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[haunting music]
[static crackles]
[suspenseful horror music]
- Horror is a genre that really deals
with putting women in peril.
- We all know the formula.
A terrified girl being pursued by a masked villain.
- Of course she runs, and falls, and the killer gets her.
[woman screams]
- The monster attacks and the audience reacts.
- The kids call them slasher or splatter movies.
- They signify a disturbing new
trend at the movie box office.
- Even with its predictability
fans would line up for more.
- I really like seeing a strong female lead come into
her own and take on the male villain in a horror movie.
- Survivor girl.
- The final girl.
- Very often you have a female hero
because they feel more vulnerable.
[woman screams]
- In the midst of the 1980s,
the horror genre was running wild.
Terror filled the walls of video rental stores
and became a weekend ritual for slumber parties everywhere.
And for every screaming final girl
was a new monster to stalk her.
[girl screams]
Michael, Jason, Pinhead, Chucky, Leatherface,
but no one was scarier than Freddy Kreuger.
- Freddy Kreuger is every girl's dream
and every girl's nightmare.
- The burned boogeyman who frightened audiences
with his razor glove and wicked tongue.
- Freddy is the ultimate nightmare
- "A Nightmare on Elm Street"
unleashed a new cinematic terror
that left audiences screaming for more.
But then came the sequel to break all the rules.
- [Announcer] Someone is coming back to Elm Street.
- I just wanted to do something different.
I didn't wanna do another slasher movie.
- "Freddy's Revenge" brought Kreuger
out of the dream world and into the body
of a teenage boy, Jesse Walsh, a bold choice
that was obvious even to the film's cast in 1985.
- We had a real sensitive male lead.
Instead of a typical macho teen boy
we had sort of this nerdy, sensitive kid and he became
the equivalent of our heroine in jeopardy in part one.
- For Mark Patton, a starring role
in a hit film series was a dream come true.
- I wasn't intimidated but I had lots of respect for Mark.
- He has that vulnerability and that sex appeal--
[man screams]
- Just everything that goes into being a scream queen.
[screaming]
- The mainstream public, they weren't ready
for a male scream queen, they couldn't articulate it.
- This was totally written to be a gay movie.
I think it's hard to watch it and not think that.
- He could have had such a different career path
but was cast in this movie was so queer,
the fact that it wasn't owned as a queer film
made a light shine on him that was completely inappropriate.
- The film that was poised
to launch his career ended up destroying it.
- [Patton] I wake up in the middle
of the first movie that I'm the lead actor in
and realize that there's a gay subtext in it.
I was a gay person and I was living in terror.
- In the 1980, to be queer was
to be this diseased pariah.
I think, in away, Mark Patton paid the price for that.
- As quickly as he had arrived
Mark vanished from show business.
- What happened to Mark is not the exception.
I think that that happens constantly.
- The movie was 30 years ago
and you're still pissed off at Dave Chaskin.
- [Patton] You've been lying for 30 years about this.
- I mean I never wrote you know, he screams like a woman.
- [Patton] This is not my theory.
This is my truth.
This is what happened to me.
[Patton screams]
[energetic horror music]
- I don't know what happened
30 years ago to make him quit acting.
- So many of us had no idea
what he was doing for nearly 20 years.
- Mark Patton pretty much disappeared.
- Like they said, he was the Greta Garbo of horror.
You know they couldn't find him.
They didn't know where he was.
[dramatic music]
- Cher gave me the best advice in the world
and it's come back to haunt me,
she said, "Mark, in show business,
what you need to do, is always do what's best for you
because that's what everybody else is gonna be doing."
- This is like the tip of the iceberg
as far as this film is.
[group laughs]
How many of you have never seen
"Nightmare on Elm Street 2" before?
It's okay, if you can raise your hand, it's okay.
It's okay guys don't worry.
This movie is the gayest thing--
- [Co-host] And it's true.
- And we did Xanadu last month.
- [Co-host] It's true, it's true.
- This is the gayest movie you are about to see.
- That's right.
- It makes "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert"
look like a staunch, Republican film.
[crowd laughs]
Just please, does us a favor, sir you've never seen
it before, put on your gayest googles please do.
- [Co-Host] Please do.
- [Cecil] In 2015, the infamous horror film,
"A Nightmare on Elm Street: Part Two",
celebrated its 30th anniversary.
In honor of the occasion the lead star, Mark Patton,
spent the year on the road, traveling
to different horror conventions
to meet the fans of Elm Street.
[engaging music]
- [Patton] Bill?
- [Bill] Yeah.
- What time is it?
- [Bill] Like 9:35.
- Isn't it seven?
- Isn't what seven?
- [Patton] O'clock.
- Yes, yes it is.
- Wake me up in 30 minutes.
[engaging music]
- Welcome back fans, I am Fozzie Bear
and I am the official GLBT correspondent for NLTOP.
I edged out Andy just by a little.
I'm here with Mark Patton,
Hi Mark, how are you?
- [Patton] Hey, good morning.
- Good morning, how are you feeling
this morning, first of all?
- Oh, I'm feeling great.
- You don't wish you were dead at all?
- Oh never, never, never.
- [Fozzie] Oh no, me either, I'm feeling good.
- Yeah, no, I wake up on Sunday mornings.
I'm like I don't know how, Beyonce does this.
And Bill said, "well Beyonce's really young."
I was like, "okay, well I don't how Cher does this."
'Cause I feel like I'm between
Beyonce and Cher or some place.
[engaging music]
Part of you lives in alternate universe, you know.
I spend my days signing photographs
of myself that were taken 30 years ago.
- [Fan] Hi, can I get a signed picture?
- Sure, of course.
And, feel weird about that, honestly.
But it is a business.
When the door opens I become Mark Patton.
- Right.
- It's almost like a veil falls
over me and I become the star.
[engaging music]
And I tell people this all time.
It's like if you're gonna do this
then be really professional, because for most
of these people it'll be the only time
they ever meet you, and it's a big deal.
I mean I've had people say to me, "if I could meet you
or I could meet Brad Pitt, I would meet you.
You're my Brad Pitt."
And they're nervous and they're scared.
You know, it's like a lifetime memory
and it only takes one second to ruin that.
If you think that this is whorish for you to do this
then be a good whore, because you're taking their money.
They want you to be a movie star.
Just go ahead and be it.
And that's your job as an actor.
If your rent is due, nobody really cares.
They don't wanna know about your problems.
They want to see the movie star.
♪ One, two, Freddy's coming for you... ♪
- [Announcer] The kids of Elm Street don't know it yet,
but something is coming to get them.
- [Cecil] Opening to unexpecting audiences in 1984,
"A Nightmare on Elm Street" introduced
the world to Freddy Kreuger, the fantasy-horror villain
who stalked and murdered the kids
of Elm Street through their dreams.
Critics praised creator, Wes Craven,
for breaking the mold of the horror heroine
with his refreshingly proactive lead, Nancy Thompson.
This gruesome flick became the first major hit
for independent studio New Line Cinema,
and they quickly jumped into the production of a sequel.
This time, they asked budding screenwriter,
David Chaskin, to take a stab at the story.
- It's starting to happen again.
- Nightmare two is a possession movie
and I especially liked the concept
of an innocent person being invaded.
- [Announcer] "Freddy's Revenge."
- [Cecil] The film's successful box office
opened the door for six more sequels,
and a surge of merchandising followed.
- [Announcer] Freddy Kreuger is just a phone call away.
[maniacal laugh]
- [Cecil] But "Freddy's Revenge" was not a fan favorite.
