A surprising movie star plays gay in ‘Parting Glances,’ a charming slice-of-life indie from 1986.

Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting 1986’s Parting Glances, an indie dramedy and one of the first film’s to address the AIDS epidemic.

This January marks the 40th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival. Founded by actor Robert Redford as an attempt to elevate and highlight independent voices in film, the festival has become one of the most important cultivators of new filmmaking talent, as countless directors, writers, and other talent have gotten their start in the snowy Utah mountains.

Ever since its inception, programming by and about queer people has been an essential part of the festival; films like Desert Hearts (1986), Paris Is Burning (1991), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Hedwig And The Angry Inch (2001) and Call Me By Your Name (2017) all got their jumpstart in Park City.

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This week, we’re looking back at one of the queer films that premiered at the festival in 1986, the comedic drama Parting Glances; a heartfelt and unwavering look at the 1980s gay scene in New York, when AIDS was making its way through the community, and the community was unwilling to give into it.

The Set-Up

Parting Glances follows Michael (Richard Ganoung) and Robert (John Bolger), a gay couple living in New York City, over the course of the last evening before Robert leaves for a work trip to Africa for two years.

In the twenty four hours that the movie tracks, Michael and Robert journey through a goodbye party thrown by their friend Joan (Kathy Kinney), and a dinner with Robert’s boss Cecil (Patrick Tull) and his wife Betty (Yolande Bavan), who seem to be living in a lavender marriage, as Michael stops by to look afterr his ex-boyfriend Nick (Steve Buscemi in one of his most subtle and yet daring performances), a young musician living with AIDS.

There is very little plot or narrative stakes in the film; the main tension relies on the character’s relationships, dynamics, and emotional bonds with each other. Michael and Robert are clearly going through a rough patch in their relationship; Michael is unclear and uncertain about their future as a couple once Robert goes away for such a long time, while Robert is mostly ignoring or burying his feelings and worries.

There is still a clear and latent emotional bond between Michael and Nick—which Nick seems to encourage, Michael resists, and Robert resents. And there is of course the unnamed but overwhelming sense of loss, grief, and communal bonding that tied them (and all of their friends) together during this period of time.

Parting Glances is helmed by first-time director Bill Sherwood, who himself died of AIDS complications only a few years after in 1990. It feels like an incredibly personal story, and in many ways more as an act of preservation (of himself, of his friends, of his community) rather than a purely filmmaking effort. 

The Buscemi Factor

Although not the protagonist, Steve Buscemi’s Nick stands out as the most fascinating and (ironically in many ways) alive of the characters. His disease and condition is never dwelled on or painfully dissected, but it has clearly affected how he moves about his life. There is a sense of reckless abandon in how openly he talks and acts upon his feelings, and a very tricky balance of joyous freedom and bitterness that AIDS seems to have given him.

Buscemi, in one of his earliest roles, has never quite played a character so open and charming before or since, and embodies Nick’s vulnerability and cynicism in equal measure. He is also an interesting contrast to both Michael and Robert, who are so tied inside their own relationship dynamics that appear sometimes shielded from the rest of the world. 

The Way We Were

Parting Glances joins a list of movies we have covered in this column that choose to portray the queer community (often during or at the corners of the AIDS crisis) in an almost naturalistic way: films like Sticks And Stones (1970), A Very Natural Thing (1974) and Some Of My Best Friends Are (1971) all have a very compact narratives that focus more on character dynamics and relationships rather than plot beats or complications.

All choose to portray the lives of their (mostly) gay men protagonists as mundane, non-extraordinary, and heavily centered on friendships and romances that are in essence true, thorny, and deep. All of these, including Parting Glances, seem more preoccupied with capturing the world as it was for the people that made them than dramatizing, heightening, or criticizing it.

This is a very defined shift from a lot of queer filmmaking that would come after it starting in the 1990s, and that is even less common now. This examination probably deserves its own piece for a fuller and more nuanced dive. But with almost thirty years removed from the film and countless ways in which gay life has changed from the one portrayed, it is still moving to see the honesty, matter-of-factness and lack of judgment that Parting Glances showcases.

One Last Glance

The film seems to be part of an unofficial filmmaking movement that preceded the much more radical and experimental New Queer Cinema wave of the 1990s (a movement that also found its footing at the Sundance Film Festival). One where filmmakers took the reigns of queer storytelling and decided to point the cameras at themselves, their friends, and their community. At a time when the world was spewing narratives and stereotypes about us and our lifestyles, queer filmmakers chose to showcase how their world actually was.

There is a lot of heart, emotion, and fun in Parting Glances. It is an unpretentious movie with complex characters, strong performances and an even stronger point of view: a point of view that dares to show a community in the midst of a plague, but won’t make that the center. It instead focuses on the relationships, romance, and smaller things that made life worth continuing.

Parting Glances is available to stream on Fandor, Flix, Kanopy, Ovid, Tubi, and Plex.

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