The Gay We Were: Love! Valour! Compassion!

The 1990s were an odd little crossroads for gay entertainment. The dominant mainstream narrative — when it paid any attention at all — trended towards the AIDS crisis and tragedy. At the same time, far from the mainstream, the cottage industry of gay romantic comedies pitched itself to a greatly underserved market. These movies barely made it to a theatrical release, and it’s fair to say that most of them weren’t great films, but they were what passed for a niche genre back then, and that makes them important. Certainly, for a child of the ’90s, they were formative in ways both good and bad. With The Gay We Were, we’re going to examine this subgenre one film at a time and examine what they said about gay entertainment and the era that once was.

This Week’s Film: Love! Valour! Compassion!
Release Date: May 16, 1997
Directed by: Joe Mantello
Written by: Terrence McNally
Starring: Stephen Bogardus, John Glover, Jason Alexander, Stephen Spinella, John Benjamin Hickey, Justin Kirk

While the official organizing principle of The Gay We Were is to talk about the gay romantic comedies of the late 1990s, a quick perusal through this column’s history will tell you that I’ve often stretched those parameters to include films from the early 2000s. That’s because more important than decade is the genre that these movies fit into; the mood and the tone and the milieu of it all. I say all this because this week’s entry, the 1997 stage adaptation Love! Valour! Compassion!, meets a lot of that by-the-letter criteria (it’s the right year, it’s gay, it’s at least partly comedic), but ultimately stands as an outlier to the genre I’m talking about. It’s worth it to look at why.

The most obvious differentiator between Love! Valour! Compassion! and a movie like last week’s All Over the Guy is that it lacks the lightness and frivolity that characterizes the rom-coms of this era, gay or straight. Gay films in the late-’90s were emerging from the shadow of the AIDS-dominated movies of the Longtime Companion era (though emerging slowly, trepidatiously, as we’ve tracked throughout these films). Not that AIDS was no longer a concern, but medical advances had begun to change what the disease meant in gay culture, and with that came an evolution in the stories we told (and were told about us). That Love! Valour! Compassion! is a 1997 movie based on a 1994 play might not seem that significant, but those three years represented a few leaps and bounds in a very crucial decade. Leaps and bounds that made the film something of a relic in its own time.

Based on legendary playwright Terrence McNally’s 1994 stage production, directed by Tony-winning Joe Mantello, and starring almost everybody from the original stage production (with one particular substitution of note for later), the film version of L!V!C! didn’t really have any interest in being much more than a filmed version of the play, and that’s fine. Fidelity to source material this strong isn’t necessarily a vice. McNally writes beautifully as he gathers a group of friends — gay men in their 30s/40s, all white with one exception — to a vacation home in upstate New York, over the course of three summer holidays. Gregory (Stephen Bogardus) is the host, a choreographer who fears his best work is behind him and who has a persistent stutter that is probably one affectation too far on McNally’s part. Gregory’s boyfriend Bobby (Justin Kirk, in his screen debut) is blind and sweet but susceptible to infidelity. Broadway vets Stephen Spinella and John Benjamin Hickey play a committed couple — a model couple, as they put it — who would be tagged as “normative” today. John Glover plays twin characters, both gay: John is a bastard who seemingly nobody likes; James is unfailingly kind and dying of AIDS. Buzz (played by Jason Alexander here and by Nathan Lane in the play) also has AIDS, though his health hasn’t yet begun to deteriorate. John has also brought with him his young lover, Ramon, who is immediately exoticized by this group of white men and whose youth and beauty wreaks exactly the kind of havoc you might expect within the group.

That’s the setup, and you can probably sketch out the drama that follows and not be too far off. It’s not the mechanics of plot that make L!V!C! such a worthwhile watch, though. It’s what emerges from the scenes themselves. And it’s also the not inconsiderable aspect of a gay movie being made almost entirely by gay people that truly feels insider-y, like the viewer is a fly on the wall observing this group of men who take their shared gayness entirely for granted and instead deal with things like fidelity and mortality and careers and resentments and clashes of personality and moments of kindness.

The comedy weaves its way throughout, finding its best successes in smaller moments of tone. There is a montage of characters packing at the beginning of the movie that throws in some proto-Wes Anderson sight gags (Alexander’s character packs pills and Broadway cast recordings). Alexander’s character fares less well when it comes to overt comedy; it’s here where your mind starts to wonder how much better Nathan Lane probably played these scenes in the play. But in the second half of the movie, when Alexander has a handful of quiet, emotional moments, he’s incredibly good, in a way that must have seemed even more jarring in the middle of his Seinfeld run.

That this kind of heavy, melancholy, sunsets-and-deck-chairs movie had already begun to fade by the time Love! Valour! Compassion! had hit theaters was in many ways a blessing. It was a mark of progress and migration (and Angels in America‘s Prior Walter, a character played by both Spinella and Kirk, might have said) in gay film. Already the world of gay entertainment was getting lighter and frothier — not necessarily better, but that’s almost beside the point. If it was an artifact in its own time, though, it is merely an artifact now, the same as The Boys in the Band or Longtime Companion or And the Band Played On. And as an artifact of that early ’90s sensibility, cast under a pall of creeping oblivion, it’s actually quite beautiful.

[Love! Valour! Compassion! is currently streaming on YouTube.]