MentalFloss.com has assembled a wonderful list of films that castrated their literary companions into opposite-sex heroes and heroines in order to moot public opposition and rustle up as much box-office green as possible. In the process, they insulted the LGBTQI community and lost much of what made the source material so fetching in the first place.
For example, in Billy Wilder's classic study of alcoholism, The Lost Weekend (which swept the 1946 Acadmey Awards), Ray Milland's character Don Birnam, was a failed writer who turned to alcohol to quiet his intellectual failures. But in the novel by Charles Jackson made it clear that it was Birnam's homosexuality that was much of the source of his anxiety:
"When, at what time, had he deliberately ignored the responsibility and opportunity that beckoned him? Oh, he could put his finger on a dozen such moments … Some were more revealing than others; one he would never forget. What went on between them in the carriage-sheds back of the Presbyterian Church, several afternoons a week, in the backseat of an abandoned carriage that hadn’t been used for years—used for anything but this …"
In Goldfinger, Ian Fleming's seventh novel in the James Bond series and third to make it to the silver screen, Pussy Galore runs a ring of lesbian cat burglars which, even for the swinging sixties, proved too much for this 1965 release.
There are others, including The Color Purple, Watchmen, Breakfast at Tiffany's and the Harry Potter series, that make this well worth your time.
© 2012, Victor Hoff. All rights reserved. Menofcolor.blogs.com
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