- When I first started going to shows people would
walk up to my table and tell me
how much they hated the movie.
I mean, like "What are you doing here?"
- Two, two is my least favorite.
- It's so hard to watch.
- Well, it deviated from the original storyline.
- It didn't feel like Wes Craven.
He was a god.
- I remember laughing at that one more
and it was mainly because of the dance.
- [Fan] He's dancing all over
his bedroom and doing this motion.
- With the little, popper doo-dad.
[pops]
- It was a really gay though.
There was a lot of gay in that movie.
- Oh, there's a lot of subtext in there.
- It wasn't subtext, it was right there.
- A lot gratuitous bulge, which is always appreciated.
- And the gay bar scene.
- That winds up in the showers.
- Towels snapping, and with Mark Patton's,
I mean he's a scream queen.
[Patton screams]
- Mark Patton, he screams, he's a super nice guy,
and he chokes you when you meet him.
- Yeah--
- It's more like this, like.
- I don't need to--
- It's gentle, it's a gentle choke.
- I don't need to meet him then.
- You don't want that, you don't need that.
[engaging music]
- I don't know what Mark went through on the show.
I don't know he felt.
- Mark, I think, is looking for resolution.
I think that some of the circumstances around the making
of this film created a lot of hurt for him.
- Judging from what happened, and then him
not being in a movie or the entertainment industry
for like 27 years, I think he was content
if had they never done that documentary,
I don't think that he might've ever pursued
trying to find out why or maybe have some closure.
- [Cecil] The 2010 documentary, "Never Sleep Again,"
set out to chronicle the entire Elm Street legacy,
with interviews of the filmmakers
and stars of all eight films.
Having disappeared from the public eye,
Mark was their most difficult subject to find.
Only after hiring a private investigator
were they finally able to locate him in Mexico.
- I had not thought about acting in many years.
I had made myself unfind-able.
I was off the grid.
I was living on a dirt road in Mexico
and I got a telephone call from "Never Sleep Again,"
and I said, "I'll come and tell my story
under one circumstance, that I get to confront
David Chaskin and say, you wrote this as a gay movie."
You've been lying for 30 years about this and every time
people ask you about it, you say "no,
Mark was just so gay that he ruined the movie."
I didn't even know I was famous.
I didn't know any of this existed.
[energetic horror music]
And then I dived in to the internet.
And that was an eye opener.
That really pissed me off.
[energetic horror music]
[light dramatic music]
I had a very interesting childhood actually.
My mother was the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister
and my father was from a very large Catholic family,
and they met each other and they got married.
By time my mother was 22 she had five children,
one of which had died, and by the time
she was 24 she had a hysterectomy,
'cause that was birth control where they came from.
My parents divorced when I as 14
and I sort of became the mom in our house.
I took care of everybody.
I paid the bills.
I did all that kind of stuff.
My mother visited mental institutions
on and off for most of her life.
I came from a place where everybody looked exactly the same,
blonde hair, blue eyes, but I was beautiful,
and I was noticed, and my grandmother had said something
to me like, "your hair is like a girl",
or "why do you have it cut like that?
And why do you have this bracelet?"
And, "boys aren't supposed to wear bracelets."
And I had a nice little flip.
And I thought, you know what, if God doesn't love me
there's something wrong with God
and when I roll over I'm not gonna care about this anymore.
I knew I was gay when I four years old, probably,
and I remember I had a set of bunk beds,
and I had built myself a tent, and I put all the pillows up,
and I was being carried off to marry the king.
But I wasn't a girl, I knew I was a boy,
and I was gonna marry the king,
and it was really fabulous and I knew absolutely that
under no circumstance should tell anybody what I was doing.
And they didn't understand me at all.
I mean, I was a brother from another planet.
Actually, I was a sister from another planet
My dad didn't understand me,
but my dad wouldn't let anyone fuck with me.
I know my dad loved me a lot.
But I think that my dad resented my freedom.
I was free because I was gay.
When you become a parent you trade
your dreams for somebody else's,
and I never had to trade in my dreams.
And it was the same with all the people around me.
I don't know why, but deep down inside me
I knew that there was something wrong with them
and there was nothing wrong with me, and that all
of my problems were just a problem with geography,
and when I moved to New York I remember my dad
was in the front yard raking the leaves.
He didn't offer me any money.
He didn't ask me when I was coming home.
He just said goodbye.
It was like I was abandoning him
and he was pretending that I was not leaving.
He, til the day he died, thought I had run away from home.
I mean that's the way they talked about it.
It was like, "come and visit me in New York."
"Well, you're the one that left."
That was the option, you know, you left
and you didn't come back, I mean, I didn't come back
to my home for four and a half years,
and nobody came looking for me.
[engaging music]
I moved to New York on February 18th, 1977
with a one-way plane ticket and $132.
I'd never been on plane.
My drama teacher had told me to get out of town.
I was 17 years old.
There was no other option.
I couldn't stay where I was, because I mean
apart from being an actor, you know just
the gay me, is I would've been dead.
Some redneck would've killed me
on a back road and that would've been my life.
I was safe in New York.
It only took one walk down Christopher Street
to know that I had arrived, 'cause the doors
started flying open, and that was
the same way with show business.
It was just, it was all meant to be.
And I moved into the Hotel Woodward,
which was a prostitution hotel.
I didn't know that at the time.
All the girls wore little jackets and stuff,
and it was $37.50 a week, and I had to pay for two weeks.
The boy down the hall had an agent.
He was making a fortune and I just thought,
I didn't even know you needed an agent.
So, I followed him to his agency
and there was a big sign on the wall,
and it said if you're an actor do not knock on this door.
Put your resume and your picture underneath
the door and we'll call you if we want you.
[table raps]
I knock on the door because it didn't apply
to me, 'cause I wasn't an actor, you know, officially.
And the owner of the agency had come in early,
opened the door, looked at me and said, "what do you want?"
And I said, "I've come to apply for a job as an actor."
And he said, "okay," and he looked at me,
and he said, "how old are you?"
And I told him how old I was.
And he said, "okay come back at 11 o'clock."
And they later told me he said "we didn't care
if you could talk, they way you looked
we knew we were gonna make a fortune in commercials on you."
Within days I had my first national commercials
and then I started making money, and that was that.
♪ So kiss a little longer ♪
♪ Just give me the sunshine, give me a dew ♪
- And I said that night, "you know what,
I'll give myself five years.
If I do something really major in five years
then this is all meant to be and it'll be okay."
- [Announcer] The curtain comes down.
The laughter and cheers go on and on.
I opened on Broadway with Cher, Karen Black,
Sandy Dennis, Robert Altman directing,
on February the 18th, 1982, at 6:30 at night.
So I made my five years by 30 minutes.
That kind of timing is just divine.
My family knew nothing about New York, Broadway.
I mean my first Broadway show, my mom called me up.
I told her I got it.
Then she called me back later and she was so embarrassed,
she was like, "do you have to make your own costume?"
[engaging music]
We rehearsed for "Come back to the
Five and Dive, Jimmy Dean" here.
The Rolling Stones came here one afternoon.
David Bowie, David Bowie kissed me
on the staircase downstairs, which was really exciting.
And anybody who had worked for Robert, Robin Williams,
and they'd watch the show and give us notes,
but they treated you as peers, which was really exciting.
You know, nobody every treated me as a young person.
It was always, I was a peer, I was a part of that group
and you were just included in the entire experience.
It was really wonderful.
I was starstruck by Cher and then
I was completely taken under her spell.
All of the time that I spent with her was
pretty magnificent, because she was
exactly what you wanted her to be.
