Alain Delon And The Homosexual Gaze

 "So what's wrong if I had? Or I did? Would I be guilty of something? If I like it I'll do it. We have a great actor in France named Michel Simon and Michel Simon said once, "If you like your goat, make love with your goat." But the only matter is to love." 

 

Alain Delon, on his alleged homosexual tastes (1969)

 

   
    

    And that's where M. Delon should have left it...in the full knowledge that actors' 'truths' about themselves are often to be taken with the same grain of salt as speculation about their sexuality. But he didn't. With his more recent dotage he's become the proverbial whore in church spouting homophobia while writing fluffy books about the women he's loved. His claim to not be bothered about being wrong can be interpreted as evolved masculinity or next-level narcissism. Richly deserving of the 2019 Cannes Palme d'Or d'Honneur for his body of work, it's hard to argue that he didn't also earn some of the backlash and personal denouncements his award attracted. It was full-circle for Alain Delon: he'd first shown up at Cannes in 1956 as the escort of an older actress, rather than as an actor. According to Roger Ebert he nevertheless walked the red carpet with gay star (and lifelong friend) Jean-Claude Brialy. 

A Real Piece Of Work

    Even as his millions of fans have tacitly accepted every salacious and unsavory aspect of his life, so they've accepted many probable dalliances with men - be they for love or personal advancement. Or as Claudia Cardinale put it: "Alain Delon? Men and women were lining up to have sex with him." But no amount of vilification or self-promotion can ever destroy or create the work of art that simply is. Delon's on-screen magnetism was summed-up many moons ago with a simple and succinct comment: "You just didn't know whether he intended to kiss you or kill you."


 

An enfant terrible from the get-go, Alain Delon's movie 

stardom arrived within a few years of his being dishonorably discharged from the French Navy while spending undocumented times as a Pigalle denizen - no place in the late '50s for a young fella to be avoiding crime and whoring. Four film roles quickly came his way, and few failed to notice that his blazing male beauty heralded future stardom as a new kind of movie Frenchman: young, immaculately composed and New Wave cool. He also personified the masculinity and sexuality which many Anglo males still despise as being of Frenchmen. If ever a man was therefore entitled to The Homosexual Gaze it was, and is, Alain Delon because his appeal lies squarely on the spectrum as carnal significance in top gear: he's a fine piece of ass.

 

 

Despite half a century of concerted hetero-washing and gun-as-penis stylized menace, there's nothing more obvious than the fact that the Delon image has its genesis in not-too-subtle homoerotica, and that the homosexual gaze polished it and continues to do so. French cinema in the wake of Alain Delon demands of male stars his unisex appeal and committed onscreen intensity. As with Delon, Romain Duris' identifiable gait commands attention in a long shot and the late Gaspard Ulliel brought Delon's acting chops as well as his male model sexual sensibility during his all-to-short life. For the French, it's de rigueur to do gay roles and do them frankly and arrestingly. As of course to hope they'll invoke the allure of Alain Delon.

The Style And Substance Of Homoerotica

When nobody else finds you attractive or desirable

    No amount of lived experience as a unisex object of desire could prepare Alain Delon for René Clément's Plein Soleil / Purple Noon (1960). The lead role in the first filming of "The Talented Mister Ripley" required acting skills far beyond what excellent direction could declare as believable. At twenty-four, Delon delivered a bullseye performance as the otherworldly Tom Ripley - seamlessly demonstrating pathos, menace and sexual ambiguity of the mostly creepy kind. A risky role, it fell to the amorphous quality of star power to succeed. The camera sent Alain Delon directly to the imaginations of audiences - any and all disparate gazes perceived exactly what their psyches craved. As we swoon we ignore the fact that nobody in the film finds Tom Ripley particularly attractive.

Originally up for the much easier second male role of the cruelly masculine Phillipe, Delon coveted the lead and his pitch to Clément and the producers (who humiliated him as "a little prick who should pay to be in the film") was that he shared Ripley's character. Watching Alain Delon in Plein Soleil does little to support any counter-arguments.


The role also demanded style, which Delon expertly served up as suave stardom, rather than something of an actor in good wardrobe. Well into the 21st Century, men's fashion writers globally invoke Delon as Ripley to demonstrate what style is, as they peddle expensive retro-ish fashion to men pursuing the myth of the alpha male with no regard for the amusing sidebar fact that they're being urged to impersonate an impersonator.

