FEATURE The making of an activist: Vito Russo revisited seemed so totally different from their idea of what film criticism is. For one thing it was so much angrier than what film criticism usually was. But he had a real activist agenda. If he were alive today, how would he update The Celluloid Closet? In the revised version, which was published in 1987, he wrote that his hope for gay film would be to see gay characters whose sexuality was completely incidental to the plot or the story. The whole treatment of a gay character today is very different from what it was in Vito’s life. If he were going to continue The Celluloid Closet he’d have to come up with some kind of methodology for evaluating gay characters that he couldn’t possibly have done when he was alive. If he were alive today, would he have been among the first in New York City to get married to his male partner? A lot of people have been asking me that. It’s hard to gauge. Vito died in 1990 when the topic of gay marriage wasn’t on the table at all. Vito did not believe in monogamy; he thought that gay people were inventing new kinds of relationships, that we shouldn’t be copying heterosexual marriages. So, on the one hand he’d be very skeptical about the idea that gay people need to be exactly like straight people and have the right to get married. On the other hand, nobody would’ve bristled faster than Vito to be told that because he was gay he didn’t have the same rights as anybody else. I think he would’ve been caught in a philosophical bind, which I think frankly a lot of gay people are. Did he leave a legacy? Absolutely. Because of Vito Russo, gays have the self-respect that we have today. Vito taught us to look at our representation in the popular media. Vito taught us to question and attack when we felt like we were not being fairly represented. Vito taught us to stand up for ourselves in ways that we had not seen before him. Even if people don’t remember Vito’s name, these things we have in the community today are largely because of him and because of the people in, say, Gay Activist Alliance, who were the first people to fight for anti-discrimination laws on the city, state and federal levels. If they hadn’t done that, we would not be anywhere where we are today. We have to thank these people for what they were doing 40 years ago. And, as for Vito, if The Celluloid Closet hadn’t existed when it did, especially before AIDS, we wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to say the way we’re being represented on the screen is directly proportionate to the way we’re being attacked in society. The Celluloid Closet was published literally weeks before AIDS was first announced. Suddenly, you have a generation of gay men who are seeing how, because of AIDS, we’re getting attacked by society. Those people in the gay and lesbian community had been taught by Vito not to put up with that, that on top of all the bigotry we’ve been facing all these years and now we have AIDS on top of that, we’re not going to take it. We know this is unfair, we know that we’re being misrepresented and our responsibility to get who we are out there in front of society. And Vito is totally, totally responsible for that. Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo by Michael Schiavi (University of Wisconsin Press), which was reviewed in the June 2011 issue of Pittsburgh’s Out, is available from Amazon.com.
PAGE 18 • OUT • SEPTEMBER 2011
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