When you enter into her world,
that's the real Hollywood world.
- Martha, do you think they could be
as big as Marilyn Monroe's.
I think they might be bigger.
- Do you, [laughs] do you really?
- [Cecil] He played an outcast Texan boy named Joe
who reunites with a group of friends years later.
But to their surprise he has changed
his gender and is now Joanne, played by Karen Black.
- Tell me about Joanne.
- She's a transexual.
- There was an altar to James Dean and I stepped
through it into the arms of the crowd, which went wild,
and just in a minute, Cher's gonna walk down through
the center and the crowd is going crazy, and it's insane.
- [Cecil] After a short run on Broadway,
Robert Altman went into production
on a feature film adaptation with the original cast.
That was it, and the next year
I was at the Cannes Film Festival.
♪ Sincerely ♪
- You really can't imagine when a dream like
that comes true, in the way that that came true.
"Kinky Boots" is at the Hirschfeld Theater
which was the Martin Beck Theater, and if you go
to the mezzanine and in the middle
of the whole presentation there's a picture of me
where I used to sit, its a Hirschfeld.
[crowd cheers]
[energetic haunting music]
I'd been scouted to go to LA for pilot season,
but I really wasn't prepared to go.
Had I not gotten in that car my life
would have been completely different.
We drove in a Karmann Ghia from New York to Los Angeles
and I was dumped into the deep end of Hollywood.
We were living in South Pasadena with a friend of mine.
- I was doing pilot season.
Mark came out and I feel like I talked about him with Tim.
I said, "you know I have this really cute friend
who's staying with me," and he's like
"well when are you going to introduce us?"
- My friend Jeff Marcus said, "oh come over and meet Tim."
[door knocks]
And my destiny walked right in the door.
- The only thing more beautiful than these
is the woman receiving them.
- Timmy was spectacular looking, insanely funny.
- Beautiful, black-headed boy, beautiful eyes,
and he was the reverse image of me.
[Dallas theme music plays]
Tim was a successful TV actor in Los Angeles
in a steady gig, living in a house in the Hills.
When we moved in together, like the day we met each other.
Tim changed my life.
And we lived next door to Madonna
in a house on the top of Mulholland Highway.
I liked to spy on Madonna and I liked
to go to dinners at Merv Griffin's house.
I mean, I knew how to work the system.
Free clothes, free travel, when somebody else
is paying the ticket, it's a blast.
The adulation and all that kind of stuff,
it's wonderful, and work is wonderful.
And that's why you're there anyway.
To pretend to be somebody else and get paid for it.
It's like amazing.
- [Cecil] After years of supporting roles,
Mark had the talent and the drive to become a leading man.
- [Patton] I was going towards my destiny.
- [Cecil] All he needed now was that killer opportunity.
- [Walters] Horror movies, mutilation, decapitation,
torture, does that sound entertaining?
- Half of American households now have
video cassette recorders, and for many children,
they're a ticket to R-rated gore
that the kids are too young to see at the movies.
- They seem to love every moment of today's horror films.
- [Cecil] Through the home video market, horror movies
had become bigger, badder, and gorier than ever.
They were an absolute retaliation against
Reagan and the growing Conservative movement.
- Take a walk down our opposition's memory lane,
it starts to look like "Nightmare on Elm Street."
- [Cecil] The kids loved them.
- I love blood, and guts, and stuff, you know.
It turns me on you know.
- [Cecil] The parents hated them
and organizations tried to ban them.
- They were talking about
the Friday 13th and Freddy Kreuger.
- [Cecil] But, for many aspiring actors
at the time, low-budget horror films
became a gateway to a career in Hollywood.
The demand for new blood allowed
for a constant stream of fresh talent to emerge.
Everyone was looking to be cast in the next big horror hit.
- I cannot tell you how many friends
told me "I would never do a horror film."
And it didn't really ever dawn on me to say to them, "well,
you don't have to really worry about it because nobody
asked you."
I was happy to get this job, you know.
I mean I loved it.
- Mark was a very good actor, he had a good luck,
and he did have that vulnerability.
I cast him basically because he felt like
he was the right guy for the part.
- I knew about the movie, of course, but it wasn't
like really on my radar at the time.
I was working way too much, and then when I the second one,
they put a screening together
of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" for me
after I had signed the contract
and watched it with a friend.
I had no idea what it was.
Then I was like, "oh my God, what have I got myself into?"
- When I think back on it, it was hard, hard, hard work.
It was a lot of hard work.
There was all this stuff in this film
that I had no idea how to do.
I didn't know how to do any of it and basically
I had an anxiety attack, and that anxiety attack
lasted for the entire pre-production period.
- We all were fighting to become comfortable
with the effects and Marks had to lots,
and lots of effects in this, and he was under
the glue as much as I was in some cases.
- And it was all so fast.
We were shooting that pool scene on July the fourth.
We opened in New York City
on every screen available on Halloween.
Times Square was head to toe "Nightmare on Elm Street".
It's "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Nightmare on Elm Street",
and everywhere you turned was my name
and pictures of me, and it was immersive.
- Who me scared?
Yeah.
- It scared the devil out of me.
- [Patton] At 10 o'clock in the morning
every theater was sold out.
I would go in anonymous and walk out famous.
It was unbelievable.
I just became a movie star overnight.
- Freddy's back, watch out.
[man screams]
- [Cecil] While Mark was riding high
on the back of a box office hit,
Freddy Kreuger was becoming a household name.
But the sequel left the audiences feeling underwhelmed
and a few were picking up on something odd,
buried just below the surface.
- None of that ever occurred to me.
When the "Village Voice" came out after
the movie opened and called it
this great, gay movie, we all had a huge laugh.
We thought it was the funniest thing.
You know, where did they get that from?
- [Patton] As the reputation of this movie started
to grow, it sort of became a nightmare.
I mean, really a nightmare.
- People have selective memory a little bit about this.
It was on the page of the script that there was gonna be
this S&M sequence in the shower room.
And I knew we were treading in there.
I knew we were tiptoeing around this.
I knew we were crossing a line a little bit,
and I knew Freddy was part of that.
Freddy was pushing those buttons.
And we did talk about this, I mean I didn't talk to Jack
about it, but I remember talking to Robert about it.
- Right away, I knew there was homosexual
undertones in the script when I read it.
I knew at the audition, I knew.
- I didn't get it.
I didn't catch it in the script.
- I never was aware until I heard that Native magazine
in New York had said this is the first gay movie.
[laughs]
And then I was like, yeah.
- Is Freddy a manifestation of this taboo thing
that's somewhere in the back of his head?
You can play with it all you want.
You know with "The Advocate, they
were the first ones to notice.
Nobody saw it, Bob asked me was there anything
in there, and I said, "you know."
Nah, there's nothing, what are you talking about?
[enterprising music]
- Where it really became cryst-clear for me
was when we were doing the scene on the stairs.
Look at Robert and I, it's a love scene.
- I remember with Mark, caressing his face,
and I remember asking Mark if I could make that,
if I could make it, and I think the word is homoerotic.
Mark and I are nose to nose,
and I've go the claw on him like this.
- And he asked me actually, if he could
put the blade in my mouth.
- And one of the pieces of coverage, I rimmed his mouth.
- But I said, well you know, whatever.
I mean, I can go there with you.
And my makeup artist, he comes running across,
screaming at the top of his lungs, "stop, he needs makeup!"
And so he grabs me and he goes, "don't you dare
let him put that blade in your mouth.
It'll look like you're blowing him."
- I'm playing with oral there.
I'm playing with a lot of symbolism there.
