Culture Slut: Queer Roles, Revolutionising Representation and Terence Stamp

Words: Misha MN

Time keeps on ticking, the nights are drawing in, and yet another iconic actor from my personal canon of admiration has died. Autumn is in full swing and everything is falling to bits. Terence Stamp was a huge presence in the queer films that shaped my youth, and my appreciation of his sensitive and nuanced performances of outsider characters, despite his rampant heterosexuality, has only accelerated as I have grown older. From Italian Art House to New Queer cinema, Stamp has been a pillar of strength, resistance and optimism for any and every film lover, and that divine projectionist’s light shines a little less after his passing.

One of my favourite Stamp performances was in the 1968 Pasolini masterpiece Teorema, where a rich Italian bourgeois family are visited and seduced by a handsome stranger (played by Stamp) and are all irreversibly changed by the experience. Stamp is effortlessly gorgeous in this, flicking dark hair out of cool blue eyes and wearing the tightest trousers known to man, clearly showing the audience his bulging genitals. It’s the kind of confronting sexuality that you don’t believe exists in stuffy old films, like how teenage girls in the 21st century have no romantic interest in the Golden Age stars of Hollywood, that is, not until your english teachers plays the DVD of Streetcar Named Desire and Marlon Brando in that sweaty t-shirt turns up and everyone gasps at his raw hotness.

Teorema is far from stuffy, it’s queerness and progressiveness is open. Every member of the household falls for Stamp, from the maid to the patriarch, and whilst one is elevated by the experience, the other is destroyed. Pasolini favourite Laura Betti plays the maid, an almost silent servant who is so moved by Stamp’s beauty that she immediately tries to kill herself (relatable), but he intervenes and gently kisses her, pulling her into bed with him. The son and daughter of family both sneak glances at Stamp as he reads in the garden, as he changes for bed, as he smiles and laughs with their friends, and are in turn seduced by him. The mother, Silvana Mangano (the reason Stamp took the part), is moved by his beauty that she strips off all her clothes and lays down on the terrace so that he might find her naked and make love to her, which he does. The father bonds with him in rough and rugged countryside, sharing intimate moments on coastal walks and in scrubby bushes. Stamp’s departure triggers their transformations. The maid returns home and becomes a Saint, healing the sick and the dying, eating nettles and levitating above her rural village. The son becomes an artist, trying to find new ways to express the love awoken within him, and the class consciousness that has started to take hold. The daughter, in perhaps the most relatable move, simply falls into a coma and has to be removed by doctors. The mother starts cruising for hot young hustlers to have sex with, sometimes two at a time, realizing that for the first time in her life she has an interest; sex. The father also starts looking for men, scoping out cruisers in train station toilets, eventually stripping off all his clothes and running naked into the black sands of a prehistoric mountain, a guttural cry all that he leaves behind. All very reasonable reactions to a breakup, in my opinion.

Stamp’s immersion in the art house canon of Pasolini, and Federico Fellini’s Spirits of the Dead brought him into the cultural knowledge not only of discerning cinema critics and historians, but to the queer audiences who combed through art house theatre listings looking for anything that might have a hint of gay subtext. The myth of gay good taste (and of gays being excessively media literate) comes, in part, from a now defunct history of having to work hard and engage with intellectual material to find even just one gay kiss on screen. In the 70s, Derek Jarman was able to make and release a low budget homoerotic film shot entirely in latin about St Sebastian and the Roman soldiers he lived with, a film that, against all odds, found a paying audience because gay cinema goers were so ravenous for homo-content. Would Sebastiane have been as successful in this era of Heartstopper, Drag Race, and annoying gay tiktok brain rot? Somehow, I think not.

Stamp’s return to queer cinema in the 90s is my favourite, and actually my first encounter with him as a teen viewer. Starring alongside Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce in the iconic cult hit The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert he plays Bernadette, a trans woman and veteran drag queen show girl who is persuaded to go on a roadtrip through Australia to take on a series of shows in a desert hotel. The first time I saw this was, of course, on the tiny tv in my bedroom on late night channel four, and I was utterly transfixed. His performance was both perfectly comedic, but not so cartoonish that it cheapened the power and nuance of the very real character he was portraying. Bernadette was experienced, tough but still vulnerable, reluctant to be uncomfortable but willing to try and help her friends when they needed her. She could deliver an eviscerating read, slap a sister silly, and knockout a straight yob with a single punch with equal ease and added panache. Her trans identity was never in conflict with her drag performance, a concept that RuPaul’s Drag Race apparently couldn’t grasp until well over a decade of broadcasting, and that reflected the reality of the queer scenes being portrayed. 

