Academy Award winning director
Ron Howard says he has no plans to remove the "electric cars are gay" joke from his upcoming
Vince Vaughn movie
The Dilemma. Howard's
Night Shift is a notoriously homophobic movie (see Vito Russo on it, for example). But, okay, that's the eighties, right? So we assume that Ron Howard has grown and evolved... surely he must have?
Until, that is, we come to
A Beautiful Mind in 2001. Howard totally de-gayed that biopic, ignoring the actual life of its very real main character John Nash and his relationships with men. In Howard's version, Nash was purely heterosexual. But surely this was just a one-off, right? No harm, no foul; it's only one movie right? Directorial decisions, etc., etc.
Now, here we are in 2010. And here's Howard, once again, defending anti-gay rhetoric in a film he directed as though it's no big deal.
So Howard has had problematic representations of homosexuality in at least
three films he's directed, over a period spanning
three decades. At what point do we quit giving this guy a pass, saying "oh, surely, supposed nice-guy Ron Howard couldn't
really be a major homophobe; what's the big deal about just
one film?"
Except it's
not just one film. It's a long-time pattern with this guy. How about "Three strikes and you're out"?
