Demme and Gays

In response to “How to Get a Major Hollywood Studio to Do an AIDS Movie (Finally),” by Joseph Gelmis (Feb. 28):

As a straight, male construction worker, not a person usually associated with social enlightenment, even I was appalled by director Jonathan Demme’s self-congratulatory frothings.

Here we have a man who admits to holding gays in “low-grade scorn” for most of his life, who believes that what most people want to do when they meet a person with AIDS is “jump out the window” and who has now decided to raise the consciousness of America with a film about a lawyer with AIDS.

This is the man whose “Silence of the Lambs” won an Academy Award for bringing us well-lit sewage. Now he’s going to give us a primer on AIDS awareness?

We get the picture, Jon: Gays as Victims. Gays as Psychos. Gays in Dresses. All those are acceptable portrayals of gay men, even for a man who has scorned them all his adult life. Any red-blooded Hollywood dude can get behind a story about a Gay Who Dies.

I have heard it said that Elizabeth Taylor is the last brave man in Hollywood. Judging from this article, it is sadly true.

MICHAEL R. KELLY

Encino