The new Rock Hudson doc shows the fun side of Hollywood’s Golden Age
There’s a quote often but falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde that reads: “Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” It’s universal truth, but the attribution to Wilde is not incidental. It’s a line that could only come from a gay man. Certainly, there are boudoir power dynamics between men and women, but they’re directed outward; at somebody whose attraction comes necessarily through their difference from yourself. But to love men, as a man, is a constant form of self-evaluation. As Daniel Mendelsohn best captured in The Elusive Embrace: When men have sex with women, they fall into the woman. She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going. She is the destination.