Commerce sometimes picks up on good ideas, and French style done properly gives a man an enigmatically attractive edge when being like him and being with him become blurred as sublimated homoerotic feelings. Of course, there would be no more aggressive salesman of Alain Delon Style than Alain Delon himself, as he merchandised as many aspects and accoutrements of his potent youth as possible through an endlessly extended middle-age.

A Piece Of Work In Progress: The Visconti Factor

    The homosexual gaze as passively experienced is one thing. The homosexual gaze as artistic inspiration and motivation is something else again, with few willing to acknowledge that some of the greatest art of Western civilization is the creation of homosexual men. Or that it was so before the term was even invented and pathologized. Luchino Visconti didn't make gay movies per se - the highly-educated aristocrat's cinema is as obtuse as it is rich in its social commentary while appearing unconfined to stylistic considerations.


Neither dissolute playboy nor self-absorbed trained actor waiting for breaks, Alain Delon immediately grasped all that cinema is, and set about being a great star actor within the collaborative process. His appetite and respect for great direction paved the way for what he had to be and do when chosen by Luchino Visconti as the titular lead in Rocco e i suoi fratelli / Rocco And His Brothers (1960). While Plein Soleil went a long way to establishing the Delon stereotype, Rocco as conceived by Visconti is an allegorical opposite. He's arguably the most womanly manly male ever to grace a cinema screen. While he could box with the best of them, Rocco's saintlike character is entirely of female components like tenderness, loyalty, protection, sentiment and sacrifice. Visconti clued us up early in the piece by sending Rocco out in the cold to happily do labor in his mother's sweater.

 

Taking direction or asserting intimate territory?

   While Rocco's 'sweetness' throws most critics to this day, it only makes sense to see him as the compleat male lover, as defined by an intelligent director who valued womanhood as much as he cherished masculinity. And it's just as reasonable to assume that the actor became what he played in some form or another.

   

People still speculate as to whether or not Delon took on Visconti as his lover - or vice versa - at this point. Interestingly, the morality of the place and time simply accepted the term 'protege' for all it implied. Candid on-set photos certainly indicate an unusual intimacy between an intimidating director and an up-and-coming actor.

 

 

 

   The Visconti / Delon relationship didn't end when 'Rocco' wrapped: within the year, Visconti decided to direct Delon and Delon's then-girlfriend on stage in his adaption of the scandalous Tis Pity She's A Whore. Neither had any stage acting experience, but Alain Delon had the experience of working Visconti's way i.e. he ran his sets as precise and disciplined stagecraft, permitting no improvisation. The Parisian critics  snorted disdain while the public and Delon in Elizabethan tights made it a huge success. As with the filming of Rocco, Visconti fussed with Delon's makeup while simultaneously applying his imposing stage skills to driving the theatrical event. All in all, it can't be assumed that Visconti took upon himself the sad role of an older gay man longing chastely for the unattainable - that's just the plot of  Visconti's Death In Venice (1971).

 

 

 

No faked period makeup for Tancredi

   Luchino Visconti was already rewriting and preparing to direct Il Gattopardo / The Leopard: an international big-budget adaption of the popular Italian historical novel, which as a film serves as a timeline precursor to Novecento/'1900' (1976), with Burt Lancaster further linking the two. Although Warren Beatty was being heavily lobbied by financiers for the key second lead Tancredi, he unsurprisingly got nowhere near the role while Alain Delon and Visconti were whatever they were. Retrospectively deemed  a masterpiece, 'The Leopard' truly is great cinema and it's difficult to imagine anybody but Delon as the sensually fresh and charismatic Tancredi. His balletic and glamorous departure-for-battle scene with his doberman is wonderful cinema inasmuch as it prevents the film from slipping early into a leaden, masculinized costume drama. Rarely feted, Alain Delon's graceful energy as Tancredi is the embodiment of 'dashing', while also being a man who knows what must be done to survive in a changing world with no sure way forward.

 

On the 'Il Gattopardo' set (1962)

A Body Of Work, The Scent Of A Man

 

 

 

    While female starlets doing publicity in bed sheets wasn't revolutionary for 1958, it certainly wasn't commonplace for male starlets. And still isn't. But Alain Delon's sexuality and attitude weren't of brutish machismo, so sprawled out in a messed-up double bed and enjoying a probably post-coital cigarette possibly seemed like the next best thing. Not an early image-building miss-step, the notion found form as the Plein Soleil camera lingered on him being woken up and revealed as an eyeful in the broad light of day. At barely 180cm he was nevertheless proportioned well enough to look as good in and out of bed as he looked in and out of clothes.

