee Williams classic "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" includes themes around homosexuality. In the play, Brick Pollit (Paul Newman) is married to the beautiful Maggie “the cat” (Elizabeth Taylor). Tensions rise and break over the family like waves one evening as they celebrate the family Patriarch, Big Daddy's, birthday. Skipper, who we never meet in the film, was one of Brick’s closest friends. So close, in fact, that Maggie suspects Brick and Skipper to be lovers. To prove her accusation false, Skipper tries to sleep with Maggie. Unable to do so, he fears her claim may be true and confesses his feelings to Brick, who rejects him. After the suicide of Skipper, Brick and Maggie's sexual life dies.
In the 1958 film, Skipper's suicide is portrayed as being the result of an aging football hero's identity crisis, the same way Brick's drinking is blamed for his being an ex-football star. More screen time in the film is given to the frustrations of a marital dead-bedroom than what the original story presents as the obvious root cause of the issue. Even though the film erased some of the story’s most intricate human themes, it is still incredibly acted and won Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, among others.
In a post-Hays world, straightwashing is still as common as ever. It isn't about solely telling the "gay story" though that is important on it's own. Identifying with characters in stories means being a able to empathize with the characters struggles and choices.
In "Little Women", protagonist Jo (played by Saoirse Ronan in the 2019 film adaptation) loves Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) but doesn't want to get married. Her lack of romantic love for him makes her resonate deeply with the aromantic community. Aromantic and asexual (not experiencing romantic and/or sexual attraction, respectively) podcast, "Sounds Fake But Okay" lends a recent episode to the topic. “I had never really felt true representation about my aro-ness," says Sara Costello, the podcasts aromantic-asexual co-host, in the episode. "I was like okay. I don’t need to be represented in [media] to figure this out... But now, I understand...because I watched Little Women and I fucking cried for an hour straight.” Having characters to empathize with stretches beyond being the A in LGBTQIA+.
While more and more on-screen queerness has been dominating the societal dialogue, many queer characters were written long ago, and still get straightwashed in a post-Hays world. According to Advocate.com Ayo (Florence Kasumba) from Black Panther (2018), Achilles (Brad Pitt) from Troy (2004) , Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker) from Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Jughead (Cole Sprouse) in Riverdale (2017) and Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) from Goldfinger were all denied their sexuality on screen.
These characters are written the way they are for a reason. You can’t tell the right story if you aren’t telling the truth, and the truth of these characters is that they aren’t society’s “default”. According to Topix.com, American Psycho (2000) and The Thin Red Line (1998) feature male protagonists who have significant homosexual experiences in the book-version of the work, neither of which were included in the film versions.
The LGBTQIA+ community and its allies are forever educating the rest of the world on the fluidity of human sexuality. Topix also mentioned the 2015 film about the Stonewall Riots, an uproar from the gay community lead by black drag queens and trans women. The movie, Stonewall: Where Pride Began, boasts a conventionally hot, white gay dude named Danny (Jeremy Irvine) throwing the brick that caught human history on fire. Danny's brick, however, is being tossed right in the face of many gay people of color who worked hard to be heard, like self-identified drag queen and black activist, Marsha P. Johnson.
Considering writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams are some of the greatest of our time, they could very well write straight characters if they'd meant to. When they didn’t write straight characters, it was on purpose, and it was to tell the story of one who struggles up certain Everests that a straight person in a heterosexual-friendly society would never even have to think about. Misrepresentation of human behavior holds us back from being ourselves and knowing ourselves. Loving is seeing, and if we can’t know our whole selves through our stories, how can we, as a society love ourselves? And, as RuPaul says at the end of each episode of Drag Race, “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?”