The history of gay cinema can be split into two sections: before Kiss of the Spider Woman, and after. This great film was undeliberately timely, and in the twenty years since its release, its pop-cultural importance has only increased.

Kiss Of The Spider Woman opened in a Manhattan cinema on July 26, 1985, the same week that a dying Rock Hudson flew to Paris on Concorde to try the experimental AIDS treatment, HPA-23. Days later, the first reviews of the film began appearing in newspapers, obscured behind disaster-movie style front pages featuring blown up pictures of the wasted Hudson, and announcements from UCLA immunologist Michael Gottlieb, such as “Mr Hudson is being evaluated and treated for complications of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”

During the first screaming years of the AIDS epidemic, gay characters in movies all but disappeared. Then they re-emerged, politicised and martyred, in films like Philadelphia and Longtime Companion. Post AIDS epidemic, they were reborn - infantile and gurgling at the breasts of mother figures like Jennifer Aniston and Madonna in films like The Object of My Affection and The Next Best Thing.

Culturally, the AIDS epidemic rumbled in like a fire curtain, sealing off the danger zone - obvious, fruity homosexuality - and Kiss Of The Spider Woman lunged across the nationwide release line just in time. The film's main character Molina (William Hurt) was the last in a grand line of theatrical, flawed gay adults who didn’t shy away from their dark sides, their carnality and their sadnesses, and who had more bravery and spirit in each perfectly polished toenail than a thousand modern gay guys put together. The vital gay characters from films like Victim, The Boys in The Band, and Making Love were a breed apart from their washed-out post-AIDS epidemic cousins, and Molina/Hurt is the King of them all.

Appropriately, the film is nostalgic and operatic, featuring the doomed theatrical homosexual Molina recounting the grandeur and beauty of a time gone by. Imprisoned and frustrated, Molina yearns for a time when romance ruled over politics, and dreams of a place where he can find love and happiness without self-compromise. Kiss Of The Spider Woman is so prescient of the bland atmosphere left behind after the AIDS-induced death of colorful gay culture it’s simply not funny, and it’s easy to forget that as well as carrying this uncanny cultural value, it is also a beautiful, wise and original motion picture.

Manuel Puig, the author of the original novel, hated it, predicting correctly that in the role of Molina “La Hurt is so bad she will probably win an Oscar”. However, while Puig's novel was innovative, anyone who’s seen the film first will find the far less lyrical book comparatively drab.

Gorgeous
John Neschling’s gorgeous theme music and Robert Dawson and David Weisman’s perfect title sequence open the film. We hear Molina’s voice next, huskily describing a strange woman while we watch a gentle pan across someone’s (his) lovingly decorated prison cell wall. Molina throws back his head, adjusts his turban, and inspects his nails. It’s the last time - and, incidentally, the first - that an imprisoned child molesting theatrical homosexual who deceives freedom fighting journalists into spilling their inside secrets for his own advantage would ever play the hero in a film.

The freedom fighter in question is Molina’s cellmate Valentin (Raul Julia), imprisoned as a subversive and regularly interrogated with whips and electric prods. As Molina probes for valuable details (an early release is waiting for him if he can uncover something good) the prickly energy between him and Valentin evolves into curiosity, respect, and ultimately becomes an intimate friendship. Pushing this evolution along is Molina’s intricate retelling of his favorite fairy tales, which include sepia-toned propaganda films from the Nazi era which Valentin initially despises, and the tale of the mysterious spider woman, a seductive creature who lives on a tropical island and who Valentin pictures as a comic-book version of his ex-girlfriend, Marta (Sonia Braga).

The memories of Molina merge with Valentin’s interpretations of them in the two mini-movies that weave through the main film - the sepia Nazi romance, and the dazzling outdoor idylls of the Spider Woman’s lair. As those minature stories unfold, so does the relationship between the mismatched cellmates, and eventually, their story becomes as bewitiching and metaphysical as the fairy tales they use to pass their time.

They exchange ideas of masculinity, of sexuality and politics. They learn what they can from each other, and take what they need, even if that taking constitutes a kind of robbery. In the end, they appear have passed each other by, leaving an imprint, not fusing together.

Can you imagine Molina popping up as a guest star on the suburban “Will And Grace”, or even floating around in the background of the lovely The Prince Of Tides instead of watered-down, neighbourly George Carlin? As Barbra Streisand said in her 95-96 concerts, “can’t do that, no no.” AIDS squeezed Molina out of the market - it’s just no longer acceptable to be gay that way.

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