Michael Schiavi

Vito Russo changed my life. When there are only a handful of books, a small handful, that I can honestly say that about, it seems odd that a book about Hollywood movies became so important to me. But it did.

Vito Russo's book, The Celluloid Closet, examines the history of how Hollywood has represented gay and lesbian people in movies from the very beginning to the mid-1980's when the book was published. What made it so important to me was not the thorough examination of gay and lesbian images in American film, though it's coverage is exhaustive, but the political rallying cry Vito Russo turned this issue into. The notion that Hollywood had systematically painted gays and lesbians as monstrous villains, simpering victims or effeminate clowns for decades, and that this was something we as a community should object to, was a radically new notion to my 22-year-old self. I took to the streets, quite literally, ACTing-UP against Ronald Reagan's refusal to fund treatments for people with AIDS or even to speak the name of the disease that had already taken tens of thousands of American lives by the time I was 22 and sending more than a few letters to studios, networks and publishers as well, letting them know just what it was they were doing and just what I thought about it. I tried to be civil, but honestly, why did so many serial killers have to be gay?

So I was a bit disappointed by the movie version of The Celluloid Closet, which didn't come out until many years later. It features lots of wonderful clips from films as far back as the experimental movies Thomas Edison made before movies became movies, but it included none of Vito Russo's passion or his outrage. The Celluloid Closet was meant to educate, but it was also meant to motivate. The book was supposed to make you mad enough to do something. The movie version simply entertained.

Now, almost 30 years after I read The Celluloid Closet, Michael Schiavi has written an entertaining and informative biography of Vito Russo, Celluloid Activist. You don't have to be a movie buff to gain from reading Mr. Schiavi's book. Vito Russo was an active participant in most of the major gay rights organizations beginning several years before the riots at the Stonewall Inn, through the early days of ACT-UP until his own death from AIDS in 1990. Celluloid Activist, by documenting the life of one man, documents the lives of a generation of activists who began demanding equality in a time when they could still be arrested for simply being who they were. Mr. Schiavi's book makes for interesting reading as a piece of history. It makes for interesting reading as a biography as well.

If Mr. Schiavi's book lacks the same fire Mr. Russo's book had, I believe part of that is due to the times we now live in. While there is still certainly cause for outrage, there is not nearly as much cause as there used to be. The struggle for gay and lesbian equality has become an unfinished success story. Mr. Russo did not live to see Hollywood blockbusters with gay characters like In and Out, or Brokeback Mountain or television shows like Will and Grace,k Angels in America, or Modern Family but we have. While big budget production about gay and lesbian people with actors who are openly gay and lesbian in are still rare, that day is probably coming very soon. Rick Santorum is not going to be a happy man in his old age.… (altro)

I have to admit that, when I read about the release of Celluloid Activist, the name of Vito Russo was not new to me, but I really didn’t know the man who was Vito Russo. For me he was the author behind The Celluloid Closet, a landmark of LGBT non fiction, and maybe due to his Italian origins, for me his name was easier to remember than for other people. But as the author of his biography, reading that at less than 20 years since his death someone could think Vito Russo is unknown to the young LGBT community is unthinkable. So I could imagine Michael’s emotional push to finish this biography right in time for the release of a documentary, Activist: The Times of Vito Russo, that together with the book will help remember Vito Russo’s name not only among the fan of old classic cinema, but also among those who need to know that Vito Russo helped paved a better life for them and all the LGBT community.

Celluloid Activist is deeply researched, not only with interviews of friends and family of Vito Russo, but also with not important, but moving details, like when Michael Schiavi checked if the night when Vito was born was really hot as Arnie Kantrowitz, Vito’s long-time friend, jocked about. No, it was not, and reading that part I imagined Michael Schiavi checking some old weather forecast to confuting that sentence.

For sure good share of the book is devoted to Vito as gay activist, and the man who helped founding the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). But it’s also the recounting of Vito’s private life, like his unrequited love for Jeffrey Sevcik, the man who he sent away three time to then always taking him back, until the time it was too late. Jeffrey Sevcik died of AIDS- related complications and Vito Russo tells about it in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary.

What you will read in this biography are public events, like Elizabeth Taylor’s involvment in the World AIDS Day and the funny recounting of that moment from one of Vito’s friends, who was envied by people since he knew Vito Russo (and not Elizabeth Taylor), or even when the author described as, at the beginning, Vito Russo and Larry Kramer didn’t like each other very much, mostly since, even if both movie lovers, Vito was more for the old ladies (like Barbara Stanwick), and instead Larry Kramer was the award winning screenwriter of Women in Love, classic example of “modern” (at the time) cinema of the ’60 and ’70. But it was from Larry Kramer apartment balcony that Vito Russo saw his last Gay Pride March, too ill to be among them marching, and Larry whispered to him “These are our children”, while the crowd cheered up to Vito screaming “We love you!”. But there are also very private moments, like when he was mourning the death of his partner Jeff, or when he refused to give Robert Ferro (dying of AIDS) a fatal dose of pills after the death of his partner Michael Grumley, even if he was deeply saddened by the fact that on the New York Times obituary of Michael (Author, 46) they said he is survived by his mother and three brothers, and of Robert Ferro there is no mentioning at all.

Celluloid Activist is not only the biography of a man, it’s the recording of a good part of LGBT history. Anyone who is interested in that should read it, but also who wants to read about a man, his friends and lovers, and his unconditional love for them.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299282309/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (altro)