The Gay Deceivers (1969)
Comedy
Watched on April 8, 2025
The basic plot of this one is that two straight best friends, Danny and Elliot, pretend to be a gay couple to dodge the draft. It only sort of works, because the draft officer keeps stalking them to see if they're actually gay, so they decide to move in together to a gay apartment complex. However, they haven't told anybody else about their insane plan due to fear of snitches, so their girlfriends and parents, who think they are straight, keep stopping by the apartment while the fantastically flamboyant landlord Malcom and his lover Craig, who thinks they are newlyweds, are over. Chaos ensures as the duo desperately attempt to keep their girlfriends and family from thinking they are acually gay.
Spoilers! They fail miserably. By the end of the movie literally everyone thinks that they are gay, to the point that Elliot loses his lifeguard/swim teacher job and Danny's girlfriend dumps him. They go back to the drafting station practically begging to be sent to Vietnam, but get rejected because the drafting officer is secretly gay and trying to keep straights out of the army(???). (Though Elliot at one point ends up in a gay bar and lets a guy hit on him and it's never explained why he was in the bar in the first place. Just sayin'.)
I found out about this movie through the book The Celluloid Closet (great book, love it), which said that the movie overall sucked but Michael Greer (who was one of the first openly gay actors in Hollywood) as Macolm was delightful, which was indeed true. He was hilarious, stole every scene he was in.
I wouldn't recommend the movie. The only saving grace is that Michael Greer as Malcom is so funny. I suppose that it is incredible that there was a movie in 1969 where the gay couple didn't murder anyone, get murdered or commit suicide. It holds up somewhat decently for a movie of this age and of this topic.
It's available to watch on Tubi and Archive.org is anyone wants to. Tubi has a higher quality upload and doesn't wash out everyone's features, and the Archive.org one at times mutes the soundtrack to avoid Youtube copywrite laws, which was super fucking annoying. My adblocker was interacting weirdly with Tubi though so I switched between the two versions at times.
Here's a clip starring Malcom and his flowers and another one where he makes an omelette. These are the best two scenes in the movie. Watch these and don't bother to watch the rest.