The film, Far from Heaven
(2002), centers around a woman whose husband turns out to be gay. That this is
set in 1957-1958 in socialite Connecticut is all the more telling, as the
Caucasian woman finds her groundskeeper, who is a Black man, to be “beautiful.”
The film is arguably a remake, or at least informed by, the film All that Heaven Allows (1955), in which a widow begins dating a younger, muscular
man who tends to her trees. Although race and homosexuality are not issues in
this earlier film (which, after all, was made in the 1950s), that a woman who
socializes with friends who belong to a country club in New England would dare
to date a younger man of a lower economic class—albeit not as low as the
woman’s son and friends stereotypically suppose—was scandalous enough in the 1950s
to furnish a tantalizing plot. That a filmmaker in 2002 could get away with
portraying an interracial extra-marital sexual interest and a gay or
bisexual husband having anonymous sex with men (even showing the husband
kissing one of the men), whereas a filmmaker in 1955 would not have been able
to get away with including such taboos (much less making them central), says
something about the cultural trajectory of western civilization temporally.
The full essay is at "Far from Heaven."
