Illustrations by Niklas Wesner.
This is the third in a series of short essays considering notable film restorations of the last year.
Winter Kept Us Warm (David Secter, 1965).
Amidst the repertory fever currently fueling a surfeit of restorations and revivals, a number of “forgotten” queer films are finally coming to the fore. Recurring series like “Coming Out Again” at the Quad, “Cruising the Movies” at IFC Center, and “Narrow Rooms” at Anthology Film Archive, all in New York, have set about to uncover the fringes of queer cinema. Such screenings often mobilize a mixture of ironic and earnest spectatorship, a suggestion that these artifacts of the past often don’t fit comfortably into modern perspectives on queer representation.
That uncertainty is present in discussions of David Secter’s debut film, Winter Kept Us Warm (1965), whose 4K rerelease this past summer brought about a number of equivocating descriptors: “proto-queer,” “a film with gay themes.” The story of two University of Toronto Students who—depending on whom you ask—either develop an unlikely friendship or embark on Canada’s first onscreen gay love story, the film is built on insinuation and subtext. Nothing overtly sexual can be said to happen between brash, popular senior Doug (John Labow) and Peter (Henry Tarvainen), the bookish freshman he takes under his wing. Indeed, most of the cast were supposedly unaware of what kind of film they were making, a claim Secter has recently cast doubt upon, though he was notably circumspect in a 1966 interview with CBC’s Through the Eyes of Tomorrow:
We’re dealing with a very close friendship, a very intimate kind of relationship that some people consider borders on latent homosexuality. Other critics have ignored it completely.… So I think it’s really up to the individual to decide whether this kind of male relationship is homosexual or otherwise. As far as we’re concerned, we were just dealing with a friendship. And we weren’t concerned with labels.
Winter Kept Us Warm (David Secter, 1965).
Secter made the film at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Canada and, according to the director, there were no openly gay people at the University of Toronto. His privately financed $8,000 budget afforded him a degree of freedom to at least approach the subject, though the film feels constrained less by the threat of censorship than by the imaginative possibilities for what queer narrative could portray. College officials who had to give Secter permission to film on campus were apparently troubled by the gay undertones of the script, which raises the question of when and how queerness is depicted in the film, especially at a time when it could only be approached through insinuation and euphemism. The sidelong glances and weighted silences that punctuate Winter Kept Us Warm are as essential a component of gay life in a closeted society as any explicitly romantic or sexual displays. In particular, the film’s abrupt ending represents most clearly the unfinished nature of queer narrative in the pre-Stonewall era, when a story like Peter and Doug’s could not reach the kind of denouement that modern audiences expect, in either triumph or tragedy. Only once their relationship has deteriorated and Peter has more or less abandoned Doug for Sandra (Janet Amos), the new girlfriend he meets in drama club, does the film make its only overt reference to homosexuality, when Doug’s own neglected girlfriend (Joy Tepperman) claims, “If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you and Peter...” and even then he cuts her off before she can make her suspicion explicit. The specter now raised, Doug confronts Peter over his absence from a campus party the night before. When Peter proudly announces he was instead with Sandra, losing his virginity, Doug responds by implying she’s a slut and knees Peter in the crotch when he tries to defend her.
They are never seen together again. Instead, as though several minutes of footage have been lost, the film jumps to Doug sitting alone in the library, his voiceover recitation of an excerpt of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land standing in for some or other lesson about youthful folly, or perhaps the lifetime of disillusionment and alienation that awaits him as a man who desires other men, though this of course would be a form of modern eisegesis.
Winter Kept Us Warm (David Secter, 1965).
The gay subtext that initially escaped many contemporaneous critics has become legible enough for Winter Kept Us Warm to be accepted within the queer canon. It is called “proto-queer” because, like the characters themselves, the film remains closested. There is nothing to suggest that Peter or poor, heartbroken Doug understand the nature of their desires or that a life of self-discovery and personal liberation awaits them outside of the confines of college. Curiously, Peter’s rejection of Doug is framed as a coming-of-age, leaving behind a puerile campus life for one of adult sophistication with Sandra, with all the trappings of culture (jazz clubs, theater, marijuana) that in the post-Stonewall era would come to represent the urban arena of gay self-actualization. Sex, too, is still the domain of heterosexuals—the one fleeting moment of physical intimacy the two men get to share is a brief group shower scene in which Peter playfully instructs Doug to wash his back. Having briefly suggested an alternative world of homoerotic contact between its characters, the film fades quickly to black, as if averting its eyes.
It is tempting to look askance at the film’s timidity. Queerness today is represented as a presence, something which can exist either explicitly in front of us on screen or else is missing or insufficient. It is constructed by an additive process: discrete representations do not stand alone, but reflect a queer identity in aggregate. Queer cinema is currently discussed almost exclusively in these terms: whether there were enough queer characters, whether their storylines carried as much heft as their straight counterparts, if there was enough physical affection or nudity, whether the sex was too vanilla or too degradingly kinky. In Winter Kept Us Warm, queerness functions more like negative space. It is anticipatory, represented by what the characters hold back rather than what they assert. Their motivations are left murky. It is not clear if Doug understands his attraction as desire or if Peter turns toward heterosexuality out of fear. The film’s reticence illustrates an underdevelopment, the something missing—namely a gay subjectivity that could guide the development of these characters toward a particular end, a closet to step out of, a parade to march in.
Winter Kept Us Warm (David Secter, 1965).
