So, 'Steel Magnolias': A Window Into a Queer Childhood

I’ve never gone looking for a movie that represented me. I’ve never had to. As a young white man it feels like every movie is for me, if not explicitly about me. I grew up watching The Goonies and Clue on repeat, two movies helmed by groups of white men. Then, when I was a teenager I fell for psychological thrillers like The Usual Suspects, Rear Window, Primal Fear, The Game. Even now, after years of reflection and broadening my cinematic horizons, I look at my favorite film of last year - First Cow - and see myself on screen in a lead role. Cinema has always been dominated by movies targeted to audiences like me, and yet I’ve never felt like that was my life I was seeing on screen. As deep as my love runs for Clue or Primal Fear, I’m neither a board game character brought to life, nor a murderous teenage altar boy; I never watched those movies and thought to myself, “That’s my life. That’s who I am.” 

That all changed when I first watched Steel Magnolias, 30 years after its cinematic release. The 1989 Herbert Ross film is based on a play of the same name about six women in northwestern Louisiana who are bonded together as they navigate through passionless marriages, local politics, and life-altering illnesses. At the center of the film is the mother-daughter duo of M’Lynn and Shelby Eatenton (played by Sally Field and a breakout Julia Roberts). They’re surrounded by local gossip and hairdresser Truvy (Dolly Parton), her new apprentice Annelle (Daryl Hannah), and two elders: the town’s former first lady Clairee (Olympia Dukakis) and the ruthlessly snarky town curmudgeon Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine). Despite the film’s setting in a place I have little experience with, a beauty salon, in a state I’ve never visited, and at least one generation removed, Steel Magnolias brought me home to my childhood like no movie ever has.

Like those three generations of women in Chinquapin Parish, I too was raised in the suburbia of the Deep South. I didn’t grow up in a big house with a pool in the backyard and magnolia trees lining the property like the Eatenton family. I didn’t go to church every Sunday, faithfully, begrudgingly, or otherwise. There was no man around the house for the women in my life to gossip about, although my family was always a notable topic of gossip. I grew up in a lesbian household. The largest home my family ever had was the one foreclosed on during the housing crisis. We didn’t go to the nearest church, not because we weren’t spiritual, but because we weren’t welcome there. My childhood whirled with the whispers of neighbors and schoolmates who wanted to keep their distance from the “gay woman with two sons.” 

It was a very alienating childhood. But it wasn’t lonely. As a young lesbian living on the petticoats of quite queer Atlanta my mom had no trouble making friends and building relationships. I’ve probably more “aunts” than actual family members in all honesty… Aunts Jackie and Ruth, Amy, Angie, Kelly, Haley, Mel, Toni, Laura, Nancy, the list goes on and on. My younger brother and I spent the first eighteen years of our lives surrounded by lesbians. Sure, we were outcasts in our local community, but we were family to another. 

Steel Magnolias has no openly gay characters. All six of the lead women are or were married to men. But there’s an undeniable undertone in the film that resonates with the queer community, suggesting to many that Steel Magnolias is ostensibly about moms, lesbians, and the inevitable overlap. From the beginning, the men of Chinquapin Parish are shown as hapless deadbeats, the balls and chains dragging down their smarter, funnier, and more hardworking wives. “Men are the most horrible creatures, honey. They will ruin your life,” Ouiser lectures at one point, without a hint of irony or jest. These are women who, at best, credit their husbands nothing more than a headache, and, at worst, disparage their very existence.

The relationships between men and women in Steel Magnolias are as superficial as they are incidental. There may have been love there once, but now the marriages are products of pure inertia. Truvy financially supports her husband Spud (Sam Shepard); M’Lynn shrugs off Drum Eatenton (Tom Skerritt) at every turn; Annelle’s first husband is an off-screen criminal who abandoned her and her new husband, Sammy (Kevin J. O’Connor) is nothing more than a wet rag; and Ousier and Clairee have nothing nice to say of their long lost husbands. The only character who seems even remotely interested in her bond with a man is Shelby Eatenton, who spends the better part of her wedding day and subsequent marriage convincing the women around her that her groom, Jackson (Dylan McDermott), is actually a good man.

The real chemistry in Steel Magnolias is not between the married couples, but between the women. There may be no more believable mother-daughter coupling in film history than M’Lynn and Shelby Eatenton. In an unnerving scene early in the film when Shelby, a diabetic, begins to have a hypoglycemic attack, the women, led by her mother M’Lynn, gather around her and steady her body. They protect Shelby, feeding her orange juice and candy, despite her protests. It is an emotionally overwhelming scene, but one that never feels overacted because of the calm and anchored performance of Sally Field. Meanwhile, Truvy gives Annelle her first hairdressing job, and takes her under her financial wing. Even when their personalities clash later in the film, Truvy stands by Annelle, bringing her along for the ups and the downs that come with mixing personal life with business.

