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HARD
NOMINATED FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD
William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) startled
filmviewers by portraying a serial killer of gay men who enjoy
sadomasochistic sexual arousal, with an undercover cop who
was straight. Hard, released to the general
public in Los Angeles in midsummer 1999, ups the ante on Cruising
by focusing on closeted gay homicide detective Raymond Vates
(played by Noel Palomaria). Director John Huckert goes beyond
Cruising by supplying much more blood on his
corpses and far more extreme bondage scenes to produce a film
that he expects may become a genre film but not, due to the
gore, a commercial success. Similar to Cruising,
the film Hard is based in part on a true story—in
this case, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer provides many of the
ideas for the scenes. Unlike Cruising, the principal
theme of Hard is not the investigation of an
unknown killer; Jack (played by Malcolm Moorman) is identified
at the very beginning of the film as a misanthropic drifter
and ex-con. Instead, the film focuses on how a gay cop copes
with his homophobic colleagues in the Homicide Division of
the Los Angeles Police Department, where the prevailing culture
parallels Jack’s view that the death of gays (called "homocide")
is some sort of public service. At first, Vates tries to keep
his sexual identity in the closet, but he does not fool Jack,
who has seen him investigating at the scene of one of the
bodies. When Vates encounters Jack at a gay bar while looking
for the killer, Jack seduces him; in the morning after the
two sleep together, Vates awakens to find that Jack has handcuffed
him to his bed and has stolen his LAPD shield. He then has
to come out to his partner Tom Ellis (played by Charles Lanyer),
who is accepting because Vates is an excellent detective.
When Vates’s police shield shows up in the mouth of the next
victim, however, he becomes a suspect, so Internal Affairs
learns that he is gay, and the word spreads to his Homicide
colleagues, who taunt Vates with homophobic discourse, and
then beat him up with impunity after work in the presence
of his boss, Captain Foster (played by Bob Hollander), whereupon
he believes that he has no recourse but to resign from the
force.
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Indeed, LAPD Sergeant Mitchell Grobson, the first police officer
in the United States to sue for discrimination based upon
sexual orientation, makes a cameo appearance in the film as
Brent. To further underscore the realistic theme of the film,
Filipino-American Palomaria has admitted that he went to two
police departments to learn how to be an authentic homicide
detective, but the first police department cut short his training
when he disclosed that he would be playing a gay cop. Hard
is conceived as the first of a trilogy to deal with perhaps
the most pressing fear that has terrified gays for millennia—the
willingness of non-gays to look the other way while those
in authority act as anti-gay vigilantes. Unlike Cruising,
where sadomasochism and leather bars alone are presented as
sensational elements, Hard also looks into
the darkest elements of our society, in which so many heterosexists
are hysterical about wanting to deny any authentic recognition
to same-sex love relationships. Thus, at the end of the film,
Vates asks, albeit disingenuously, "Where does all the hate
come from?" In a culture where certain religious and political
leaders seem determined to institutionalize homophobia, preferring
Condemnianity to Christianity, it is no accident that gays
often live with internalized homophobia, as portrayed so eloquently
in William Friedkin’s Boys in the Band (1970).
In Hard, we should not be surprised that a few
gays whose internalized homophobia is most extreme—masculine
gays—turn out to be either sadistic or masochistic or both.
The Political Film Society has nominated Hard
for an award as a 1999 film focusing on human rights--showing
how police persecute gays rather than treating them as ordinary
citizens with as much rights as everyone else. MH
NOMINEES
FOR 1999
EXPOSÉ:
Bastards, Three
Seasons
HUMAN RIGHTS:
Hard
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