But mostly for me it was disfigured Freddy
playing with Mark's beauty, which is what,
"Beauty and the Beast".
[Mark screams in horror]
- When you actually go back and you look at it,
you know the S&M bar with the guy in leather,
and his ass is being whipped.
I mean, you know it's shot through with this stuff.
You know, why I didn't get it I don't know.
But I mean just because it never occurred to me, you know.
- Obviously, I didn't want it to be obvious,
that subtext, which is why I never really admitted to that.
That and because it was so much more fun not to.
[dramatic music]
[enterprising music]
- [Patton] My agents went to watch the movie
and they were like, "yeah you can carry a movie,
but we're gonna have to make you a character actor,
because you can't play straight."
- [Cecil] In order to keep his image marketable,
Mark's agent had to act fast.
They began working to conceal his sexual identity.
- She threw a couple of pairs of jeans and T-shirts
on the floor, over in the corner, you know.
Like went through my dirty laundry and threw 'em
in the corner, and she was like, that's what you can wear
to auditions and the rest of the stuff has to go.
- [Cecil] Setting him up for his most challenging
acting role yet, the all-American boy.
[engaging music]
- There were 10 boys in town at any given time
who could actually get a job.
That's why you keep everything on the down-low.
You don't wanna give anybody anything
that they can use against you.
I knew I was in danger and it was scary
because I wanted to be a movie star,
and I made it, and I didn't want to destroy it,
and this movie destroyed it.
And I remember thinking one day,
thank you Jesus, you gave me everything that I asked for,
every bit of it, you gave me every bit of it.
It's all here, and then the next day it all went to hell.
- The irony of Mark Patton's career is that at a time
when young gay men all over America and Europe
were coming out and feeling relieved,
and being accepted, the doors all shut again.
At some point during the beginning
of the AIDS epidemic, everything changed.
- [Cecil] By the time "Freddy's Revenge" opened,
the AIDS epidemic had consumed the nation's headlines.
Rock Hudson, the quintessential leading man,
had not only been outed as gay by the press,
but his tragic death to AIDS had
sent all of Hollywood into a panic.
- Movie star Rock Hudson, died
at his Coldwater Canyon home this morning.
His publicist said that the movie star's body
has already been cremated.
- Hudson's battle against AIDS came to an end--
- [Cecil] Gossip rags like the "National Enquirer",
had ignited a full-fledged witch hunt
to expose anyone thought to be in the closet.
It became regular, front-page news.
- There was a moment of time in the mid-70s,
and I think it may have been a combination
of the 60s culture and the rise of Disco culture,
and I saw this sort of melting pot
occur there, and everybody got along.
- [Patton] The early 80s were just amazing,
because there were no boundaries.
Cocaine wasn't addictive.
There was no HIV.
Everybody was bisexual.
So, it's like you could pretty much sleep
with anybody that you wanted to sleep with.
- There was hardly any stigma.
Yes, there was kind of an etiquette of don't ask don't tell,
but it was much like you don't talk
about politics and religion at dinner.
- We were free, I mean were living the liberation.
And then the check came.
- [Cecil] The AIDS virus is intelligent,
adaptable, and relentless.
In 1985 it was still an enigma and completely unstoppable.
Its parasitic qualities reeked havoc
on all functions of the body, and the gore and horror
it caused were worse than anything
that had ever been dreamed up on the silver screen.
It became a boogeyman for an entire generation.
While "Freddy's Revenge" showed the devastating
transformation of one teen, gay men across the world
were actually experiencing it in real life.
- At the time, I was emotionally rock-bottom.
I, it was so scary.
- HIV and AIDS was happening everywhere
and nobody knew what was happening
or who it was happening to.
- You know, there was a time when everybody
lost a lot of friends, or you walked around and it was like
zombies on the street the way that people looked.
- I know what it's like to watch zombies
walk down the street, and they're your friends.
I mean you'd have a friend who was this beautiful,
hot man and you'd run into him six months later
and he was somebody's grandpa,
and then you never saw him again,
and if you didn't see somebody for a year
you just assumed they were dead.
[dramatic hospital music]
- It just seemed like overnight everybody woke up
at the same time and everyone became paranoid.
- It was the worst years of my life, personally,
professionally, I think I was having a nervous breakdown,
didn't even know it, just because I was ill-equipped
for the enormity of what was being thrown at me.
- Because it just got to the point
where it was just so overwhelming,
and then you fall into denial, you know.
[dramatic music]
- I was a teenager during that time and that was one
of the main reasons I didn't come out,
because it was so terrifying; there was nothing positive.
It seemed horrific to me what was going on, what was being
said on TV, when you know that who you are isn't that.
- Gays are being called a dangerous and violent group
that corrupts children and infects the community with AIDS.
- You hear that it's vile.
You hear that they are doing despicable thing.
- Well, what they're doing is abnormal in the sense
that they were, they're most of these people
that they're not fit, they're not human beings.
They have emotional problems.
- There were no role models.
I mean, I was raised in a religious background, so,
on top of that everything that I heard,
it was incongruent with who I knew I was.
- Homosexuality is a sin.
- God's plan for man was
Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.
- The constant dynamic of being beaten down verbally,
image wise, TV, it was just terrible.
And then all these deaths, and I kept thinking,
you know, if I start having sex, I start having gay sex,
I'm gonna get AIDS, I'm gonna die.
- If these fags don't kill us all with AIDS
they'll bankrupt us all, but before that happens
God almighty will visit this country with judgment.
- I decided to hide it and just pretend
that basically I was straight.
I made myself believe it.
It was a struggle and it was a struggle
I almost didn't make it out of.
I almost ended up killing myself, so...
- People did go back into the closet in great numbers.
Big stars, actors that I know, that were being very free
and liberated and all of a sudden, they sort of had
to return to masquerading as a leading man.
- Like, the public always came, especially with Tim.
We had dogs.
He had a photo shoot
and they were shooting in the house.
I got really mad because I didn't think it was fair.
I had to leave the house of course, and it no longer
became my house, it was his house,
and I didn't want our dogs in the picture.
Tim and I had a very tempestuous relationship.
So we would break up a lot.
The rumors spread that he had AIDS.
And Timothy did not tell me.
He was not the first person that told me.
It's a, a dear friend of mine told me
and I said "no, that Tim was not HIV positive,
that he wasn't sick", and then I called him and he was.
So, it was pretty devastating, 'cause I had talked
to Tim like, a few a hours before, right?
How do you tell somebody that you're intimate with
that you have disease that's gonna kill you
and they might've given it to you?
There's no protocol with that.
You could be judgmental and say
that you know what you do but you don't, because
the shame was so intense, and the fear was so intense.
But I never blamed him.
I never, never, I loved him, I don't blame him for anything.
So, I got a call from a guy in New York
and he said, "hi, how are you?"
It's like, I'm friend with Tim and said,
"well Tim said I should call you when I got
to New York because I don't know anybody, blah, blah, blah."
And he said that we could get dinner, and he knew enough
about us that I just assumed, right.
And I went out to dinner with this guy, and about midway
through the dinner he said, "oh my God how's Tim doing?
I'm really worried about him and blah, blah, blah."
And I didn't really reveal anything but I just revealed
enough to say, well you know he's doing as best as,
you know, we don't know what's going on.
And that guy worked for the "National Enquirer".
You know, they broke into Tim's hospital room
and they took pictures of him in bed while he was dying,
- And I remember just really in that hospital room
mustering all of my courage to just to pretend
like we were still happy friends having a wonderful time,
and as he lay there, not looking like the Tim I knew,
and then he passed away and I was not at the memorial.
