A Few good men is all that is needed
In 1983, a gay adult film called A Few Good Men was released — a series of vignettes set inside an all-male, all-straight military world, built around drill sergeants and recruits, discipline and obedience. Ten years later, in 1993, a mainstream courtroom drama with the same title reached wide release, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, about two Marines court-martialed for a hazing death at Guantanamo Bay.
Same title. Same institution. Same decade.
Two ideas of manliness
The adult film’s counter-narrative is worth sitting with: that manliness is not the absence of intimacy between men, but the capacity for it. Its military setting strips away the performance of toughness and finds, underneath the uniform and the hierarchy, men reaching for each other. That’s its own argument about what a man is — not the hardened, untouchable figure the culture usually hands us, but someone capable of closeness with other men, even inside the most rigid, rule-bound institution built to prevent exactly that.
The mainstream film runs on the opposite current. Its fictional victim is hazed because he’s weak — physically unable to keep pace, and worse, because he goes around the chain of command instead of enduring in silence. He is punished, in other words, for failing the code. Weakness itself is the offense. The film doesn’t name that failure as anything about sexuality, and there’s no evidence its writers intended it that way. But the coding is familiar to anyone who grew up around locker rooms and barracks: “weak,” “soft,” “not man enough” have long done double duty in American culture, carrying an implicit charge about who is suspected of not really being one of the men — an anxiety about homosexuality riding along under the surface of a word that, on paper, is just about strength.
The man playing that film’s lead carries his own version of this territory. Tom Cruise has never made a formal public statement in support of gay rights, transgender rights, or the LGBTQ community. He has, however, been a member of the Church of Scientology since the late 1980s and is widely described as its most prominent member, having received the church’s Freedom Medal of Valor — its highest honor — in 2004; some reporting indicates he has reached OT VIII, the church’s highest publicly acknowledged auditing level. Former high-ranking Scientologist Leah Remini has said Cruise ranks second only to church leader David Miscavige in internal status. The church’s founding texts describe homosexuality as an “aberration” treatable through its auditing practice, and while church spokespeople state the organization does not discriminate based on sexual orientation, former members and critics have disputed that.
Put the two films side by side and something clarifies: one insists manliness can include physical intimacy between men; the other punishes anything read as insufficiently hard. They’re arguing, a decade apart, about the same space and same time.
What the decade was
That ten years, 1983 to 1993, wasn’t incidental. It was the worst stretch of the AIDS crisis in America — the years before the first genuinely effective treatments arrived, when a diagnosis was close to a death sentence and the country largely watched with hostility or silence. The men hit hardest by the epidemic were the ones born in the early 1960s: still teenagers or barely into their twenties when it began, so that an entire generational cohort was cut down at the age when a man’s public identity — his career, his visibility, his claim to being “a man” in the culture’s terms — was just taking shape.
And behind 1983’s production sits a small, devastating record of its own. Director Steve Scott — born Salvatore Grasso — died September 12, 1987, from complications of AIDS. The film’s producer, Al Parker (born Andrew Robert Okun), died August 17, 1992, at age 40, also from AIDS. Lee Ryder, the film’s lead performer, died of AIDS on July 10, 1991. And Brad Peters, also in the cast, died in 1992, likewise from AIDS-related complications. Four men who made A Few Good Men — its director, its producer, and two of its performers — were dead within five years of the film’s release, all from the same epidemic. The Subdivision honors these lost souls.
By 1993 the country was fighting out, in Congress and in public, what it would mean for gay men to serve openly in the military at all — the fight that produced “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The same institution both films are set inside. The same year the second film reached wide audiences.
So the decade runs: a film that imagines intimacy between men as its own kind of manliness, at the height of a crisis that was killing a generation of men for who they loved — to a film, in the same military setting, that punishes weakness without ever naming what “weakness” has always half-meant — landing in the same year the nation legislated exactly how much a gay man was allowed to be visible inside that uniform.
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