Questions of morality have always directed discussions of representation, and they are especially concerned with representations that are missing. Secter’s straitlaced protagonists were the antidote to the degenerate queer-coded villains which preceded them during the Golden Age of Hollywood, just as they would eventually come to represent a staid and repressed sexuality. In a revealing moment—the only other time the two are naked together—Peter and Doug sit on different levels of a Finnish sauna discussing Peter’s interest in the campus anti-war protests. Doug berates him for it, telling him he’ll be branded a communist and to stay away from the “weirdos” and “misfits.” Once again, Doug’s conception of same-sex desire is portrayed as a closed-off fraternity of two, in contrast to the unseemly Others to whom Peter finds himself drawn. Queerness is still a withdrawal from the political world, its liberatory potential yet to be achieved.
This is an archetype to which gay filmmakers would return during the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The sixteen years between Winter Kept Us Warm’s release and the outbreak saw the rise of the gay liberation movement but not much in the way of filmic representation. Hollywood dabbled in gay stories but, as in William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970), mainstream depictions tended to focus on their self-loathing and societal exclusion (they’re out of the closet, but they’re miserable!). Friedkin would return to gay subcultures with his controversial leather-bar-serial-killer picture, Cruising (1980), which was itself kept in check by the social conventions of the time—the deleted 40 minutes of extreme BDSM scenes represented an impossible marriage of mainstream cinema and unadulterated sex that was too racy for the MPAA and too insultingly reductive for the gay rights activists who protested its release. Friedkin’s anthropological approach (he wore a jockstrap to the Mineshaft sex club as research) refused to make concessions to respectability, enraging a community that had taken pains to counter its hedonistic stereotypes with loftier egalitarian ambitions. That a fully restored cut (likely impossible) would now be rapturously received at any of the aforementioned queer screening series is yet another sign of how shifting cultural perspectives foreclose and reopen narrative possibilities.
An Early Frost (John Erman, 1985).
When Hollywood belatedly turned its attention to the AIDS epidemic, it did so with two austere dramas from gay directors and screenwriters: John Erman’s television film An Early Frost (1985) and Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1990). Both films focused on the virus’s effects on white, upper-middle-class communities—a closeted lawyer returning to his parents’ home in the suburbs and a group of professionals sharing a summer home in Fire Island, respectively. Both have an auxiliary function as educational tools, meant to show a predominantly straight audience the ravages of AIDS, both the disease itself and the discrimination faced by those who suffer from it. As Sarah Schulman notes in her 2021 book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, “For decades the corporate cultural apparatus favored works … that made straight people into the heroes of the crisis.”
The protagonist of An Early Frost, Michael (Aidan Quinn), though gay, is masculine, professional, and pointedly monogamous (he is infected when his more fey partner cheats). The film is structured as a series of conflicts and reconciliations between Michael and his family members (his parents are played by Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara), who exhibit varying degrees of bigotry, with little attention paid to Michael’s larger community of gay people in Chicago, the city where he works and lives with his partner. While one can understand the filmmakers’ reluctance to sideline the luminous actors playing his parents, the truth is that well-heeled families welcoming in their AIDS-afflicted children were the exception, not the rule. This bit of ahistorical pandering positions AIDS as a personal, domestic affliction, removing it from the urban environment that was its political battlefield. According to coscreenwriter Ron Cowen, the NBC’s Standards and Practices Department provided some “helpful” suggestions: “One was, you can’t make the straight people the villains and the gay people the good guys. It has to have balance.” Similarly mannered was the deliberate decision on the part of the filmmakers to avoid showing Michael’s death. The film ends instead once each family member has made their peace with Michael’s illness and, by extension, with his homosexuality. As he and the lover with whom he has reconciled head back to Chicago, the family sees them off at the foot of their driveway. The last shot is not of Michael but his parents embracing, their uneasy faces anticipating the fate that the film can’t bear to depict. Reviewing the film for The Washington Post, Tom Shales observed that “an AIDS movie with a happy ending would, at this point, have to be a lie.” And while An Early Frost does not produce some miraculous deus ex machina, the filmmakers’ desire to suggest a kind of ambiguous hope does have the uncomfortable implication that the very characteristics that make Michael a suitable protagonist also inoculate him from an onscreen death. The same cannot be said for the flamboyant side characters in Michael’s HIV support group.
Longtime Companion (Norman René, 1990).
If the more recent backlash over the lack of explicit intimacy in films like Call Me By Your Name (2017) and The History of Sound (2025) is any indication, queer narratives will always be hamstrung by what they do not depict (giving us sex or else love, life or else death). At issue is a dichotomy that scholar José Esteban Muñoz has identified as the “here and now” versus the “then and there,” a focus on the tactility of the present moment as it is competing against the future-oriented utopianism constitutive of queer longing. Film is the medium most capable of embodying this tension between pragmatism and hope, being the site for both fantasy and posterity, things are they are and as they should be. It is a contradiction that the ending of Longtime Companion attempts to resolve by staging a collective hallucination for the last three members of the central friend group left alive. Walking the barren shores of Fire Island like the survivors of a shipwreck, they witness a kind of gay Victory Day, as throngs of jubilant men pour down the boardwalk and over the dunes to celebrate the discovery of a cure for AIDS. They are, we see, the victims of this plague, the men whom we watched die onscreen earlier in the film, resurrected for a brief moment before the light dims and they disappear again.
It was a controversial gesture. In a brief oral history of the film, screenwriter Craig Lucas recalls “a friend of mine, a wonderful playwright, saying, ‘You know the dead aren’t coming back! Why are you giving us that happy, sentimental ending?’” If Winter Kept Us Warm’s ending gave too little in the way of resolution, Longtime Companion gives more than enough, its melodrama born from the coexistence of joy and grief, which is maudlin as often as it is transcendent. What then can an ending be for an identity, a perspective, premised on futurity, on desire unfulfilled? Secter’s proposition, even or especially if unintentional, may come closest to a persuasive answer: that something is missing, even if you can’t name what it is.
Continue reading Notebook’s 2025 Year in Review.