(Credits: TCM)
If a thousand people were asked to describe Tom Hanks in one word, you can guarantee that not a single one of them would say ‘divisive.’ Call the Forrest Gump star what you will, but polarising isn’t one of them. If you were mean-spirited, you might call him bland, predictable, or, as the kids say, ‘basic,’ but it’s hard to come up with a truly negative descriptor. He is universally beloved, a man who can bring down your blood pressure purely through the sound of his voice.
Lest you accuse him of playing it safe his whole career, though, it’s worth pointing to a role he took in the 1990s that was so divisive that he received blowback from all sides. Philadelphia was a 1993 legal drama directed by Jonathan Demme that followed a young lawyer (Hanks) who is fired from his job after being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Denzel Washington plays a homophobic attorney who only agrees to represent him in court because he can’t afford to turn him down.
Released in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, Philadelphia was controversial on every level. Homophobia was rampant, and any film that presented a sympathetic gay man as a protagonist was bound to receive pushback. However, the bulk of the criticism came from the queer community, which blasted the film for glossing over the realities of living with AIDS and skipping over the complete lack of action on the part of the government. There was also the fact that Hanks was a straight actor playing a gay character.
Larry Kramer, a prominent activist in the movement who was dying of AIDS at the time, called the film “heartbreakingly mediocre,” saying that its failure to accurately portray the reality of the epidemic and the bigotry faced by gay men was worse than not telling the story at all. For many, Philadelphia painted a disappointingly saccharine picture of a much darker truth. It also portrayed Hanks as being in a seemingly asexual relationship with his male partner and made a simplistic homophobe-to-ally story arc for Washington’s character.
That said, it was the first movie from a major studio to focus on the AIDS crisis, and as such, was revolutionary in its own way. Hanks’s friend Mary Beidler Gearen remembered that he faced personal backlash. “I know when he did Philadelphia, he got hate mail,” she said, adding, “We have to be really protective of him.” Hanks took the responsibility seriously, even if, from a 2020s perspective, it’s clear that the role should at least have been played by a gay actor.
When he accepted the Oscar for his performance in the film, he made sure to make the moment count, calling out his high school drama teacher, Rawley Farnsworth and his classmate, John Gilkerson. “I mention their names because they are two of the finest gay Americans, two wonderful men that I had the good fortune to be associated with, to fall under their inspiration at such a young age,” he said, revealing that Gilkerson had died of AIDS in 1989. “The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels,” he concluded.
Stephen Spielberg, who was in the audience that night, said later that Hanks’s speech did more to spread awareness about the horror of the AIDS epidemic than the film had.
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