Though ostensibly – and quite famously – the film about homosexuality and AIDS, Philadelphia is a film about neither homosexuality nor AIDS. Ten years after its release, the film’s cultural context and socio-political imperatives are all too clear – it’s firmly timestamped and a valuable pop-culture artefact, an interesting time capsule of ideas and images of early-nineties US metropolitan AIDS-soaked culture.

Like Hair or Fatal Attraction Philadelphia is a museum piece, an entertaining but unoriginal film pertinent at the time of its release, almost immediately dated, and now retro-fabulous. In a way, Philadelphia is plain, and it does de-sexualise homosexuality, and separate “good” gay AIDS victims from “bad” gay victims – and pretty much ignore all other AIDS victims – but from a pop-culture point of view, it’s stellar. On the stand, Tom Hanks unbuttons his shirt to display his disfiguring KS lesions to the court. Antonio Banderas makes his Hollywood debut as Mother Earth, while hospital scenes are sprinkled with skeletal gay men dying in beanie-clad dignity. In other scenes, Michael Callen and Quentin Crisp make cameos, and the costume party, where Hanks and Banderas, dressed as sailors, slow dance together, is as haunting and spectral as AIDS-kitsch gets. When Joanne Woodward, playing Hanks’ shattered but resolute mother, delivers the line “Honey, how are your platelets?” to her stricken son on the telephone, the film is jet propelled into vintage-classic territory.

Scorned widely in the past, including on this website, Philadelphia deserves revisiting - it is a near-classic that has aged very well.

Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a hotshot Philadelphia lawyer doing everything right – loving family and friends, great partner, about to be made a partner of the firm etc. – when he’s sacked in mysterious circumstances, probably because his secret HIV infection has become known to his conservative superiors. Increasingly ill, Andrew looks around for a lawyer to take on his wrongful dismissal case, but no-one wants to know about it. Hanks visits ambulance-chaser Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), who he’s worked with in the past, but is initially rebuffed there as well. Miller is completely uncomfortable with gays, and is terrified of exposing himself, his wife and his newborn daughter to the plague, and, in any case, believes Andrew did have an obligation to disclose his infection, and that therefore there's no case.

But Philadelphia is a very fast moving film, and a couple of scenes later, after Miller witnesses Andrew’s battle with discrimination and humiliation first hand, and learns that there is a Supreme Court precedent for unfair dismissal regarding AIDS, he takes the case. The second half of the film is set in court, where we get several instructive monologues from Miller about homophobia, intolerance and so on, and the gripping decline of Andrew, who is dying rapidly – will he live to see the verdict?

The ticking clock of the courtroom narrative and the melodramatic good versus evil character set is trite, but practical. Choosing one person and their specific quest avoids the telemovie cast-of-thousands pitfalls of Longtime Companion and And The Band Played On. But the film does have two very contentious notes. Firstly, criticisms that the film presented a gay character who was very unrealistic and unrepresentative of many gay men are fair – Beckett is an angel, and there’s a disturbing message that he’s an “innocent” gay victim of AIDS. Philadelphia splits the hair that innocent and non-innocent AIDS victims aren’t necessarily straight and gay ones, respectively, but that some gay AIDS victims are innocent too. It’s a totally incongruous message in an ostensibly “pro-gay” film.

Secondly, Philadelphia also bases itself around a black, civil-rights template. The film is saturated with African-American characters and civil-rights messages, and the parallels the film is trying to drawbetween gay/AIDS and black struggles are obvious, but troublingly simplistic – is every non-white middle class American lumped together as an “outsider” and is the AIDS epidemic and homosexuality really just the same thing as segregation and racism?

McGays
Ron Nyswaner, described in an Advocate interview as a small-town American boy who “today makes his home in upstate New york with his lover of 15 years”, is apparently critical of promiscuous, soulless gay lifestyles. Good – who wouldn’t be – but in the context of Nyswaner’s script, Andrew Beckett’s vanilla sexuality becomes a little tricky.

Andrew, we learn, most probably contracted HIV during one of his three visits to the Stallion Showcase Theatre, a gay porn house on the wrong side of town. In flashback, we see Andrew, replete with clone-esque moustache, fumbling in the dark in 1984-85 with a horny stranger. Andrew is insistent – and the script backs him up – that this behaviour was abhorrent, and he has now returned to the tender, long-term relationship he enjoys with Miguel (Antonio Banderas) and solid, normal familial bonds.

