The H.O.Y.A.Y.

One of the many disappointing things about the later seasons of The O.C. was the near-squandering of all the Seth/Ryan subtext set up in the first.

But then it's true that when your opening image is this, you don't leave yourself much place to go hoyaywise:


Still, I think we all know that the show would have been better if it had ended on the note proposed in a Newsweek interview by Ben McKenzie (who played Ryan):

Will Ryan pop the question to Marissa?
I've always pushed for the big marriage that the whole entire audience has always seen coming. Ryan and Seth walk down the aisle hand in hand.

Gossip Hoyay

We don't as yet get Gossip Girl over here. But if the rumours I hear concerning the Blair/Serena hoyay are true - and these pictures very strongly seems to indicate that they are - then I may have to consider watching it.

Brideshead Rehoyayed

No-one has ever done hoyay quite like Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the 1981 television mini-series Brideshead Revisited. Really, really, no-one.

Bend It Like Hoyay

I remember the first time I saw this movie poster on the side of a bus. For a moment, my hopes soared so high. Girls in sports clothes! Girls with their arms around each other! Could it be... a lesbian romance? And one of the girls in particular seemed to be cute (a certain Miss Keira Knightley... I hear she went on to do rather well).

Alas, it was not to be... although apparently it would have been, if director Gurinder Chadha hadn't got cold feet at the last moment. But traces of the original architecture of the movie, where Jess and Jules did fall in love, can be seen in the finished product: the moment when Jules first spots Jess in the park, for example, or the moment when one of Jess's relatives glimpses her and the short-haired Jules together, and thinks that they are a couple.

As it is, we have to take the movie for what it is: a heterosexual romance with just a dash of hoyay. But at least it does end with the girls walking off into the sunset... er, football scholarship... with each other.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Hoyay

I'm not sure I've yet found a picture that does justice to the hoyay and general life-partnerishness that was the Matthew Perry/Bradley Whitford pairing on the late, lamented Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

But this shoulder-kiss that Whitford gave Perry on the red carpet is rather cute:


As is this one of Perry reciprocating:


Then there was the man-hugging on Leno (sadly no longer available on YouTube).

Not to mention the quotes from Time:

Perry and Whitford have fantastic chemistry; squabbling but loyal, Matt and Danny are like a long-married couple but with more passion.

And from TelevisionWithoutPity.com:

Danny's just enjoying the pristine sense of calm that comes with sitting in the back of a cab. Matt ambles by and knocks on the roof and says, "We're doing it." Dude, we know. Oh, the show! He means the show.

And from the actors themselves:

Jumping in so quickly after The West Wing, I did sort of feel like I was cheating, but I felt like I was having an affair with Matt [Perry, his Studio 60 costar]. It's more of a masculine man bond. Matt said that we're having a "bromance".

True Hoyay

Credits are in order here. This utterly awesome music video, featuring footage from the 1991 drama True Colors starring James Spader and John Cusack, was created not by me, but by someone called Fayzabeam, who posted it on YouTube. Hopefully she won't mind me posting it here, in tribute both to her editing skills, and to her great taste in music ('Black Velvet' has always been a favourite of mine).

This is the kind of video that, just when I think I have fallen out of love with hoyay, makes me fall back in. The long, lingering, burning stares. The romance that always stops just short of a kiss. I haven't seen the movie, but judging from the footage here, I think it's probably safe to say that Messrs. Spader and Cusack knew what they were doing. Sirs, I salute you. You have created hoyay, and you have made it beautiful.

Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane is a movie that always seems to come up when lesbian subtext is being talked about, so I thought I ought to give it at least a mention here. Actually, the movie seems to me less specifically and strongly lesbian than it does just pervasively and giddily queer all round: has there ever been quite so much cross-dressing in one movie? Calamity dresses like a man, and gets winked at on the streets of Chicago by a girl who (presumably) thinks she is one. A male performer called Francis Fryer does a drag act at the Deadwood bar, for reasons I can't quite remember - and it takes the male audience a while to work out that "she" is actually a he. Even Wild Bill Hickok has to dress up like a squaw after he loses a bet with Calamity.

Everything gets 'straightened' out in the end, of course - but it's true that you could see at least a little hoyay in Calamity's initial admiring and protective attitude towards Katie, their duet 'A Woman's Touch' after moving in together, and - of course - the song 'Secret Love' that Doris belts out at the end, even if she is ostensibly singing about Bill.