Delon's notorious swimwear getup for 'The Yellow Rolls Royce' (1964)

    Hollywood never knew what to do with Delon, but nevertheless took a shot at imagining what a Frenchman wore for a swim. Never bulge-friendly, MGM wasn't so shy about taking the tits-and-ass approach. While The Yellow Rolls Royce hasn't achieved any measure of esteem after the fact, the same can't be said of Delon's black terry-cloth trunks: a decade ago at auction a version attracted four times their estimated value. The following year, The New York Times review of Once A Thief took a veiled and bitchy pot-shot at his masculinity by declaring he "appears to be a romantic intellectual, and not a rough-tough type". While Delon's masculinity was at odds with Hollywood's male all-American graceless lumpiness, it resonated with men of the Far East: in a long-shot he passes as an Asian male ideal and that ensured a lifetime of idolatry and superstardom in territories east. 

 

 

  

Alain Delon's failure to resonate in a slew of Hollywood films didn't stop Jean-Pierre Melville creating an apparent vehicle for him. Without seeing one line of a script Delon committed to  1967's Le Samourai. A mutual trust exercise, Melville's invasive camera wanted much more than star-power - it demanded the acting chops of a man who could create a hired killer unanchored to morality or temporal references. Delon's Jef Costello is indeed a very real man of existential loneliness. He surrounds himself with no spoils of war and has to share a girlfriend. His eccentricities (a fedora, white gloves, a bird) flesh out a character which will have to carry the movie, with no action sequences to help him out. In purging Jef of machismo and obvious heterosexuality, Melville put a man on the screen who still resonates with men everywhere. Many a movie has been subsequently borrowed from Jef Costello: the fact that Alain Delon could summon him at the age of thirty-one is astonishing

The still from 'La Piscine' which informs its modernized artwork, and then some

   Sexualized Delon in a Courreges bathing suit however still sells La Piscine (1969). In fact, it still sells not only the movie but a whole lot more: in 2010 Alain Delon became the face of Eau Sauvage when Dior relaunched the sensational 1966 men's perfume. Vintage 60's photos of Delon in print ads, and a TV commercial of clips from the aforementioned film, heavily feature Delon in the aforementioned swimsuit. Eau Sauvage was our bourgeois gateway to the Houses of Guerlain and Sisley, and it's only appropriate that Alain Delon being of the senses takes us to that place when and where the world is sensed as better, with just a dash of something like class.

   On a good day it's easy to part the mists of Avalon à la recherche du temps perdu, and be on a sun-drenched Mediterranean with a man who excites our senses...all of them. He looks good, he smells good, he infuriates us, he impresses us, he indulges our projections and we're more alive for the experience. He's insouciance and he mixes a damned good Boulevardier. You may have met him in Saint-Tropez but then again you may have met him in the brig. He's probably Alain Delon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Seditions and Subversions of "Querelle"

The thought of murder often evokes thoughts of the sea…of sailors…and what 

eventually follows thoughts of the seas and murder is the thought of love and sexuality. 

Querelle by Cocteau 1947

   Or so the opening credits voice-over for R.W. Fassbinder’s Querelle claims. The credits themselves state that the film is about Genet’s “Querelle de Brest” - rather than "an adaption of” or “based on” the book. The novel's anti-hero is both pretty homosexualist and psychopathic killer. Some knowledge of the classic 1947 Existentialist tome may or may not be a hindrance in appoaching the 1982 Expressionist-cum-Surrealist film. Querelle challenges direct access from almost every approach: the narrative is Querelle himself, and that’s underscored by anti-cinema devices like bad dialog, obvious sets, melodrama and the darkest of comedy.

Film school teaches that script is of elementary importance. Consumers of porn know it isn’t. Fassbinder knows how to get ‘em where they think, and in doing so abandons most traditional elements of film-making in favor of images and sound which can steer a viewer in diverse or conflicting directions. The film's sound design incorporates narrations which mock the idea of Great Truths being told. Occasional title inserts from Genet serve as other theater-in-the-round asides. "Clues" are often thrown from long shots, and some scenes back-reference others within the labyrinthine plots. Querelle was gutted prior to release - twenty percent of the film was edited after Fassbinder's death for running-time considerations. Scenes have been rearranged, and secondary characters like Matrose and Mario's stool pigeon / boyfriend Dede are gone. Querelle's earlier murder and robbery of  The Armenian has been excised altogether.