[engaging dramatic music]
- Through a combination of experiences,
both professional and private, they broke me.
- Because he's in a Hollywood that is fearful
and wants everybody to butch up now,
and I think that that's what made him go a little crazy.
- [Patton] And I thought, this is fucking insane.
There were people asking me if I could live
in the closet while all these people are dying
and I'm having a nervous breakdown
over my friends and I just don't want this.
So, I guess at that moment all
of this came together and I made a choice.
- [Cecil] After walking away from his acting career,
Mark retreated from the public eye, completely.
[distorted music]
Decades later, a new generation was
taking a second look at "Freddy's Revenge".
- We're always reinventing the bogeyman.
It's constantly in flux.
In my class, we go through a lot of different
monster as, dot dot dot, monster as racial other,
monster as a different nation, a different ideology.
Nightmare On Elm Street 2 is useful to talk
about the monster as the homosexual,
a monster as queer and tapping into that paranoia.
The relationship between horror film and reality
is reciprocal; that horror films do reflect culture,
but they also give us a vocabulary
to talk about things in the real world.
Well there's three ways I think in a horror film
to think about how queerness emerges.
One, is this sort of homosexual as a threat
to others, and often the homosexual
is linked with sadism or violence in the horror film.
There's the homosexual threat to the culture,
that they represent something as foundationally antithetical
to the family, or to the future.
And then the third way is the homosexual
as the monster within, that would emerge,
and that we have to constantly repress.
- And I think for all those reasons queer theory
is intimately linked to the horror film.
- A lot of horror movies have used queerness
as something to be afraid of, and what's interesting
about "Nightmare on Elm Street, Part Two",
is it's not the killer who's necessarily queer.
It's someone, you know, dealing with themselves.
- All right guys, tell me as social historians,
you and I, how do we talk about this film?
"Nightmare on Elm Street 2" is one of those films
where you could say it's not subtext
at certain points, it's just text,
especially from a modern perspective when you're
looking back and saying of course that's a gay bar.
Of course that is anxiety about this creature coming out.
We can see Jesse reading this erotic fantasy
about a man in a diary entry.
- Under the sheets with me, tearing
at my nightgown with his steel claw.
- He has to repress his own desires in order to survive.
- I think it's interesting how you have this final boy
who's actually acting like a final girl.
- Right, do you think in a weird way,
given what we know about the final girl,
who tends to be more masculine than her female counterparts,
does that make sense that he would be
kind of to this side of feminine?
- There is nothing to figure out.
- It may not even be about sexuality.
- I wanna help you.
It actually could just be about gender first,
and you change that up--
- I'm not gonna let anything happen to you.
- [Jesse] Automatically shifts the dynamic of the film.
- You know the mainstream public, I don't think
that people thought, oh this sucks because it's gay.
I think they weren't ready for a male scream queen.
They couldn't articulate it.
- I think one of the problems with having a final boy
is that the final girl has to go through this transition
from being a victim to an agent,
and sort of taking up the phallus and turning the tables.
I think in our culture, we can't accept that
a boy will be at any point unphallusized,
and then have to go through this sort
of coming-to-age to gain power.
- I'm scared.
- Jesse, who is doing this to you?
- Fred Kreuger.
He's inside me and he wants to take me again.
- I think it was different, it was breaking ground
for that kind of horror film to introduce a man in that way.
[lightning crackles]
[engaging dramatic music]
[metal clinks]
- This is a virgin, and it's a family altar.
There's all kinds of prayers in there.
It's a gift.
It's beautiful though, isn't it?
And it would make a nice disco lamp.
That's my dog and that's me.
This is me jumping out of the airplane.
This is how I arrived in Vallarta.
I mean you can tell my head was a little confused.
Well I've had many dark nights of the soul in this house.
I became very sick with HIV.
I had full-blown AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis,
I had like everything that you could
possibly have all at the same time.
I was bed-bound for a year and a half.
I was struck dead, but I was also lucky
because I got sick when the cocktail came out,
but unfortunately I had tuberculosis,
and tuberculosis medicines, you have
to be treated for tuberculosis for a year,
and they're not compatible with HIV cocktail.
So, I had to take all of the old line therapy.
I had AZT, DDI, D14, neuropathy,
and the AZT almost killed me the first year.
But this is what happened to me after I got here.
It's like I had a spiritual breakthrough, and this is me.
I always draw me as a deer, and it was me trying
to get away, but every time I would leave
I would fall into a depression that I'd have to come back.
[enterprising music]
I knew that I wanted to move down here,
but I also knew that I couldn't not work.
So I decided to open a store here.
Yes, we're very famous in Puerto Vallarta.
They call us the Prada of Puerto Vallarta.
When I came down here, nobody knew I was an actor.
I mean I didn't want really anybody to know.
Then, "Never Sleep Again" happened and I was interviewed,
and suddenly I was out of the closet, and that's really
when Hector began to find out about my life as an actor too,
because he really didn't know much about it.
- And then it suddenly became people were coming
to the store and asking for my autograph.
Then, I went off on tour.
[dramatic music]
[birds chirp]
[engaging music]
- You know, I think in theaters
you can feel all kinds of creepy vibes.
They're good, but you can feel everybody's energy
in here if you're kind of sensitive that way.
There's a lot of hopes and dreams in this room.
The Supremes, actually the beautiful Mcguire Sisters.
Actually when we came in here, somebody said that it
smelled like high school, which it does,
and that's a really, really good memory for me,
because that's where I really found myself originally.
[engaging dreamy music]
- So this will be here.
- Yeah, I'm gonna give you the Ray-Bans.
And you're getting a special, they only had gold ones.
- That's okay, I'm gonna get these.
The timing of Mark coming here is
actually really awesome, because next week
Portsmouth actually celebrates its first Pride.
There are still things happening within
out community that are not being talked about.
You have this monster in the room.
When you give it a lot of power it'll become something huge.
Mark is a wonderful platform for talking
about HIV, for talking about AIDS.
- So I decided that if I was gonna do this I was gonna take
my little bit of fame and I was gonna
squeeze as much of out it as I possibly could.
I knew that this glove was really powerful.
The first year I was gonna talk about bullying,
and everybody could related to that.
The next year I talked about homophobia,
because conventions were very closeted.
I wanted to shine a light into this world
and make it save for gay horror fans to come.
I would always let all of these people
get to know me as a healthy person
and then I would tell them that I was HIV positive,
so that they could know that they had met a person
who was gay and who had HIV,
and they couldn't say they didn't know anybody.
- We've reached a point where you can actually have
a completely normal life, HIV can be completely managed.
Research has reached a point where they're comfortable
talking about the fact an undetectable person
is unable to transmit HIV, not necessarily that it's
being eradicated, but it's being stopped from progressing.
- When I was on the cover of "The Advocate",
and HIV plus magazine that went
around the world, I was thrilled.
With that glove on it went around the world.
[engaging music]
Oh, do I need that tape.
See I have the tape look, go like that.
That's amazing isn't it?
With a little bit of make up and like that from a distance.
I could like, still play a juvenile on stage.
[a BIG stage]
- Ladies and gentlemen please welcome the star
of "Nightmare on Elm Street Two, Freddy's Revenge",
Mr. Mark Patton ladies and gentleman.
[Crowd cheers]
- Bunny, you must be so excited.
- I am actually--
- 'Cause this has been your dream
the entire time we've been doing this theater.
- Well, I love a girl with a dream.
- Can you make my dream come true?
- Well, I can try.
- Will you dance for me?
- No.
[crowd cheers]
No.
