Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

I was thinking about the late Parker Tyler the other day. What triggered this occasion? The Olympia Press recently reissued The Young and the Evil, the 1933 novel Tyler co-wrote with Charles Henri-Ford, considered a founding text, if such a designation is not too over-wrought, of modern gay literature. At the time of publication, the authors and their work achieved the status of "scandalous" and "controversial" — always useful career-makers in New York City. The book had its celebrants: it was lavishly praised by Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein.

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Parker Tyler was born Harrison Parker Tyler in New Orleans in March 1904. He died in New York City in 1974. Charles Henry-Ford was also a Southerner. The two of them edited the surrealist magazine View until it folded in 1947.

Tyler was taken with film early on, and started writing about it. He lived with underground filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse from 1945 until his death. Tyler wrote for Film Culture and other periodicals and published a number of books. His 1972 Screening the Sexes was really the first book to explore the theme of homosexuality in movies, years before Vito Russo's 1981 much-heralded The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Tyler's approach to same-sex contact in film goes a bit more for the theoretical; Russo is the documentarian of on-screen gay relationships. Tyler's other titles include The Hollywood Hallucination, Magic and Myth in the Movies, Classics of Foreign Film and Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film. Tyler was also a published poet.

How a writer finds his or her voice is always key. With Tyler it's important to remember that he born and raised in the South. After moving to New York he spent his time in gay cultural circles and with experimental artists. He even appeared in two underground films. The first, At Land (1944), directed by his friend Maya Deren, also featured a young John Cage. He also appeared in Galaxie (1966), directed by Gregory J Markopoulos. His co-stars included Storm De Hirsch, Donald Droll, the Kuchar brothers and Jasper Johns — highlights from the A-List of underground culture.

I don't think it's a stretch to imagine how Tyler and his gay friends talked about the movies — the Hollywood movies; gay chat on filmdom hasn't changed over the decades. He grew up at a time when the Hollywood Dream Machine was in its heyday. I recall that Celeste Holm, the surviving member of the cast of All About Eve, was in town a few years back at a big screening — on a large screen — of the famous flicker, and after the event, Holm was interviewed by a writer for the town's biggest rag. Holm noted how many gay men were in attendance for the screening. She also said, "Gay men get something altogether different out of the movie than the others."

This was Tyler's signature. He saw things others didn't see. His essential argument that the great films of the Hollywood era recapitulated the classic dramas from the ancients, that there were no new stories, just new tellings of stories. This is not a radical concept. And, I suspect, those folks in the Industry, who generate the product, have known this from Day One.

Tyler reads as though he were an autodidact, which I do not know to be the case. He has this great queeny sensibility, which probably made it harder for his ideas to be taken seriously. Some in his line of work were cruelly dismissive of his criticism. I recall the occasion when Andrew Sarris, for years the film critic at the Village Voice, wrote a piece — this was long after Tyler's death — wherein he finally acknowledged that he had been unfairly critical and, yes, downright mean, to Tyler. Whether some homophobia played into this mea culpa would only be speculation. But on the mark.

Tyler's style is an acquired taste. The simple sentence was not his forte. He wants to stuff as much chat-info-you-need-to-know between periods as he can. Here's a sentence from Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film; the essay is "Mass Film Criticism":

"For serious critics, the movies function on the one hand as a set of symbolic texts for socio-psychological-mythical interpretation with aesthetic overtones, and on the other as a supposed laboratory where it is possible to show the Film has inexhaustible ways to produce what theoretically has every right to be termed 'art,' but which is art only because it must be in order to save 'everybody's' face."

What I find fascinating is that Parker Tyler invented his genre, the gay sensibility grasping the essence of the moving pictures, which still tricks us today.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com