Three and a half decades of being relegated to cult-but-not-camp status haven’t anointed Querelle with any revisionist patina, causing it to be celebrated for something it isn’t. And what it isn’t is a film with a clear story line – the auteur rightly deemed the book as coming up short on story. Nor did he attempt to create one: the convolutions of Querelle’s exposition challenge us to focus on what we get as fact or fantasy. As Dylan’s wordy “Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts” assembled shady characters, ideas and images for an unresolved musical tale with cabaret and crime motifs, Fassbinder does it cinematically. He approaches the source material thus:


“As far as discrepancy between objective plot and subjective fantasy is concerned, “Querelle de Brest” may be the most radical novel in world literature. On the surface, its story, when divorced from Genet’s world of images, is a fairly uninteresting (in fact, third-class) tale about a criminal, and as such is hardly worth our while.  

 
Only those who are truly identified with their own selves no longer need to fear fear. And only those who are rid of their fear are capable of loving nonjudgmentally. The ultimate goal of all human endeavor: to live one’s own life.” 

 

 Token Identities

 

Querelle...sailor

Lieutenant Seblon... Querelle's voyeuristic superior and closeted admirer 

Lysiane...Madame of the Feria Bar bordello, wife of Nono

Robert / Gil....Brother of Querelle, lover of Lysiane / Unwitting patsy to Querelle

Nono....Husband of Lysiane, gatekeeper of the Feria Bar

Vic...Querelle's partner in crime, his murder victim

Mario...Corrupt police officer, Feria fixture

Roger....pretty boy, brother/substitute of Gil's unseen girlfriend

A pox be upon this house and all it stands for: the Feria bordello

   On a massive soundstage sits the set of Brest redux - an Expressionistic  re-imagining of the French port destroyed in World War 2.  For cinematic purposes, the town is more lately dominated by the Feria Bar, replete with enormous phallic statuary. Like a mosque of sorts, there's little doubt about what overshadows the town's trade and sensibility. The theatrically lit and painted port of no fixed temporal identity is not unlike its denizens and visitors, inasmuch as they too are of identities of dubious substance, and of no particular age. All exist as interchangeable people - not limited to, but most notably within sexuality considerations and the inherent vagaries of same.

If a bordello's secondary social purpose is to keep men from straying to queerness, then the Feria (transl. "market", "fair") has certainly lost its way by the time Querelle arrives. It's probably not the place for a slow-starting son to come of manly age in the traditional sense, nor would it be an ideal mobile brothel for an army in need of approved sexual release. The identities of the Feria's top brass have caused its culture to morph from prostitution into something else.

  
Enter Querelle then, a loner fresh off the recently docked Le Vengeur ("The Avenger"). While negotiating an opium sale to Nono at the Feria, he runs into his brother Robert, currently ensconced as lover of the ageing voluptuary Lysiane. He decides he "wants" Lysiane - especially when he learns that a toss of dice will determine whether or not his ass first goes to Nono. Lysiane lives in a blurred world of confected desirability, womanly wiles and tarot cards. Games of chance it seems determine how love and sexuality become manifest at the Feria, or at least how they are deconstructed.

Both milieu and subculture conspire similarly with the individual in search of identity, and in the case of homosexuality, identity often is experienced as mirrored male bodies defined by dicks and asses and the what-nots of will-to-power. Querelle however is no genital fetishist: within his apparently disoriented sexuality he seeks a way to prevail without having to ritualistically compete with other men on time-honored terms. But not by assuming “fairy” characteristics (like affected softness and non-violence) will he seek identity: grabbing at crumbs from the table of "real men" isn't his style. Querelle’s world according to Fassbinder isn’t one of misogyny or fascism – it’s one in which femaleness and femininity are ineffective and superfluous...regardless of who attempts it.

Querelle will take upon himself what the Feria is failing to accomplish: the task of how to best purpose a hard dick towards one's own best interests. Too much a narcissist to think with his own -  or to assign magical powers to the dicks of others - the foundations of Querelle's sexuality lie far beyond the simple tawdriness of most men's fears and fantasies.