- Come on Mark.
- No, I don't dance.
- Mark, you have to dance for me.
- Do you really want me to dance?
- You want him to, come on.
I will take this dance.
- I'll do it with you.
[energizing music]
- This has turned out to be a lot
of peoples favorite part of this movie,
especially straight guys really love this.
"Risky Business" had just come out and everybody
wanted me to be Tom Cruise, and I just wasn't.
[engaging music]
♪ Let me hear you when you call my name ♪
♪ Til I finally believe you ♪
♪ I only want, I only want to please you ♪
[pulsating music]
- If I knew then what I know now, well I would dance more
like Crispin Glover, electroshock therapy, but you know
I guess it's perfect, 'cause everybody loves it.
[pulsating music]
♪ I would follow you into the night ♪
♪ I wanna hear you when you call my name ♪
♪ Til I finally believe you ♪
♪ I only want, I only want to please you ♪
[crowd cheers]
[Pop]
[energetic music]
- [Cecil] After traveling the horror circuit
for the past year, Mark heads
to Fort Lauderdale for the grand finale.
The first ever "Freddy's Revenge" reunion.
- Welcome to Shock Pop
- It's just a big, it's a circus, it's a big circus.
I feel really, totally weird, I don't know why.
I feel very strange right now.
But like some of these people I haven't
seen in like a really long time, which is really weird.
[mixed greetings]
Good to see you.
Well none of us have changed.
We're all exactly the same.
- We all got pickled.
[engaging music]
[dramatic music]
You know Mr. Clu.
It's Mark, how are you?
- Oh how are you>
She said you were down here.
I want that room unpacked by tonight, young man.
- Okay dad, I promise.
See he's got the brains and I, of course, have the body.
And this is Ms. Joanne Willette.
She is the number one bitch on the--
- I am the best bitch.
- [Patton] She is the best bitch--
- In real life, too.
[dramatic music]
- You okay?
- Yeah, I'm fine.
- Wow, how are you?
- [Patton] Good.
- It's so great to see you.
- It's so great to see you too, you haven't changed a bit.
- You look pretty much the same.
- [Patton] Yeah we look all the same people.
- [Sholder] You have a little more mileage on you.
- Yeah.
There has never been "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2" reunion.
I have only spoken on stage with Robert one time
in my life and it was by accident.
When we're busy we don't get a lot
of time to talk to each other.
You're signing autographs the entire time.
It's like we don't have time to sit down and rumble.
You know, we don't have the time
to sit down and work things out.
[engaging music]
- [Announcer] You guys ready?
Are you guys ready?
They said, yes.
All right, let's start off with,
let's bring out the first off the director
of "Nightmare on Elm Street, Part Two, Freddy's Revenge",
let's hear it for Jack Sholder.
[crowd cheers]
The star, the scream queen of this film,
Mr. Mark Patton, Jesse Walsh.
[crowd cheers]
- At a Q&A for Nightmare Two, I swear to God seven out
of 10 times the first question is,
"did you know that this was a gay undertone film?"
And I usually just kind of break out with, but I didn't
mm-hmm, and I just try to have some fun with it.
- Hey, I have a question for Mark.
I read that you had a lot of problems with homophobia
in Hollywood, and I just wanted to know
if there was any pressure to act straight otherwise?
- For me it was terrifying.
I wasn't an out, gay actor.
There wasn't any such thing as an out, gay actor then.
In 1985, Hollywood was very homophobic and very AIDS-phobic,
and when you signed a contract for a television series,
they gave you a blood test,
so if you were gay you were hiding.
[dramatic music]
- [Cecil] After the panel discussion,
Mark and the cast returned to their hotel to catch up.
- When they talk about the homosexuality of the film
the end of the sentence always is, Mark Patton,
an out, gay actor in Hollywood.
I was not an out, gay actor in Hollywood in 1985.
I was a 25-year-old young man working
very hard to have a career.
I'm now a 50-year-old man who's out
and I'm a gay activist, it's a big difference.
- This isn't about anybody's sexuality at all.
Through the subtext and the questions, and some of the stuff
that happened and evolved, you know, it was Jack,
and Michael, and Joel that I think realized that,
or maybe even sensed it, I'm not sure.
Jack, you'd know better than I.
- Well, I think a lot of this has
to do with the lens that you look at it.
I think there was kind of a perfect storm.
- I do too.
'Cause look, I was the director--
- I agree.
- I was the director and I think about all this stuff,
and I think about story, and I had no fucking idea.
- Right.
- That there was this subtext,
but there were lots and lots of things.
- [Patton] You filmed in one
of the biggest gay bars in Los Angeles.
- Oh, was that a gay bar?
- Yeah, oh my God yes.
- It was called "Toilet Bar."
- Yes.
- Jack, please don't play dumb.
- [Patton] It's the--
- These guys didn't know.
- They didn't know.
They person that knew--
I KNEW ON MY AUDITION!
[mixed speaking over arguments advance]
- No, I went and I scouted the bar,
because I wasn't thinking about these things.
[mixed arguments]
- [Rick] You didn't think about it though?
- And now that you mention it, I do remember,
I went and I scouted the bar when it was closed.
- That's right.
- I didn't see a whole bunch of gay guys.
- This was written not as a gay bar,
it was written as a transvestite bar.
- That's right.
- In the script, and they actually threw
kind of odd looking women in.
- So, while we were shooting the movie you always
seemed like you were slightly out of sorts.
That's kind of my recollection.
- You mean as far as--
- [Sholder] You were just a little, cranky.
Cranky's not the right word.
I guess, slightly out of sorts.
You just didn't seem happy.
- I was very tired.
I was feeling a lot of pressure.
It gets around to the homosexual stuff all the time,
but here I was in this movie.
I was gay, my lover was sick, I wake up in the middle
of the first movie that I'm the lead actor in,
and realize that there's a gay subtext in it,
and my agents are waiting to see if I can play straight.
My agents went to watch the movie and they were like,
yeah you can carry a movie but we're gonna have to make
you a character actor because you can't play straight.
And the minute I heard that, I heard everyone
that had ever called me a faggot in my life,
at the top of my lungs, and I was like, I can't do this.
- You know, I sensed that there was a resentment
that was built from you, and I wanna ask you--
- What made me so mad?
Where the resentment came from?
- Yeah, what pissed you off?
- Everything that you see me doing in
"Nightmare on Elm Street" is written in the script.
David, when he was asked over the course of all these years,
did you write this movie as a gay movie, he said, no.
David went out of his way to say that it was me.
Do you know what I mean?
He would say, no, I didn't do this.
Mark, the actor did this.
- Okay, but he was saying that you did what?
- That I had made the movie gay.
I got a stick up my ass against David
when I read this stuff because I thought,
you know what, this is seriously cruel stuff.
[energetic horror music]
- [Cecil] After an eye-opening chat
around the fire, Jack was waiting for Mark
at the convention the next morning.
- Well, I mean this is stuff that I probably would have
said last night if it occurred to me.
There's one aspect of this that I've gotten an insight from,
because I didn't really know who the hell you were.
At call time I saw you and at wrap I said goodbye,
that was it, but it's been a really good
experience for me to get to know you.
Your life I think, there will always be a level of turmoil,
because you have some conflict in your life--
- [Patton] But we all do.
- Yeah, but I think you may have a little more than others,
and I'm sure when you're referring to the dark side
that there's a lot of hate mail and a lot of bad stuff
that would be very hard for anyone to live with,
which is part of celebrity.
It's just, it struck me last night that you were getting
a little too wrapped up in the David thing,
and your whole thing about that just struck me as odd.
