Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997)

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Terrence McNally adapts his play for the silver screen, with direction by Joe Mantello. Love! Valour! Compassion! is about a group of gay men who get together around the holidays at a rustic house in the middle of nowhere. Since the play was written in 1995 and the film released in 1997, AIDS eclipses anything else the story or characters might be about. (Gay characters not coming out or suffering from AIDS is a more recent phenomenon.) I don’t mind the preoccupation with AIDS, though. I do mind the stereotypes.

I like that the story is about seven strangers coming together and forming their own family. But the family is too dysfunctional — you’d never believe these people would voluntarily hang out with each other. The pettiness and bitchiness factor is off the charts. Even the really nice couple — a stutterer and a blind man — are afflicted with a surprising naivete that ends up inducing eye rolls. The most compelling relationship in the movie is one struck over talk of Broadway musicals and the one man who doesn’t swish and lisp is jokingly referred to as a ‘waste of a gay man’.

What bothers me the most is seeing some of the actors put on vocal and physical affectations to make them seem more gay. I’ve seen John Glover, Stephen Spinella, and Jason Alexander in other performances, so I know they aren’t lisping, limp-wristed queens in real life. That they should play their characters this way is hard to reconcile. Those qualities are fine with me as long as they feel authentic. These guys aren’t authentic — they’re caricature.

While the film as a whole doesn’t quite work for me, I do really like one scene in which Jason Alexander’s character confides to Stephen Spinella’s that he’s afraid of dying alone. That is something I think most single gay men can relate to, whether they have HIV or not.