Now, lots of gay men do and always have enjoyed monogamous lives, but lots (lots more?) enjoy Stallion Showcase Theatre lives as well. The message in the film, though, is clear: casual gay sex leads to AIDS. Not necessarily excessive or promiscuous casual gay sex, just casual gay sex. Remember, Andrew only went to the theatre three times, and when asked about it in court he acts shamed and regretful. Now, there is truth in these messages – even today, every second young guy who moves to San Francisco ends up HIV positive within twelve months, and the AIDS epidemic wouldn’t have evolved as it did without the seventies and eighties Fire Island culture of bath houses, Crisco and orgy parties. Gay sex of any kind carries with it a relatively high risk of HIV exposure. This is part of the dark, deadly edge to gay culture that’s always denied by gay activists and the gay mainstream. We shouldn't seek to underplay the day-to-day HIV risk of being gay and sexually active that does exist, and so for this we applaud Philadelphia. What we boo is that Andrew seems to have caught HIV from a low-risk, semi-clad contact in a porn theatre, mutual masturbation at best. Doesn’t this feed directly into the myth that any kind of male-male sex instantly generates HIV/AIDS? That the dipping of a toe into the gay world inevitably results in disease and death for the toe dipper? We have a major conceptual problem here.

But in a way, in shoving Andrew’s urges to fuck strangers up the back in the hope nobody notices them, Philadelphia is like a gay glossy magazine, pushing a happy shiny model of gay life on the front cover and most of the way through, then packing all the explicit personals and ads for porn, bathhouses and poppers in the back end of the publication.

A stronger script would have integrated Andrew’s sexual history into his characterisation, or at least not been quite so fire-and-brimstone about it. In a film about tolerance, it doesn’t quite make sense that the one crucial character flaw that delivers the storyline and drama – casual gay sex and resultant HIV infection – is fourty-foot-poled and made out to be some kind of UFO, aliens-have-landed fantasy incident that neither characters nor film nor audience have any idea what to do with. Cheek-to-cheek with the film’s liberal politics and pro-gay message is this very strange confirmation that gay sex and AIDS are in fact completely dangerous and utterly terrifying.

For Andrew to succeed in the narrative of Philadelphia, he has to more or less become straight – a straight gay, a homosexual who’s all-American. But it doesn’t work, because audiences must leave the theatre thinking, "yeah, he was okay, but the rest of them gays, those ones in the porn theatre, they’re as dirty and diseased as I always thought they were". Like To Kill A Mockingbird, where freaky Boo Radley turns out to be a hero but the rest of his yokel cousins scare us to death with their stereotype-confirming behaviour, Philadelphia guilelessly uses the exception to prove the rule.

However, the movie is about functioning and surviving within the American system. As Oscar Wilde noted, you can’t live your whole life flaunting a disdain for society, then turn to the same society and beg for its help when things go wrong for you. Philadelphia’s solid, anti ACT-UP message is that if you want access to the mainstream then you have to pay your mainstream dues. Working hard and earning money, living conservatively and hanging out with family and friends on the weekend – whether you’re heterosexual or not – wins you this access. Hard working McGays, with their ironed t-shirt adherence to the nine-to-five, win this access. Leather-clad, shaved headed gay activists don't.

Rosa Parks stars in Philadelphia!
As mentioned, Philadelphia isn’t a film about homosexuality or AIDS. What’s surprising and little discussed is that it’s more a film about African-American history, and racism in general. Washington gets equal screen time as Hanks, and his race allows us to see his wife giving birth and their huge extended black family arrive at the hospital, his black doctor, and a black gay guy cruising him at a pharmacy. A key defence witness, an African American legal secretary, says she was advised by Andrew’s bosses to change her style of earrings, as they weren’t considered “American”. Her sassy comeback that they “[were] American – African American” wins her a sympathetic giggle from the jury. Andrew’s friend applies “Tahitian Bronze” foundation to cover his ghostly pallor. Andrew’s mother encourages him to go ahead with his court case, proudly stating that she didn’t raise her children to “sit at the back of the bus”, a reference to Rosa Parks and segregation in general (what white mother in the United States fears that her children will be forced to sit at the back of any American bus?), while non-white races gather at the film’s periphery, most notably, Andrew’s Hispanic lover Miguel, played by Antonio Banderas.