Movie Yelling: Tea and Sympathy, Sixty Years Later

by Mallory Ortberg · May 2, 2016

TEA AND SYMPATHY: okay this is Tom, who is Morrissey
Tom has beautiful hair and ten thousand sweaters and no one understands him

ME [quietly, from the audience]: oh my God
I understand him

TOM: I have the most beautiful sweaters and hair in the world but all the other boys hate it when I win tennis because I play tennis with my wrists

ME: OH MY GOD TOM
NONE OF THE BOYS EVER LET ME PLAY THEIR LITTLE REINDEER GAMES EITHER
TOM THIS IS WHAT TOXIC MASCULINITY IS
YOU DON’T HAVE THAT WORD WHERE YOU ARE IN THE PAST BUT YOU’RE LIVING IT

ALL THE OTHER MALE STUDENTS: Tom likes to hang out with women, he is clearly gay, whereas the fact that we are recreating the volleyball scene from Top Gun pretty much 24/7 reinforces our unimpeachable heterosexual bona fides

MY OLD PROFESSORS: MALLORY YOU ARE CONFUSING HOMOEROTICISM WITH HOMOSOCIALISM YET AGAIN

ME: OH AM I

TEA AND SYMPATHY THE ENTIRE MOVIE WRIT LARGE: okay but to be very clear
Tom is not gay
no one is saying that
[loudly, in case the Hayes Office is listening] NO ONE IN THIS MOVIE IS GAY
JUST THE KIND OF FEMME-Y GUY THAT WOMEN LOVE, LIKE RUSSELL BRAND

EVERYONE: UGH REMEMBER WHEN RUSSELL BRAND WAS A THING

DEBORAH KERR: let’s literally all maybe just consider that it’s not a good idea for the entire faculty and student body to refer to a single student as “sister boy” and strip him nude before beating him at an official school function

ME: DEBORAH KERR I AM SO WITH YOU

DEBORAH KERR’S TERRIBLE HUSBAND: well obviously you want to have sex with this high school effete, Deborah Kerr

ME: HOW DARE YOU SLANDER HER PURE AND DISINTERESTED –

DEBORAH KERR: oh Tom you’re just like my dead husband

ME: uh-oh

TOM LEE: I don’t have a mother

ME: UH
OH

TOM LEE: everyone is so mean to me that if I do not sleep with a woman or get a crew cut I will die
and I refuse to get a crew cut
because of my beautiful, beautiful hair

(you guys his hair was SO beautiful)

TEA AND SYMPATHY, THE WHOLE MOVIE WRIT LARGE: okay well
what if a boy were SO gay that he wasn’t gay at all

ME: wait what

TEA AND SYMPATHY: and in fact he was SO gay-ungay that if he didn’t sleep with his mother he would die

ME: wait

DEBORAH KERR: Mallory don’t overthink this
bullying and forced conformity are terrible

ME: right, I agr–

DEBORAH KERR: and the only way to keep this young man from killing himself is to have sex with him on this golf course

ME: WAIT

DEBORAH KERR: too late
I saved him

10 years later

TOM LEE: that boning saved my whole entire life and also carefully took place the literal day after my actual eighteenth birthday so as to avoid Consent Issues

You guys, I loved this movie so MUCH, every bonkers Technicolor SECOND of it.

Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.


67 Comments

      2. aiquale +11

        I want to thumbs up this, but that would put it past the perfect number “42” and I don’t think Adams would approve.

  3. Rhi +31

    I had completely forgotten this play/film existed until now! I need to watch it now that I regularly confuse homoeroticism with homosocialism!

    Also, sadly, in some places Russell Brand is still a thing. [sigh]

    1. marillenbaum +17

      Important question: what IS the difference between homoeroticism and homosocialism?

      1. queenofbithynia +95

        well the one of them is where you tell the other fellow his left thigh is like a poem and Lysippus would have cut out one of his own eyes for the privilege of casting it in bronze, and the fellow says gosh, thanks, because that’s how fellows speak to one another in a free and manly atmosphere, just like chums, you know. and the other one is where you don’t tell the other fellow anything because you are heaving and sweating in concert with him as you work shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh to put out a fire or haul in a line or some such thing, and it is left to the audience to notice for itself how poetical it is.

          1. janiyapie +24

            (I think) the first example is homosocialism and the second is homoeroticism but fuck me i can tell the difference between them

      2. msbias +25

        yes, my memory of the distinction is that they CLAIM it’s homosociality but hahaha boys yeah right.

