Was It Good For The Gays: ‘Philadelphia’

If you’re going to make a movie about queer people, you’re likely going to get a divisive response. Does it reinforce negative stereotypes? Does it provide an accurate cross-section of the diverse LGBT community? How many think pieces will it incite? In this regular column, we’ll look at depictions of queers in cinema and ask, Was It Good For The Gays? Today, in honor of Hanksgiving Week, we look at Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia.

It took over a decade after the AIDS epidemic began for a major motion picture to be made about it. One might say it was possibly not as inconceivable as, say, the fact that it took President Ronald Reagan three years to publicly mention the crisis in 1985 — three years after the term was defined, after thousands of deaths had been reported, the same year that Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart was produced on stage in New York. Reagan’s first speech to address the epidemic, in which he called it “public enemy number one,” took place in April 1987. By the time Philadelphia was released in 1993, roughly 40,000 people in the United States had died of the disease, including actors like Robert Reed, Amanda Blake, and Rock Hudson, as well as artist Keith Haring, entertainer Liberace, and tennis star Arthur Ashe. Basketball player Magic Johnson revealed in 1991 that he was HIV-positive. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts’ history of the epidemic, was published in 1987, and an HBO film based on the book premiered the same year that Philadelphia hit theaters.

It’s an understatement to say that the AIDS epidemic was at the forefront of many Americans’ thoughts, but the disease was incredibly misunderstood. It took years to fully understand how the virus was transferred — the virus itself was not identified until 1983, after 2,000 Americans had died. The disease primarily affected gay men in urban areas, with African-Americans the second demographic most likely to contract the virus. It’s not hyperbolic to say that the groups most affected by the disease were, to put it mildly, undesirable in the eyes of most Americans.

AIDS was scary, and those suffering from the virus were, to most people, either tragic victims or monsters. They were misunderstood, belittled, feared, and politicized — and no major Hollywood film touched that until Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia.

Tom Hanks stars as Andrew Beckett, a promising attorney who keeps his identity as a gay man — and his HIV-positive status — secret from his colleagues. As his health begins to fail and lesions begin to appear on his face, he is unceremoniously fired; he is told by his bosses that his attitude and performance are the problem. Beckett goes to personal injury lawyer Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) for counsel; he wants to sue his former employers, and his case is turned down by nine other lawyers before Miller agrees to represent him despite his apprehension. (Miller is admittedly homophobic and afraid of contracting HIV from Beckett despite the common knowledge at the time that the virus is only contracted via bodily fluids.)

Throughout the case, Beckett’s former employers focus on two important narratives. The first, he was a bad lawyer and didn’t get along with his colleagues. The second is that he participated in risky behavior; not only did he supposedly contract HIV after an anonymous sexual encounter in a gay porn theater (while he was living with his partner, Miguel, also putting him at risk of contracting the virus), but he also “brought the disease” to work with him, presumably putting his coworkers at risk, as well. (The partners of his firm are as unapologetically homophobic in the courtroom as they are in the office and at social events.)

I’ll admit that I hadn’t seen Philadelphia before I watched it yesterday afternoon. It’s one of those cultural blind spots I left open for years, mostly because I have seen too many films about the deaths of various gay men through the years, and what’s one more, right? Seeing it two decades after its release was an interesting experience. I find myself being so drained from the narrative I’ve see variations of all these years: the injustice, the tragedy, the unfathomable lack of empathy that fueled the AIDS epidemic for so long. It’s still incomprehensible to me, being a gay man who was born at the time the disease was spreading and willfully ignored by those in power or used for political agendas to spread fear toward a group of undesirable people that many felt were being punished for their lifestyle and risky behavior. It’ll never not be shocking, as someone who has known about AIDS all my life, that so many cared so little for other people and allowed this disease to further reduce and strip away a sense of humanity when systemic discrimination was so rampant.

What Philadelphia accomplished, with Tom Hanks — the friendly, safe, non-threatening Hollywood actor — acting as an avatar of inequality, pain, and suffering (he deservedly won an Oscar for Best Actor in 1994 for the role), was giving those affected by the AIDS epidemic a humanity. Andrew Beckett was depicted not just as a victim, but as the Everyman: someone’s son, someone’s lover, someone’s friend. His death was inevitable; the film takes place at a time when treatments were tricky and experimental and men and women of all backgrounds were dying by the thousands. One can be cynical that it was a movie starring a major Hollywood star that accomplished what thousands of patients and their supporters attempted to accomplish, but one can also make the case that the unapologetic activism of those directly affected by the epidemic did not lose and, in fact, accomplished bringing their activist efforts into the mainstream.

As always, it’s incredibly heartbreaking that the effects of a disease, which wiped out the larger part of a generation of gay men in particular, could be so politicized, and that it took the death of millions — and the fictional portrayal of one case — to allow those unaffected by the epidemic to have an understanding of it and empathy for those who suffered through it.

But progress is progress, and what sets Philadelphia apart from other films of its kind is that it’s not strictly about death. Yes, Andrew Beckett dies in the end just after hearing the news that he won his case. But Demme’s film ends on a hopeful note: Andrew’s family and friends gather together to celebrate him, a talented and gifted man whose life was unfortunately cut short by a disease that could — and can — affect anyone. The film isn’t overly political in nature, and the most radical thing it says is that AIDS is not a punishment. It’s an illness, a cancer, and it shouldn’t define anyone. But it also makes a strong case for compassion — it asks us to have empathy for anyone who suffers rather than accept the notion that someone’s suffering is deserved. It’s safe to say that films that promote this message, however treacly they can be, more often than not affect those who need to hear and see these things to understand the small differences that set them apart from those more likely to experience pain from which they feel blessedly immune.

Previously in Was It Good For The Gays:
The Birdcage
Brokeback Mountain
The Children’s Hour
In & Out
Cruising

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Photos: TriStar Pictures