My Gay Ass Has a Problem with Knock at the Cabin

There are two kinds of gay guys: one is the kind who doesn’t see an issue with what I’m about to type about (That’s fine. He should just move along.), the other is me.

And there’s another thing; although I’ve looked, it’s something I’ve yet to see mentioned in reviews of this film. My assumption then, rightly or wrongly, is that the reviews I’ve read were written by straight people, because it doesn’t seem to have registered with them. 

Yesterday, my husband and I took in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Knock at the Cabin”. It’s his adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s novel “The Cabin at the End of the World”, which I’ve not read. In the film, a gay couple (oddly always referred to as “same sex”) and their daughter rent a secluded cabin and are visited by four strangers who may or may not be the four horsemen of the apocalypse (sans horses). They tell their hostages that one of them must be killed by their other two family members in order to prevent the end of the world. 

Sure. Let’s just go with that for the sake of enjoying the movie. I mean, “The Rapture” and “Breaking the Waves” both did a pretty great job of selling a Christian “what if” scenario, so why not? Food for thought.

Here’s the thing, though people are chopped, shot and bludgeoned in mostly PG-rated ways, what’s the one horror that Shyamalan can’t bring himself to show onscreen? Answer: Two men kissing. 

This is a film about love, about the romantic bond between two men and their bond with their daughter. These men are tied to chairs, forced to watch murders take place before their eyes, they are asked to make a choice about which one of them will die, but they are not allowed the absolutely human, more than situationally called for act of an actual kiss. Forget about fucking. You know, like real human beings do. 

Our boys are, however, allowed flashbacks. Flashbacks that work hard to earn the couple acceptance by a hetro audience. 

See them struggle with homophonic parents. See a gay bashing. See an actual adoption. All in aid of trying to work up some sympathy from the audience. And how do we do that best? We take away the queer threat. We de-sex queer characters, because that’s where the real horror lies, isn’t it, M. Night? That’s the threat present in a simple kiss. 

While it’s true that one movie can’t (and shouldn’t) be called upon to address all ills, to show only uplifting stories about marginalized people, how long can we continue to represent gay men onscreen via handsome, buff white men of means who are busy assimilating into straight society, here with the added bonus of de-sexualizing them? 

HOW DELIVERANCE TAUGHT ME NOT TO BE GAY

I've come to terms with the fact that my sexuality was sent down the rapids by director John Boorman's "Deliverance" (1972).

I was ten years old when I caught a showing of the movie on the late show. I grew up in a relatively liberal (i.e. out of control) household, and my father always allowed me to stay up with him far too late on a school night in order to watch the classic Universal monster movies -- the Frankenstein, Dracula, Werewolf and Mummy series -- and others of that type. The screening of Deliverance, however, introduced me to a new species of monster: the hillbilly rapist.

This was the mid-Seventies; the days before videotape, meaning you could catch a movie after its theatrical run only when the networks had scheduled it. In Canada, our main channel is/was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a network that rarely censored its broadcasts if the program had "artistic merit", and Deliverance clearly fit that bill.

My father, an artist who was against censorship and who believed in letting people experience things for themselves in order to form their own opinions, had heard that Deliverance was a terrific movie and something about a canoe trip gone wrong. He understood my love of movies and encouraged it, as long it didn't become an obsession; I was the type of kid who easily became preoccupied with things. We settled in to watch this adult action movie, and unbeknownst to my father, my view of gay men started to take shape.

Four friends -- Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox and Burt Reynolds -- leave urban Atlanta for a canoe trip downriver through Georgia hillbilly country. They are out of place here. Cox takes part in a banjo duel with a young in-bred banjo-picker in one of the film's two most oft-mentioned scenes. The men continue downriver, where they become the target of two horny male hillbillies. Telling Voight that he's got a "pretty mouth" and forcing Beatty to "squeal like a pig" in the film's other most-quoted scene, the hillbillies attempt to force a little oral action from Voight and a little butt-play from Beatty.

This scene was both intriguing and shocking to me. The emotive result of this concoction: confusion. Just what was it that this hillbilly was attempting to do with Beatty?! Was it possible that people actually did this? Or was it just something that “river folk” indulged in? Whatever it was, it must be wrong and Deliverance was just about to show me that there was a price to pay for being gay beyond being a toothless hayseed.

As things are about to reach the point of no return between our urbanites and river men, Reynolds, around the time that he did his famous and relatively discreet Cosmopolitan centerfold spread, arrives decked out in leather river gear, a saviour in S&M drag. He and his crossbow put a swift end to the attempted rape.

Though I remained engrossed by the rest of the film, and terrified by the nightmare dream sequence wherein a pale hand emerges from beneath the surface of the river, the rape scene stayed with me even more so. A mishmash of “erotic” imagery and conflicting emotions. Gay sex was bad, punishable by death, the sentence served by the swift bow of a leather man.

A ten-year-old can't make sense of these images and thoughts, but they can lay dormant in the back of his mind until they reach the surface like that pale hand rising out of the Cahulawassee River. Deliverance remains a great film; its iconic moments a part of pop culture history. As an adult, I have a more comprehensive understanding of sexuality and its complexity, of what the film is saying (and not saying), and, I hope, of myself. I've come to a place where I appreciate the journey I took downriver with it, stopped shockingly and unexpectedly like the film's leads by a couple of horny hillbillies that I was also forced to confront without so much as a crossbow to protect me.