Subverting the Rough Trade Mystique

 

Querelle 1982

  The protagonist Georges Querelle, of no fixed past and no fixed morality (beyond being a sailor and a criminal) is presented for consideration. As exhibited by Fassbinder in the form of Brad Davis, he’s a ripe Tom of Finland cartoon come to life as a gay archetype: short-legged and working class and presenting as dubiously attractive...in a butch kinda way. Revealed as sexually submissive although murderous, the seafaring trash is enough to signal any homosexualist that there’s a rocky road ahead in terms of identifying with, or desiring Querelle. Within our own sensibilities, we’re not even sure that the boy-man can be pegged as gay or non-gay. And he’s not young enough in close-up to earn sympathies one way or the other, despite his claims to be a neophyte when it comes to bending over.

The murder of Vic has transpired for no good reason. While he's stripping down to wash, Querelle involves him in a hypothetical exchange about what men Vic would have sex with, culminating with Querelle himself on offer. Vic’s rejection costs him his life, and Querelle's sexuality becomes entwined with betrayal and killing. As penance for the murder of his partner in crime, Querelle returns to the Feria to purposely lose a toss of the dice. But the punishment is a most Catholic one: he unexpectedly climaxes quickly while being sodomized, and instead of expected pain he experiences pleasure and no sense of humiliation whatsoever.

Death - the wages of not sinning with Querelle

    While  Querelle inhabits no fixed era, Fassbinder is prepared to go balls-deep into rough homosexuality in a way that Genet couldn’t fully explore post-World War 2. Genet’s set pieces of homosexuality within Existentialism  might still tag him today as a literary enfant terrible, but the rough trade “bisexuals” who fuck, slice throats and betray without remorse weren’t unique to Genet’s tastes and times. Life, love and survival still often play out on the edge of a knife, symbolically and otherwise. 

Self-proclaimed “power bottoms” have much to learn from Querelle, inasmuch as doing it effectively possibly requires varying degrees of contemptuous psychopathy as well as a simple need to be loved and protected. By his own calculation, passive anal homosexuality requires no love at all, but actively fucking requires a little…for a short time at least. He therefore presses his body into service as an object upon which to turn the tables of power in his favor, with sexual gratification as a mere bonus rather than a Muse-like calling or a compulsion. The homosexual queerness of Querelle is of the entrenched European kind, and is repeatedly defined as acts between men: not binary Anglo-American gay couplings of tops and bottoms.

Prison Walls & Eros - Part 1: The Sublime

    We don’t often delve into our psychosexuality when responding to the homoeroticism of sex behind bars. It’s a staple of modern pornography. From a getting-off perspective it’s a no-brainer. One aspect of why prison sexuality continues to figure so strongly in both gay and non-gay male sexual fantasies is quite obvious: incarceration is a very good excuse to fully and without inhibition explore the male taboo of enjoyment of the homosexual experience. The fact that it’s best enjoyed with another man’s body isn’t helpful in honestly addressing what is usually felt as internalized homophobia, but experienced as most pleasurable. In short, choice has nothing to do with men’s attachment to thoughts of prison sex, and that’s its attraction.

But pornography only addresses desire – that’s its band-aid purpose. It doesn’t address existential loneliness, or the pervasive longing which in many ways defines much of our culture and individual selves, regardless of what relationships we may experience (or, all too often, reject).

It’s tempting to imagine that bridging the gap between pornography and longing is a future topic to be addressed by gay men. However, some digging into our culture yields up Jean Genet’s 1950 silent film 'Un Chant d’Amour'(“Song Of Love”). Reviled as pornography from its onset, this short masterpiece of homoerotic existentialism is peculiarly more relevant than ever. It’s still deeply subversive inasmuch as there is no refuge within for the homophobe of any persuasion – the viewer is denied that dubious payoff.

Set in an oppressively gloomy prison, the familiar dance of The Boy’s capitulation to both The Man and homosexuality is perfunctory and speedy – the need for connection jolts him from his narcissistic auto-eroticism. The Man’s tears of nothingness give way to a bashful smile of being, when he's "accepted".  The film has been fairly critiqued as a damnation of the walls men build around themselves.

Juxtaposing the bleakness of the wall of separation, Genet offers a sweet counterpoint fantasy of bucolic contact, respect, sensuality and liberation. Much has been made of Genet’s insistence on aberrant homosexualism as a valid and menacing repudiation of 'civilized society', but 'Un Chant d’Amour' is as decent as it gets for the thinking homosexualist: as it documents immuration, it also documents our lost history when homosexuals (and homosexuality) actually had the ability to transcend age, race, gender and identity.