    2. Ursula +1

      I really liked him in St. Trinian’s. Possibly just because he was associated with it and not because of any inherent Russell Brandiness.

  4. typewriterandgramophone +45

    Years later, when you wrote about it, (and you did), you were kind. Mission accomplished!

    Beautiful social outcast Deborah Kerr is best Deborah Kerr. See also “The Chalk Garden.”

      1. goddessoftransitory +2

        Ohhhh, me too! When the uncle takes both her hands at the beginning of the movie when he’s hiring her and saying he never, ever ever wants to hear anything about her or the kids EVER and she falls totally in love with him???? MAN.

    2. testingwithfire +7

      NICE.

      Seeing Deborah Kerr now always makes me a little sad because of all the classic era movie stars she’s the only one who reminds me of my late mum.

      1. typewriterandgramophone +8

        <3

        We are big Deborah Kerr fans in our family, to the point where my Mom gets cross with costume designers who don’t put her in prettier colors like purple or green. We have kind of a weakness for all the “ladylike” stars like the De Havilland/Fontaine sisters, Greer Garson, Loretta Young, Teresa Wright, & co.

    3. cleoreads +4

      Nicely done.

      I have to confess that the only reason I’ve even heard of this movie is Savage Love’s Tea and Sympathy rule about dating someone significantly older than you. Glad to see the pertinent line referenced.

  6. thebeagee +56

    What if a boy sleeping with his mother is the ungayest of all?

    Wait…what?

  7. middlemarch +55

    “MY OLD PROFESSORS: MALLORY YOU ARE CONFUSING HOMOEROTICISM WITH HOMOSOCIALISM YET AGAIN”

    Well, there’s my life in a nutshell. Also this movie… this literally hits on every theme my high school self and friends cared about / I may have watched “Wilde” like 10 times when I was 16 and also maybe once we had a Bosie themed sleep over?

      1. teenybuffalo +31

        Me too, eh? I want to hold one myself.

        You take lots of opium and phone older men to demand money and tell them to take your dad to court?

      2. middlemarch +34

        I mean, literally we just had a sleepover and watched Wilde and obsessed over this dude we knew who looked EXACTLY like Sir Alfred Douglas. Also we had an ongoing comic we made during class when we were bored that involved Achilles and Patroclus and at some point I’m pretty sure we had gay Dracula hook up with Bosie in it? At some point I think Alcibiades was involved? #justgirlythings

        (But really though, we went to a tiny high school and dating options were slim and none of us were ready for real sex with real dudes, so, this weirdness was born.)

        1. catherinevmcguire +9

          but BOSIE IS THE WORST!!!!!! Clearly, I feel strongly about this, oy.

      3. popelizbet +10

        Mallory has ruined my brain, because I saw your question and screamed (in my head, I’m at work) SEX GREASE.
        Ahem.

    2. grumblyqueer +47

      I’ve always thought that from around age 13-25, homosocialism is doomed to become homoerotic through the sheer power of hormones and romantic inexperience. To be clear, that applies to all genders, whether real people or fictional character.

      1. AlmondTort +23

        Was bi at all-girls boarding school, can solidly confirm this theory

      2. middlemarch +38

        I might be the exception to this. Turns out I was pals with lots of (later out) queer girls and was COMPLETELY OBLIVIOUS. A friend offered to take pictures of me posing like Bettie Page in a vintage-looking bikini I had – after we talked about Tegan and Sara! – and I thought she was just being really friendly and artistic.

  8. janeypie +46

    I remember reading The Celluloid Closet and Vito Russo had an absolute FIELD DAY with this movie. The sensitive, femme, gay coded, but still heterosexual boy is a trope I have a complex relationship with.

  9. Lilah +85

    Oh my gosh, I was so delighted to see this movie being talked about! Where I grew up, gay people who were caught were imprisoned and tortured, and absolutely no one was ever open about being gay, so my accidental and illicit viewing of about half of this film while at a suspiciously-liberal relative’s house was the first time I saw anything that was even vaguely gay being portrayed in a remotely positive light. This film was literally life-changing for me and shall forever hold a special place in my little gay heart.

