Going out west ... Sterling Hayden and Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar
There seem to have been so many movies with gay-related themes knocking around that it's difficult not to wonder whether the London Lesbian and Gay film festival, now in its 20th year, might be somewhat upstaged. With Transamerica newly opened in the UK, and Capote and Brokeback Mountain still screening in plenty of venues, the idea that pink is now one of film's primary colours seems to be here to stay.
Upstaged? Hardly. In the event, the festival programmers' response to the preponderance of out gay films in mainstream cinemas has been simply to reach back into the closet and pull out some more. Prompted by the pioneering sexual adventures of Ang Lee's handsome young cowboys, the decision to devote a section of the festival to the Western genre more generally is genuinely inspired. For what better symphonies of sublimated homoerotic fantasy do we have, if we think about it, than such films whose emotional landscape centres on the sexually-charged atmosphere of gunmen strutting before a draw, or the bristling, theatrical self-confidence of the stranger's entry to the small-town saloon to be mercilessly, cattily sized up by the company at large.
Once you see it this way, there are in fact very few Westerns that couldn't be outed. Why else did Gary Cooper prefer to stay behind and face the swarthy Miller brothers in High Noon over settling down with a young Grace Kelly at her most staggeringly beautiful? When Etta left Butch and Sundance to their joint fate, was she doing anything other than recognising a love so pure that its inexorable outcome was a Tristan-and-Isolde-style death and transfiguration? And was there ever a love more burning, more jealously binding, than Pat Garrett's for young Billy?
The Western fare programmed for the festival includes some fairly obvious choices - Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys being a veritable camp classic - as well as some more closely-closeted fare such as Howard Hawks's Red River, in which John Wayne and Montgomery Clift provide a powerful exploration of troubled father-son relations. A truly fabulous decision lies behind the showing of Johnny Guitar, which shows the mesmerising masculinity of Sterling Hayden finding its spiritual echo in the trouser-wearing ways of gay icon Joan Crawford. Nicholas Ray's 1954 theatrical spectacular was always intended to offer a revisionist take on the Western gal, but the result also managed to come across as both gay and lesbian both at the same time.
Of course, maybe you could argue that the Western provides easy pickings for this retroactive strand of the festival. But then again, find me a film genre that doesn't.
· The 20th bfi London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival runs from 29 March to 12 April.