“I remember, even when I first came out in the mid 00s, that the idea of being gay was enough to close off the possibility of having a traditional family with children, so seeing this glamorous, selfish, bitchy, campest of camp queens build a real friendship with this normal (straight) kid, and for him to be totally unfazed by his father’s sexuality was truly eye-opening.”

Watching it again now as an adult, there are so many small moments that I relate to in new ways never accessible to my teenage self. We see a flamboyant funeral near the beginning, drag queens in black veils gathering to mourn the death of Bernadette’s handsome young boyfriend, an image so familiar to the queer audience living through the height of the AIDS crisis at the time, until it is playfully revealed that the deceased actually asphyxiated on the fumes of an at-home-bleach hair kit. In fact, AIDS is brought up only once, in one of the few downbeat scenes featuring the homophobic abuse one might expect when travelling through rural Australia, when “Go Home, AIDS Fuckers” is written on the side of their bus. 

The film touches on a few more heavy issues, like childhood abuse and queerbashing, but ultimately remains an uproariously funny romp with poignant moments of pathos and nuanced connections. Bernadette’s burgeoning romance with an old mechanic they pick up along the way is sentimental in the best way, but my favourite is the relationship between Hugo Weaving’s secret son and Guy Pearce’s Felisha Jolly Goodfellow, the meanest, cattiest queen on the road. When the troupe arrive in Alice Springs, they are greeted by the eight year old son of Mitzi Del Bra, something which none of them expected and are at first unsure how to proceed. Felisha ends up babysitting him whilst Mitzi reconnects with the mother, and the two start to bond. I remember, even when I first came out in the mid 00s, that the idea of being gay was enough to close off the possibility of having a traditional family with children, so seeing this glamorous, selfish, bitchy, campest of camp queens build a real friendship with this normal (straight) kid, and for him to be totally unfazed by his father’s sexuality was truly eye-opening. Even now, it’s enough to make me emotional, so one can only imagine the effect this had on queer audiences of the 90s. To this day, it remains the only film that has the power to make me consider having children.

Queer lives are reflected back to us through the silver screen, showing us our standing in society at any given time, and our histories can be traced through the actors that have portrayed us through the decades. As I have said before, when it comes to queer roles being kept for queer actors, I believe more in the importance of queer writers and directors to create meaningful roles and stories than in the specifics of the performers. A nuanced portrayal in a well written film by a straight actor is better than an underdeveloped part played by a queer actor who was not given the space to bring reality or subtlety to the role. In our modern age, I do advocate for trans actors to play trans roles, as this is the demographic that is still the most misunderstood by Hollywood, but I can still be grateful for some of the good performances that came before. 

Terence Stamp’s queer roles have had the benefit of being crafted by some of the best and most authentic queer filmmakers of their day. Pasolini, that lovable old Marxist radical, transformed Stamp into the shadow of a secret sexuality that caused his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party. In Teorema, Stamp’s beauty is used to wake a bourgeois family from it’s complacency, to unlock their unique powers and individuality. Stamp is the queer catalyst that leads to revolution. Almost thirty years later, Stamp returns as Bernadette, a sympathetic yet empoweringly straightforward portrayal of transness created by the queer filmmakers buried deep in the Sydney gay scene. 

Stamp is an entry point to queer life, a hook for the uninitiated to bite at and discover the hidden depths of new worlds. His beauty and his fame brought audiences to films that might have remained forgotten cultural exercises, but, thanks to him, have become touchstones of queer culture itself. Teorema still resonates today, appearing recently dressed up as The Visitor, the latest Bruce LaBruce feature film, and Bernadette’s one liners from Priscilla are still echoed by drag queens all over the world, from Drag Race to your local bar. Stamp’s face and body has been used to tell our stories throughout the decades and I believe deserves his place in the pantheon of queer cinema.