- Odd in what way?
- The movie was 30 years ago,
and you're still pissed off at Dave Chaskin.
You had a goal in your life which was to be a movie star
and you sort of got there, and then you chose to not,
and so, you know why, and there's gotta be a reason,
and I think you put a lot of stuff on David.
I mean, the way it came out maybe wasn't that good.
But it's not about you.
It's not about you at all and what I wanted to say is
I think it's time that you just let it go.
It's over, it's done, and I think, that's
the perspective that I wanted to give you.
- I don't know anything about David.
The point is he didn't admit his intention
back when it wasn't acceptable to be gay,
then when people started to notice his subtext
he denied it, and instead he pointed the finger at me.
Now that it's becoming an interesting thing,
he's owning it, he wants to take credit for it.
Now everybody's having a great time with this.
Meanwhile, I'm being called fag a 100 times a day.
David didn't come to this convention because of me.
The reason he's not here is because
he doesn't wanna have this conversation.
This is not all about David and it never has been
all about David, 'cause it really is about me,
and it's about people like me.
I talk to young people and say look, you're standing
on the shoulders of a lot of different people.
Know your history.
Don't forget your history.
I'm just reminding the generation that's here
that this is what happened in 1985.
- One of the first things that like really
offered escape for me was horror movies,
and I don't really know why but for me,
and I think part of it was being a sissy,
and getting bullied, there was sort of this otherness
in certain horror movies that identified with.
I think one of the best things about this movie
is that I think a lot of people in this room,
it was kind of our first gay movie,
but we didn't know it at the time.
- For many queer people this was probably
their first look inside of a gay bar,
their first look at an S&M culture.
- Coach Schneider in the shower, you know strapped up,
you know, whipped with a towel,
that was some beginnings for a lot of us.
- You know we were used to so much female nudity
in horror movies or even kind of any movies.
- Any movies.
- Adult comedies at the time, that to actually see
nude men as a gay teenager, it was
like wow, that's kind of cool, you know.
- Being a kid who grew up in the 80s, like,
you know homophobia was the norm.
- I have this nightmare that I go to Hollywood
and find out that Mr. T. Is a faggot.
- Wait a minute, are you gonna tell me you're a fag,
I mean if you're gonna tell me you're a fag,
I don't think I can handle it.
- In the 80s, I mean you had kid's movies saying faggot
and fag, I mean it was just awful.
- Thor's my hero.
- Thor's a homo.
- Just answer me one question.
- Yes, you're a total fag.
- What'd you say faggot, what'd you say?
- You're a faggot Blaine.
- [Girl] Fag!
[group jeers and laughs]
- Homosexuality was treated like the plague,
like, you were like a vampire so stay away from me.
- Fags in the shower, fags in the shower,
fag alert, fag alert, fag alert everyone.
- And that's the comedy, that's the joke [drum tap]
- Nobody was making films really for minority audiences
at the time, and this is the thing about queer spectators.
I think all of us, we learned to be scavengers.
The fact that this film has become
a kind of cult object is fascinating.
Part of the hallmark of queer viewing is that maybe
we will forget about the ending of the film and just enjoy
the section in which the queer monster run amok.
- "Nightmare on Elm Street 2" was on of the first films
I saw that I thought was relatable to me.
It made me feel a little less alone.
I could relate to Jesse.
- And that was the first time that I saw
that the hero of the movie be a sissy boy, a Nancy boy.
- I mean, Mark Patton was probably my first crush.
He was my first, like boyfriend.
- And he was facing problems that
nobody else around him could understand, and somehow
he showed some strength dealing with those problems,
so he's somehow kind of a hero to me.
- Having any secret, being gay, transgender,
any sort of internal conflict can be so real and so violent,
- And that's part of the genius about it.
I mean whether it was intentional or not, it works.
- You know, I was sort of adverse to gay stuff growing up,
and this was a movie that sort of snuck in under the radar,
and then really enjoying it on that level,
and coming out myself shortly afterwards.
You know, this was an important movie to me.
- It's great that it's in an iconic franchise
that another 10-year-old somewhere, somehow can find,
and it will have the same effect on them,
that they might not be able to see the gay movies,
or the gay TV shows, but parents
might let a Freddy movie fall through the cracks.
- You know, I think one of the reasons so many young queers
identify with those scream queens of final girls
is because they fought back against the bully,
and that was what we were dealing with everyday in school.
- Even at 10, I was kinda like I wanna be
in one of those movies but I wanna be her.
I wanna be the one that kicks Freddy's butt at the end,
and they were always the strongest ones.
You know, they were great to look up to at the time.
- I was bullied, and to me, Nightmare
was about beating your bullies.
- I mean right away, off the bat, Freddy driving the bus,
Freddy's the biggest bully in the world, right?
- How do you beat a bully?
You show you're not afraid of 'em anymore
and that's what Nancy does to take away Freddy's power.
- You have to face that monster head on,
and if you don't face that monster head on,
then how are you ever gonna make a difference in this world?
[engaging dramatic music]
- Well, we're going to see David Chaskin.
This is the one moment that I never really expected.
I never thought David would sit down for this.
I just don't really want a generic apology.
I want him to really understand what he actually has done.
I'm hoping for like a really nice, sort of atonement,
and amends, and like we can hug each other
and walk way from the whole thing,
and he doesn't have to get tarred and feathered.
But just in case, I do have a cauldron in my bag with me.
[engaging dramatic music]
- I'm trying to put the times in perspective here.
Most people at the time, it was just a horror movie
and I think what you first saw were a lot of people
that just said, I don't like it.
I love the idea that people are rediscovering it,
and saying, you know there's some stuff here.
- Well, I find it really interesting
that over the course of 30 years you're denying this.
- That I denied--
- That you had written this as a gay movie.
You would say, well it was subtext.
- [David] Yeah.
- But at first you denied any subtext
and then you decided to get out from underneath it,
and you took the attention off yourself
and you placed it on somebody else.
Everybody knew that it was a gay movie.
I mean, it had been discussed in the press, quite a bit.
- Oh, I gave an interview five years ago
where I admitted it, it was to a website, but--
- Yeah, I actually have a couple of your interviews
that like when you ask me--
- This is where I get haunted--
- But yeah, it is haunting.
There's a quote that you have and I'm just going
to sort of give it to you off the cuff.
You didn't write the movie as a homoerotic movie,
you wrote it as a homophobic movie, the type of movie
that they should show at a conversion camp,
that the love a good woman can make any gay man straight.
- Well that was a joke--
- And well, I'm just telling you what it was.
This is what is says, okay.
At the end of this particular article
you say it was supposed to be subtext,
but then casting ruined that.
You're talking about me.
I have issues with a lot of this stuff
because I was only doing what I was told to do.
- It was a funky chicken number if I remember.
- Actually it says that I close
the drawer with my ass in the script, and--
- But you also have pencils sticked up your nose.
That was in it--
- Right, there is somebody that all that stuff got thrown
on, and the person that it got thrown on was me.
- I do remember this, very, very specifically.
I remember that you didn't wanna do that scene
the way it was with the pencils in your nose
and all that other stuff,
so Jack said, "well what do you wanna do,"
and you said, "I can dance."
- What I recall about that dance scene,
at the end of that dance scene was people applauding.
Nobody directed me and pulled
me over and said this doesn't work.
It's the same way with this scream.
You know, nobody ever pulled me aside and said,
you know what I don't think this scream is such a good idea.
- Wasn't it Jack's job?
- It was Jack's job, yeah.
- See, I never wrote he screams like woman.
