The Problematics: ‘American Gigolo’ Made Breakthroughs in Full Frontal Male Nudity And Its Treatment of Sex Workers, But Is It Homophobic?

God bless Paul Schrader. For over fifty years now — first as a film critic, then as a screenwriter, then as a writer director, now as both AND a social media personality as well! — Schrader has been stirring up the culture in brash and unpredictable ways. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

Now — let us contemplate his third film as a writer/director, 1980’s American Gigolo. 1978’s raw Blue Collar was a purposeful exercise in poking two bears — race relations and labor strife — at once. 1979’s Hardcore grafted John Ford’s The Searchers onto a contemporary story of porn and trafficking, a very film critic move. American Gigolo, released 42 years ago in February, like Hardcore, found Schrader working under the aegis of a big studio. Hardcore had been done with Columbia, which released Taxi Driver, the Scorsese picture Schrader scripted in 1976, which did, you know, okay at the box office. Paramount handled Gigolo; this was one of the first big pictures on which Jerry Bruckheimer was producer. Unlike Cimino, Coppola, or to a lesser extent Scorsese, Schrader, for whatever it was worth, wasn’t likely to bankrupt a studio. His high-minded artistic instincts coexisted with a sensationalist streak.

The premise of Gigolo has the conventional wisdom adage “sex sells” all over it. An enigmatic, smoking hot male prostitute — high end, not a street hustler — is caught in a web of intrigue and murder just as he meets the potential love of his life (who happens to be married to a smarmy politician). Schrader’s boundary-pushing had many aspects here, but the male nudity was one that really got the puerile (more so now than then, but honesty not hugely so) industry tongues wagging.

The movie’s star-crossed lovers were Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton, and aside from giving outstanding, complex performances, they also looked great. As it happened, the movie’s often blunt approach to the world of transactional sex relations divided and discomfited viewers from the beginning. Well do I remember when Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell covered the movie’s New York premiere, and recounted a no-doubt-straining Candice Bergen complimenting director Schrader with the comment “the colors are wonderful.” Indeed, the colors were wonderful — thanks to art director Ed Richardson and of course, fashion designer Giorgio Armani, who did the costumes for Gere. And on this movie Schrader brought on a “visual consultant,” Ferdinando Scarfiotti. The creamy pastel blues and greens in Gere’s apartment as he looks for evidence framing him for murder are almost distracting from the action.

As for the how it holds up today, well, as is the case with Pretty Woman, in which Gere played the client rather than the object of desire, the movie has a generally clear-eyed view of sex work, except when it doesn’t. Schrader’s primary influence here is a 1959 French film directed by Robert Bresson called Pickpocket, in which a street thief finds redemption through the simplicity of pure (possibly even sanctified!) love. In Schrader’s scheme, Gere’s escort Julian Kay is a pro who rose up from the ostensibly muckier aspects of sex work into a rarefied realm he’s in charge of.

He’s arrogant, but he also has elements of sainthood in him. Hence, he goes on about his mission in life is to give neglected (albeit rich) women sexual pleasure. He will not do what he calls “kink,” and recoils with distaste when he’s trapped in a situation where he’s got no choice. And when a flirtation with Lauren Hutton’s Michelle goes wrong, the conversation takes an odd turn when she asks, “How much would you have charged me?”

“Translator or guide?” Julian responds — those are the guises he sometimes adopts.

“Just one fuck.”

“Now you’ve made a mistake. I don’t do that,” Julian says, affronted. Oh my.

But the one thing Julian really really really does not do is turn gay tricks. Or, as he charmingly puts it several times throughout the movie, “f-g stuff.”

Julian’s former pimp, Leon (played with subtle malevolence by Bill Duke) is gay, and late in the movie, when Julian goes looking for Leon in a gay club called The Probe (come on!), Julian’s trajectory is depicted as a literal descent. Down in the pit of Gay People, there are clones of the leather guy from the Village People, everyone’s doing poppers, and the music is sinister. Compare and contrast with joyous photography from NYC’s Paradise Garage in this era and the notion of Schrader dealing from a stacked deck is hard to deny. A lot of the denizens of the club know Julian and one of them asks “Julie! I thought it was you! Homecoming?” SO the strong implication is that Julian has scratched his way up out of this environment and has no intention of going back.

Gay critic Robin Wood was outraged by this, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the 1992 essay “Muse Abuse” cited Wood, and the movie’s “derision” of gays as an indication that Schrader was a “quasi-fascist,” at least. Times change though. In a 2018 essay called “A Room of One’s Own: Paul Schrader’s Queered Masculinity,” Kyle Turner asserts: “Though Julian is (ostensibly) heterosexual, American Gigolo is a queer film by virtue of its form. Schrader imbues the film with queer aesthetics, its Californian, neon-painted fakeness, its kitschy set design (the loudest furniture juxtaposed against the most austere symmetry) and its little does of Blondie, ‘Call Me’ blaring at the beginning of the film. One of his pimps, Leon (Bill Duke) is gay and black, and the affair he carries on with Michelle Stratton (Lauren Hutton), the wife of a well-known politician, feels like a stiff fantasy. Masculinity is a prison, the film almost seems to suggest […]”

AND: In interviews at the time of the film’s release and after, Schrader asserted that he himself felt a strong affinity with gay culture. Recollecting his early years in L.A., he told Kevin Jackson: “I started moving in gay circles and going to gay discos and I found a way into physical contact, because it was harmless. I mean I could go dancing stripped to the waist, hugging and holding men, and feel completely released and liberated because I knew nothing would come of it.” Talk about feeling mighty real. When discussing why he took the role of Julian, Gere mentioned, “There’s kind of a gay thing that’s flirting through it and I didn’t know the gay community at all.”

So what, finally, is the deal? I suppose one can interpret Julian’s disparagement of gay sex as an emblem of his own lack of self-knowledge, but in terms of where the film is going — that is, a rather beautiful scene of epiphany and resolution, inspired by Pickpocket, and using imagery that Schrader returns to time and time again, most recently in last year’s The Card Counter — it kind of doesn’t matter. At least not any more than the film’s nudity, featuring a very relaxed Gere in full-frontal-with-shadows-of-Venetian-blinds-slats mode, does. My final verdict: the dancing around homophobia here is irritating, but no reason to eighty-six this gigolo from the canon.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.