Coming to terms with the f** word

As much as Gen Xers romanticize the pop culture of the 1980s, it's important to acknowledge how relentlessly homophobic so much of it was.

ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES of having my kids get older is being able to introduce them to the pop culture of my youth – mostly movies and music – and seeing what resonates, and what doesn’t. My son loves ‘80s action movies, but Star Wars (alas) bores him. My daughter likes Taylor Swift, but while I haven’t managed to get her into the OG drama queen Alanis Morissette, she really digs Queen. 

One thing both of them agree on is that Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a most triumphant movie. We’ve watched it as a family maybe half a dozen times, and I adore how my kids have adopted as their own some of the best catchphrases of the film (e.g. “we’re totally weak… we couldn’t possibly fight you”). Of all the decade’s endless run of goofball teen stoner comedies, it’s probably the sweetest and most innocently fun, and it totally stands up today. 

Except for one scene. It’s when Bill and Ted are back in Merry Olde England, and they are being chased through the castle by some medieval dickweeds. Ted falls down some stairs, and rushing down, Bill thinks he sees him killed by a sword thrust through his suit of armour. As it turns out, Ted wasn’t in the suit at the time, and he re-enters the scene a few moments later to find Bill leaning over the empty suit, mourning his friend. Relieved, the two friends hug, only to step back, look at one another with a scowl, and together go: “Fag”. 

The scene makes me really uncomfortable, and it almost ruins what is one of the best lines in the whole film, when Ted explains how he survived: “I fell out of my suit when I hit the floor!” Yet by the standards of ‘80s pop culture, this is pretty mild stuff. Looking back, it is wild just how drenched in homophobia it all is. 

The ur-text for a lot of us was Delirious, the Eddie Murphy standup comedy special from 1983 that launched his career into the stratosphere. A friend’s older brother had a copy on VHS, and we probably watched it a dozen times in their basement. It all seemed side-splittingly funny at the time, and not despite,  but in some ways because of, the homophobic content. This includes Murphy’s fey imitation of Michael Jackson and an extremely unfunny riff about AIDS. Murphy’s attempt at an apologetic line, “I kid the homosexuals, because… they’re homosexuals,” struck our adolescent brains as hilarious, and we would recite it to one another over and over. 

That cued up a decade worth of casual homophobia that we consumed almost without question or comment. It was so relentless, it’s hard to find a “beloved” teen movie from the era that isn’t shot through with gay slurs. In particular, the f-word and its variants is constantly employed as a generic insult. It is exceptionally predominant in John Hughes’ movies, including Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club, but it also appears in Weird Science, Teen Wolf, Adventures in Babysitting, and on and on it goes. 

The f-word also makes an appearance in at least two of the biggest hits of the decade, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits and “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues. The artistic defence of the its use in both songs is that it is “spoken” by characters in the song itself, and is supposed to reflect badly upon them. But that didn’t stop both acts from endorsing the subsequent bowdlerization of the radio edits of the tunes.

What’s incredible, in retrospect, is how this went on even as the AIDS epidemic was devastating the LGBTQ community, with the entertainment industries being some of the hardest hit. The free use of “fag” or, if the writer was getting creative, “homo”, as a go-to put-down seems to have operated in some sort of parallel universe where its “humorous” intent was somehow completely divorced from the transparent meaning of the words and the actual people to whom they applied. 

It’s hard to identify a single turning point in the culture where offhand homophobia stopped being acceptable, for comedic effect or otherwise. I can think of three episodes that have always stuck in mind as important, though.

The first was the release in 1988 of the Guns N’ Roses Lies EP. GN’R was probably the biggest rock band on the planet at the time thanks to their Appetite for Destruction album, and I loved them. But the EP had a song called “One in a Million,” which was purportedly about an experience Axl Rose had getting off the bus at the Greyhound terminal when he first came to LA. The lyrics include rants against police and immigrants, blacks and gay people, and employ hugely offensive slurs against both both of these latter targets.

The band came in for a fair amount of criticism for the song. While Axl tried to defend it at the time, he was never really able to explain or justify the song’s obvious sentiments and it was not included in any later compilations or box sets of their music. But as far as I was concerned, the most devastating takedown came from the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, who had a bit in his routine where he mocked the song for its lyrics about how “immigrants and f******” come to his country “and spread some fuckin’ disease”. As Goldthwait wondered, had he missed some great exodus from the land of “Homoslavia?”

Now that struck me as funny.

A second, related moment was the eclipse of hair metal and the rise of grunge music, in particular the fantastic popularity of Nirvana, in the early nineties. Hair metal was notoriously misogynistic and, at least tacitly homophobic, notwithstanding all of the makeup and the hairspray and the tights and the high-pitched singing. But Kurt Cobain was the first musician I liked who I can recall being outspokenly feminist and pro-gay rights, not because it was part of his own image or identity, but because he simply hated the misogynists and the homophobes. A straight guy defending gay people? That was new.

Around the same time, Magic Johnson announced that he had contracted AIDS, which forced a long-overdue conversation about the disease into the mainstream. Two years later, Tom Hanks starred in Philadelphia, a based-on-a-true-story movie about a lawyer who sues for wrongful dismissal who was fired after his employer found out he was gay and had contracted AIDS. Hanks was already a star, known mostly for slapstick or romantic comedies, but Philadelphia is the film that turned him into a Serious Actor. That Bruce Springsteen agreed to write the Grammy-award winning song “Streets of Philadelphia” for the soundtrack only amplified the mainstreaming of the issue. 

Nothing changes overnight of course. And even if things , in retrospect, seem to have turned the corner in the early nineties, it wasn’t until 1997 that  Ellen DeGeneres was able to come out as gay, albeit in character as “Ellen Morgan” on her hit sitcom, Ellen. And as late as 2009, the hit comedy The Hangover frequently went to the mined-out coalface of frat bro homophobia in search of yucks. But the key point here is that by the 2010s this sort of thing was a noticeably uncomfortable aberration in the culture, where a quarter century earlier it was the unnoticed norm. 

The good news is that social and moral progress is a real thing. Thanks in part to the natural tensions built into intergenerational dynamics, each cohort of teens tends to be more progressive than their parents, and there is very little in the way of retrenchment or backsliding. Which is why as much as Gen Xers tend to roll their eyes at some of the pieties of kids these days, especially around pronouns and bathrooms and that sort of thing, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no going back.

And even if we could, why would we want to? The past is a mirror of our former selves, and through the looking-glass culture of the 1980s, it’s hard not to see a lot that should make us all cringe. 

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