  10. teenybuffalo +38

    This sounds like Mary Renault’s Return to Night where the jaded doctor in her thirties has sex with the beautiful boy in his twenties in order to keep him from either being a mommy’s boy all his life or killing himself. Also, he’s coded as gay–repeatedly described as beautiful and vulnerable, secretly wants to do theater, super passive all the time–yet he’s into women. Well, A Woman. Could this be a power trip for the protagonist, and the audience who presumably identify with her. “He’s not into women EXCEPT FOR ME.”

    1. tidepool +55

      I like how killing themselves is just casually assumed as a fate for beautiful sensitive boys who do not get laid.

      1. teenybuffalo +10

        Well, it “worked” for Young Werther, and by “worked” I mean “glamorized suicide.”

  11. Virginia +21

    Okay, so in high school I did Tea and Sympathy in Dramatic Interp and The Children’s Hour in duo interp (“I have loved you IN THAT WAY”!!!!), and I spent the entire article in a welter of confusion, having conflated the two.

    Also, what the shit, high school drama teacher. Between those and The Bad Seed, I’m starting to wonder what he thought of me, with such assignments for the speech team.

    1. goddessoftransitory +5

      This description is starting to read like some obscurely bizarre Blade Runner Vo-Comp Test.

  13. mrtafadhali +54

    I wrote a whole paper on this movie in college! I love (and by love I mean hate? hate-love? I kind of find them irresistible) the genre where it’s ALMOST saying homophobia is bad but actually it’s saying homophobic bullying is wrong because what if that person is actually straight? What then? Then you’ve called them the worst possible thing for no reason.

    This is also one of those ones where the worst bully (Deborah Kerr’s husband) was Gay All Along, which is not a trope I have love-hate feelings about, I’m pretty much solidly on “hate.”

    1. janiyapie +35

      It’s one of those “faux liberal” analogies: “just BECAUSE a character is very gay coded doesn’t make him gay, maybe you’re the real homophobe for noticing it?”

    2. pigeonsquid +35

      It’s up there with All Homophobes Are Secretly Gay in the list of pseudo-tolerant tropes that piss me, A Gay, off.

      1. mrtafadhali +10

        Which, as I noted, is also a trope in this movie (though more subtly than in the play), so it’s a twofer!

  14. tidepool +13

    … how have I never heard of this film before? God, the fifties sure were a time, weren’t they.

  16. Annie +11

    It sounds magnificent. I must see it.

    (I’d also like to point out that this film was produced by one Pandro S. Berman. They just don’t make names like they used to.)

      1. Mrs_Peel +15

        Hermes Pan (Astaire’s choreographer/ collaborator) also had a great name.

  17. ZevNV +27

    I have somehow never read/seen TEA AND SYMPATHY but I am *so here* for “be flabbergasted by how mid-20th-Century theatre and film handled LGBT stuff” conversations. Especially if we start with the sheer lunacy of THE CHILDREN’S HOUR.

    1. Sophia McDougall +17

      Oh yes! When the play’s all “homophobic witch-hunt is bad, lesbianism still tragic, though.” And the film’s all “We’re pulling our daughters of your school! Because you’re… um. You’ve been accused of being… well. Liking the WRONG men?”

  18. alula_auburn +19

    Slight tangent, but my recent comfort reading has been detailed snarky recaps of VC Andrews novels, which I managed to get through my youth without ever reading, so there’s just. . .a lot of boys needing to sleep with their mothers in my online reading life, I guess. Because really, any nonzero number is a lot when it comes to boys needing to sleep with their mothers.

    I read a review of this as a play a long time ago and was like MUST SEE and promptly forgot, so yay! movie! Pretty, pretty movie.

  19. Unreadaethel +12

    I just hear Greg Kinnear in my head saying, “she’s not naked, it’s ART!”

    ETA: IntenseDebate misplaced this reply to @beagee.

    1. walrathem +11

      And now I hear Muppet Janice saying “… I don’t take my clothes off for anybody even if it is ‘artistic.'”

  20. BookishBroad

    I want to thumbs up this, but that would put it past the perfect number "42" and I don't think Adams would approve.

  22. cleo

    Nicely done.

    I have to confess that the only reason I've even heard of this movie is Savage Love's Tea and Sympathy rule about dating someone significantly older than you. Glad to see the pertinent line referenced.

  23. goddessoftransitory

    I remember in The Celluloid Closet one of the commenters bitching about Suddenly…Last Summer and this–how it was cut to the point of imbecility because they couldn't have The Gay, but the ENTIRE STORY is about this sadistic mama's boy gay guy!