Credit Where Credit Is Not Due

According to IMDb, the Los Angeles Daily News wants to give Brokeback Mountain credit for several recent movies featuring gay characters:

The box-office success of Brokeback Mountain has opened the door for other gay characters in movies, a fact that will be particularly obvious this weekend when The Night Listener, starring Robin Williams as a gay writer, opens wide, while two other films, Quinceañera and Shock to the System open in limited release, the Los Angeles Daily News observed Thursday. Chad Allen, who stars as a gay detective in Shock to the System, told the newspaper that until Brokeback, "There was a huge fear or belief that you couldn't tell a story with a gay hero and have it make money. A well-made movie with a good story trumps everything. It's not just a victory for gay rights; it's a victory for humanity."

Certainly none of the abovementioned movies was greenlit because of Brokeback Mountain; they were all in production long before Brokeback opened. But beyond that, because the history of the public's acceptance of gay characters in movies is a long and complicated one, I doubt very many people will attend any of these movies with Brokeback in mind.

More likely, when they decide to see The Night Listener, they'll be thinking about how much they enjoyed another well-known Armistead Maupin adaptation, PBS' "Tales of the City"; or how entertaining Robin Williams was when he was gay in The Birdcage. Maybe when they see Quinceañera, it'll be because they enjoyed Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland's previous gay-themed feature, The Fluffer. Maybe people will turn out for Shock to the System because they're fans of Richard Stevenson's long-running series of Donald Strachey novels.

I'm not sure what happened with this particular story; it looks like some reporter just took Allen's comment and ran with it. But there are examples of lazy journalism everywhere, and not just in the entertainment press. It's no wonder so many people don't understand what's happening in the world, because the press so often can't be bothered to place anything in a context that goes back more than six months.