You know what I mean?
- You know, when I heard you to begin to talk about
the subtext, your subtext inside of the film, the first
question that I wanted to ask you was why?
Because I didn't understand it at all.
It was a very dangerous move to pull.
- First of all, you have to understand
the context of the times, I was in New York,
starting in 1978, I had never met
in my life an out of the closet gay.
Coming out in the 80s was a scary thing, I'm sure.
It's gotta be because nobody, not only do you have
to deal with your parents, you gotta deal
with your straight friends, and it just
wasn't something that people talked about.
It just seemed like a very visceral, animal thing
that's not controllable and that would infiltrate
somebody's mind, and it's just another thing to worry about.
Because of what was happening, because of the AIDS thing,
and the AIDS thing made it even worse.
I mean what if I do this, and what if I get AIDS,
and it just seemed like it would add to the horror
in a sense, maybe it was a little exploitative,
but you know, that's what movies do, they manipulate people.
And that's why I wanted to make it as subtle as possible.
I mean subtext's supposed to be subtext.
It's supposed to stay down there and I think it did
until people started really analyzing stuff.
I don't know if it's something that you feel
that I shouldn't have done, I don't know.
I'm not gonna say I haven't made mistakes.
I'm not gonna say I haven't said things that I've regretted.
- You did.
- But I hope you can forgive me
for any perceived or, it wasn't intentional.
Certainly, I don't want to promote homophobia
but I do want to point it out.
- Right, first of all I wanna say thank you,
and that was the only thing I wanted
from this entire experience, what you just did.
I wanted somebody to say that if I was
hurt by it that they were sorry.
You know, and you're the only person who has done that.
I don't want people to think you're homophobic
because I think that would make me a bully.
My intention is not to harm you in any way.
- I know and I'm really glad we're able to do this.
I wish we could've done it in Florida.
- It really meant the world to me.
I don't really think it would've been possible
in Florida to be honest with you.
- Really?
- No, I think it probably need to happen like this,
you know, just me and you, because ultimately in the end
this really is all about me and you.
You know, you wrote it and I played it.
I got what I wanted out of this ultimately, you know,
which was I got an apology from David Chaskin.
When I got to the part where it became very vulnerable
for me, he sat there and listened,
and he didn't try to interrupt me,
and talk me out of what I was saying.
I said things to him that I don't think
that I had been able to articulate in my mind,
but I just wanted one of them to say there were sorry.
I think that's a great thing about apologizing,
and doing, and investigating, and talking to people
is that really is where the healing comes.
[engaging music]
The reason that I began this process, this whole process,
really, I was angry at David, I did blame David.
I felt like he was responsible for,
I guess I made him responsible for a lot
of things that he wasn't responsible for.
He's not responsible for AIDS.
He's not responsible for homophobia in Hollywood.
He's not responsible for 14-year-old boys
sitting in the dark, calling people faggots.
David's not responsible for that.
But I did bring all of that energy
and he became my focal point.
I did hang the blame on him
and I'm certainly glad now that I don't.
[engaging music]
I've had a great amount of healing I think around this.
Like, I've let go of a lot of things.
But, I also have realized what I gave up
in this world, and I gave up a lot.
I did ask God, as I understood God, I did say why me?
Why did this happen to me?
I heard the voice of my own spirit or my own God
saying to me, look, I made you famous
and then I made you not famous.
I let you get sick and I let you do it in private
because you could've never done it in public.
You could never handle AIDS in public.
It would have been way too humiliating for you.
If I would've started taking the medicine
earlier the medicine would've killed me, right.
And then, as soon as you got well, sitting on a dirt road
in Mexico, I made you famous again,
and I gave you a rock to stand on and a story to tell.
So, you get on the rock and you tell
the story and that's what your job is.
My generation's gone.
I have no friends my age.
I want people to know their history.
I want to them at least hear from somebody that the way
the world is now, it wasn't this way five minutes ago.
[whistles blow]
They need to know what happened, and we need to keep
telling them, because if we don't keep telling them
there are a whole lot of people
that would like to put them back in a box,
and put them back in their place where they belong.
[dramatic music]
The world has changed since 1985,
and you know why the world has changed?
It's changed because of people like me, who stand up
and tell their story, and say look, this is what happened
to me, and I will be God damned
if I'll let it happen to another person.
[inspiring music]
This being the gay film, at Halloween,
I'm always gonna make the scream queen list.
I'm, and do I like that?
Do I like being identified forever and ever
as a scream queen, as a gay movie, that's mine,
that's it, that's my title, that's who I am.
Like the worst thing that you can
say to me is I'm a girl, you scream like a girl.
And I always say, what's so bad about screaming
like a girl, it made me rich and famous.
I used to say I take the bricks that people throw
at me and I build a firm foundation with them,
and that's what I've done with "Nightmare on Elm Street".
Now, like over the course of the last five years,
it's like really, like you've seen what's happened.
Now you type in, Mark Patton gay, and it's like
Mark Patton is a social activist who is a horror,
like a leader in the horror community
and all this kind of stuff, and it's all nice,
and the creepy stuff is buried way down.
It doesn't lead with the creepy stuff.
You have to start digging for the creepy stuff.
- Yeah, if you don't like the dialogue, change it.
- I changed the conversation on "Nightmare on Elm Street",
and I wanted to save Jesse and I saved him.
So I have to proud of it because it's my baby,
and right now he's the favorite one,
and so, of course I'm proud of it.
You know, this is my creation.
[crowd cheers]
[man screams]
[crowd whistles and cheers]
- When "A Nightmare on Elm Street", the first one came out
and a lot of the world has Heather, but to all
of the gay fans of horror, we have Jesse.
[crowd cheers]
- All of these other people can say whatever they want to,
this is about those boys who are sitting in a room,
they looked up at the screen and they saw themselves.
[engaging music]
This is my testimony that you can live through
it all and you can watch it happen, and they can
throw rocks at you til the cows come home
and you can still come out of it a winner.
[energetic horror music]
[enterprising music]ú
♪ Don't lie ♪
♪ Don't cry ♪
♪ Don't try ♪
♪ No need to have ♪
♪ Don't hide ♪
♪ Don't thrive ♪
♪ Don't choose ♪
♪ No need to have ♪
♪ Reactions of your own ♪
♪ There's something wrong with me ♪
♪ And there's nothing wrong with me ♪
♪ Don't read ♪
♪ Don't learn ♪
♪ Don't yearn ♪
♪ Just live through me ♪
♪ Don't burn ♪
♪ Don't fade ♪
♪ Don't fall ♪
♪ Just live through me ♪
♪ That's all you ever know ♪
♪ All of my problems were just a problem of geography ♪
♪ Don't think, don't blink, don't sink ♪
♪ Just waste, just pace, just case ♪
♪ Just bleed for me ♪
♪ I'm still what you want ♪
♪ Nothing of your own ♪
♪ And if you don't face the monster head on ♪
♪ Then how are you ever gonna ♪
♪ Make a difference in this world ♪
- [Female] There's more to it than just well,
call it premonition, or women's intuition
if you like, but I'm afraid.
- [Male] Of what?
- [Female] Afraid I'm going to lose you.
- [Male] To a dream?
- [Female] To a dream that might be real.
- [Male] It could all be real for a little while.
[engaging music]
- [Female] All the ways that I love you Tony.
- [Male] Take care of yourself Val, I'll see you soon.
[captivating music]
- [Female] I'm afraid.
- [Man] Of what?
- [Female] I'm afraid I'm going to lose you.
- [Male] To a dream?
- [Female] To a dream that might be real.