Lesbian killers on the movie screen. Gay activists in the streets. By the time the erotic thriller Basic Instinct opens Friday, it may have done more to encourage dialogue on gay stereotyping than any film in a decade.
The controversial picture, which stars Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, is about a psychologically confused police officer who falls in love with a bisexual woman suspected of stabbing men to death with an ice pick during sex. The story also contains two lesbian killers.
Brought to the screen by director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Total Recall), Basic Instinct already has been the subject of enormous controversy: Filming last year in San Francisco was so heavily protested by gay activists that producers got a court order to bar further disruptions.
At the American Film Market trade expo in California this month, the gay activist group Queer Nation warned overseas film distributors that it planned to reveal the film's ending to spoil its chances at the box office. And nationwide, members of the media have received mailings from a group dedicated to publicizing the name of the film's serial killer.
Queer Nation's New York membership has vowed to deface all of Basic Instinct's posters and to hand out leaflets at theaters where it opens. Similar protests are expected in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Locally, the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force is also organizing a dissent.
As far as some members of the gay community are concerned, Basic Instinct is a paradigm for everything wrong with Hollywood and its vision of gay lives.
"Basic Instinct is a good indication of where gay and lesbian images are right now - the only ones we see are negative and stereotyped," says Chris Fowler of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in Los Angeles. ''The fact is, the gay community is one of the last that people feel they can bash without regret."
"There has been a nonstop, decades-long portrayal of gays as psychopaths, sociopaths and screaming queens," says Robert Bray of the Washington-based National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. "I don't mind a gay villain or two, but I also wouldn't mind a gay or lesbian hero. No one is calling for cultural censorship, but we are asking for diverse representations."
