A Single Man Loses Its Gay Luster

As we touched on in an earlier post, the new trailer for Tom Ford's first foray into the feature film arena, A Single Man, starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult, is similar to its original trailer except for one small change -- it totally strips the film of its gay subject matter.

IndieWire.com did a comparative study of the two trailers, the first (above) put out by Ford's production company, and the second (below) by The Weinstein Company, which is distributing the film, and found that "new trailer uses the same music and mostly the same shots, except it adds in a bunch of quotes that not-so-subtly emphasizes the film’s Oscar buzz, and leaves out a few choice shots -- pretty much all of which are suggestive of the film’s gay content."

IndieWire goes on to breakdown the content of each trailer noting that The Weinstein Company is committed to making it appear as if the film is about Firth's relationship with Moore, even going so far as to remove Nicholas Hoult and Matthew Goode's names from the credits (both play characters romantically involved with Firth's character). What's more, in the second trailer a scene featuring a kiss between Firth and Goode is cut, a sequence of shots showing Firth looking into the eyes of both a female and male student now simply shows the female student, and "gone completely in the new trailer are a few shots of Firth running into the smoking (literally and figuratively) male prostitute outside a liquor store (one of the film’s more homoerotic sequences), as well as a few shots of him and Hoult running romantically and shirtlessly into the ocean together."

This isn't the first time a patently gay film has been marketed as a straight offering in order to either secure (trick?) hetero audiences into buying tickets or get potentially homophobic Academy members to vote for the film come Oscar time (Brokeback Mountain, anyone?). We guess it just means we (still) have to work that much harder not to be erased from mainstream culture. Perhaps we should get Michael Lucas to offer a counter-marketing strategy?

To see a photo portfolio of our November cover boy Nicholas Hoult, click here. To read our interview with Tom Ford on the making of A Single Man, click here.

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