Till The End of Time

I've never seen the 1946 movie Till The End of Time, with Guy Madison and Robert Mitchum. But it looks hoyaytastic.

The Edge of Hoyay

Even if Keira Knightley's mother Sharman Macdonald, who wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Dylan Thomas biopic The Edge of Love, has nixed the idea of any overt lesbian relationship between Vera Phillips (Knightley) and Caitlin MacNamara (Sienna Miller) - that doesn't mean there can't be subtext, right? Come on, Sharman - all the best movies have gay subtext.

The Lord of the Gay Wedding Rings

Oh, Sam and Frodo. And Merry and Pippin. And Aragorn and Boromir. But mostly Sam and Frodo. What can I say that hasn't been said already? Perhaps only this: that I watched the trilogy - which, if you're watching the extended DVD version, is TWELVE HOURS IN LENGTH, people - purely for the hoyay. And it was not time spent in vain.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Hoyay

The 1991 screen adaptation of Fannie Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe soft-pedalled the lesbian relationship between Ruth and Idgie. So that if you wanted to, you could tell yourself the fact that Idgie dresses like a boy, that Ruth eventually moves in with her and they raise Ruth's child together, and that Ruth's child has Idgie's last name - Threadgoode - all meant nothing more than that these two women were very good friends. Or something.

Becket

People have said of this 1964 film that the gay subtext is so blatant, it's virtually text. And having seen the film for the first time recently, I would agree that it's difficult not to construe Peter O'Toole's character as bisexual or even gay by the end.

The filmmakers really aren't shy about this. We start off with a lot of misogynistic pre-feminist horseplay with busty blondes and brunettes - but the first seriously hoyayish note is struck when O'Toole's Henry II gazes intensely into the eyes of Burton's Thomas a Becket, and says "It's funny - I can't bear the thought of you in pain."

Henry's wilfulness and his intense emotional dependency on Becket are quickly established. Then he starts throwing himself on Becket's bed and announcing that he's staying the night. He snarls at his wife that he dislikes his children and that family life bores him. His wife calls his "obsession" for Becket "unhealthy and unnatural". They agree that he is behaving over Becket as if he were a woman. Etc, etc.

In some ways it reminded me of Oliver Stone's Alexander in the way it depicted an intense emotional relationship between two powerful men - one a ruler and one his companion. It's pretty staggering that they got away with this in 1964 - and picked up an Oscar and near-universal critical acclaim in the process.

The Wings of the Dove

The hoyay in this film is subtle - I don't think I saw it on first viewing. I was focussed on the central, and overt, romance between Merton (Linus Roache) and Kate (Helena Bonham-Carter). It was when the DVD came out with a new picture that I was led to reconsider:


At first I thought: why have they posed it like some sort of menage-a-trois? There's no romance between Kate and Milly (played by Alison Elliott) in the film. But then I started thinking about the Kate/Milly relationship more closely, and I realised all the subtle ways in which the filmmakers do suggest an attraction. I don't think it's there in the original novel... but added homoerotic subtext, and indeed added complexity and subtlety of any sort, will never really seem out of place in a Henry James story.

Sporadicus

"I love you, Spartacus..."

"And I love you, Antoninus..."

There is a reason gay people love this film.

Blondes Prefer Brunettes... er, I mean, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Truthfully, not a film where I could really claim substantial hoyay - but hey, just ignore the rest of the story, and it's a seriously glamorous lesbian wedding!

The Defiant Ones

To quote Tony Curtis from a Metro Weekly article in 2002:

In 1958’s The Defiant Ones, Curtis played opposite Sidney Poitier, as two prisoners, shackled together, on the run.

That movie, says Curtis, contained a homosexual subtext. "The subject of homosexuality did not come up literally," he says during a phone call from Dallas [...] "but it was so evident. There have been a number of movies I’ve found myself in without even thinking about it doing it because I like the idea of the impudent attitude toward sex, politics or anything else. My film career always kind of moved in that direction."

Much Ado About Nothing

All right. I confess. There isn't really anything in this movie that could be called substantial hoyay (alas). I just wanted to post this picture of Emma and Kate.