But the real star of Steel Magnolias isn’t the pairing of Truvy and Annelle, or even M’Lynn and Shelby; it’s the relationship between Clairee and Ouiser. Olympia Dukakis and Shirley McLaine, the two veteran screen presences in the cast, have a chemistry that’s so palpable, it’s thicker than the Louisiana humidity. Steel Magnolias has long been a wink and a nod among the LGBTQ+ community for the seemingly queer relationship between Clairee and Ouiser, two older widows who become inseparable as the film moves on. By the end of the film, it’s taken for granted that they are essentially a couple. “Ouiser could never stay mad at me,” Clairee jokes in one of the last scenes, “She worships the quicksand I walk on.” Ouiser, always one in a bad mood, rolls her eyes at the claim, but when the pair go off, they do so arm in arm. 

While that may seem like a punchline to most, it’s the moments like that when Steel Magnolias teleports me home. There’s nothing explicitly romantic between Clairee and Ouiser, but there doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing explicitly romantic about most lesbian relationships, but there is a fluidity of intimacy between lesbians that blurs the line between friendship and romance. Intimate friendships, for lack of a better term, were an underlying constant in my childhood. I grew up learning the language of lesbians - a flirtatious banter of inside jokes and shared experiences - the kind of dialogue strewn throughout Steel Magnolias. To be honest, everything I learned about talking to women I learned from these women. To see that kind of intimacy between Southern women be the very bedrock of this film spoke to me in a way that few other pieces of art ever have.

Of course, Steel Magnolias isn’t all comedy. It is definitionally a dramedy, and the drama is heaped on in the third act. A few months after her wedding, Shelby becomes pregnant, and despite medical advice to the contrary, she decides to continue her pregnancy. The next summer, Shelby gives birth to a beautiful boy, baby Jack, and despite her condition, she remains relatively healthy. For a time. However, within a year of Jack’s birth, Shelby is in need of a kidney transplant, which her mother M’Lynn readily provides. Though the procedure is initially a success, a few months later Shelby is on the verge of death, deep in a comatose state. Ultimately, after spending weeks by her side in the hospital, M’Lynn makes the heartbreaking decision to remove her daughter from life support.

When the women, now five, reunite for Shelby’s funeral, an ideological reckoning surfaces. M’Lynn, in a state of profound grief, is confronted by Annelle about Shelby’s passing. Annelle, now an evangelical Christian, tells her that “Shelby is in a better place. She’s with her King.” M’Lynn, like the other women of the group, is religiously ambivalent, and snaps at Annelle. She doesn’t want Shelby to be with “her King,” she wants her to be with her, right here on Earth. In one of the most powerful performances of her career, Sally Field breaks down in rage, frustration, desperation, and sorrow. Her compatriots simply stand there, unwavering beacons of support, their strength compensating for M’Lynn’s vulnerability.  I, like the majority of audiences I suspect, succumb to this tear-jerking scene every time. Once again, I am transported to my childhood.

A few months before my tenth birthday, my mother collapsed while on a business trip to Chicago. She went downstairs to pick up Chinese food and blacked out on the way back up. Nobody knew at the time, but my young mother, just 33, had bilateral pulmonary embolisms cutting off her oxygen. 

I found out that she was in the hospital from my stepmother. My very first thought was, “Is she having a baby?” Obviously, at the time I had almost no understanding of sex, pregnancy, or childbirth, and yet that thought has always stuck with me. I thought I was being given good news. Instead, I was met with dismissive explanations and vague promises that didn’t seem so promising. “Your mom can’t come home right now, but everything will be okay. Everything will be okay.”

I still don’t completely understand what happened to my mom on that business trip to Chicago. What I do know is that when she finally recovered, the doctors told her that she shouldn’t have survived. I do know that as my mother was fighting for life in the hospital, her own mother sat by her side, just as M’Lynn did for Shelby. While my family didn’t suffer the same loss as baby Jack’s, I did find strength and comfort in my tribe of aunts. I do know how fortunate I was. 

That grief and fear and sadness, all of it, bubbles up when I watch Steel Magnolias; because, while my head knows Sally Field is merely performing, my body doesn’t. The tears come naturally as I feel the heartbreak of imagined loss. Beyond the obvious devastation that my mother’s loss would be, my vulnerability gapes wide as I imagine the loss of my tribe, because it’s those women who nurtured me and made me who I am. It’s those women that have taught me what unconditional love is. 

Steel Magnolias ends where it begins, an Easter Day celebration. Baby Jack bounces on the knee of his great Aunt Clairee, as she tells him tales of the evil witch Ouiser. Truvy helps an exceptionally pregnant Annelle to a picnic blanket. M’Lynn directs her clumsy husband and two rambunctious teenage boys as they head the festivities. It is the happy ending to an unhappy story. 

And while I see my own life reflected back at me every time I sit down to have my heart broken by Steel Magnolias, I’m comforted by the knowledge that that isn’t my ending. I am not baby Jack. I didn’t lose my mom. I didn’t lose my grandmother. I didn’t lose my aunts. I am my own person. Steel Magnolias, a movie made by my grandmother’s generation for my mother’s generation, has been passed on to me, not as a mirror, but as a window into this intimate community of steel magnolias, a reminder of the women that raised me.