THE discovery that Rock Hudson, one of the most internationally famous and beloved male stars of Hollywood in its heyday of the 1950s and 60s, was ‘gay’ during most of his life, has nothing whatsoever to do with the sustained beauty and human values of his films. Hudson’s revelation of his homosexuality and his death of AIDS does not, and cannot negatively affect the magnificent achievement of his film roles and film career. Perhaps only idiotic men and inhumane film viewers would decide that Hudson’s films are about ‘gay’ values, and are therefore for similar people upon realizing the truth of his personality.
The brilliance of Hudson as an actor is that he was exactly that; acting out values that heterosexual men, or all men should heed, or at least learn from. We cannot decide that because of our knowledge of Hudson’s sexual orientation, all his roles which portray him as otherwise, as a heterosexual man, a lover of women, a married man etc, are really worthless because they are a fiction and a fraud, offering no genuine values which genuine heterosexual men should receive or emulate. I say this as a sustained heterosexual male who is, and has always been a confirmed fan of Rock Hudson, ever since I first saw his early films, which were Westerns, as a boy.

Lost film values
It should be apparent by now that the drastic loss of public cinemas, along with the prevalence of rerun films of past decades, especially in many post-colonial nations, has blocked the once vital public flow of the best classic film culture, when cinemas were secluded structures where the outer world was locked out, and what was happening on the big-screen became the object of our focused attention.
The success of a civilized social lifestyle on a mass scale in Western Europe today is related to the preventative acceptance and serious upkeep of the best values of Man affecting the masses via the recycled transmission of countless films like Hudson’s and others, which maintain their social impact.
Though the majority of these films are on DVD, or Internet download, the fact that now they have to be personally sought out, whereas before they were gigantically given in a most exciting and engaging way via fabulous posters (far better than today’s), and the replay of features that were far from recent, but excellent, meant that most of the best idealistic values of Man, which Classic Hollywood built its fame on, flowed into the mentality of everyday men and women who were not so asinine as to be interested in  colour films, or recent films alone.
The fine moral and humane values of Rock Hudson’s film roles flowed into the mentality of ordinary men and women via cinemas without them having to seek them out, often with little information, on today’s haphazard TV time slots of miscellaneous films simply listed as ‘MOVIE’.
The present rise of aggressive and crude male behaviour, brutal anti-female and domestic violence, political irrationality, delinquent nihilism etc, particularly in certain post-colonial nations of today, can be traced to the breakdown of the careful rational transmission of acted-out positive and negative behaviour and values in countless films with actors like Rock Hudson that were once publicly accessible to the masses.

The Hudson role
What specifically can we say about the Hudson role? In considering this question, I am reminded of what the structuralist critic, Roland Barthes wrote in his profound little book: ‘The Pleasure of the Text’:
“Difference is not what makes or sweetens conflicts, it is beyond and alongside conflict. Conflict is nothing but the moral state of difference: Whenever (and this is becoming frequent) conflict is not tactical (aimed at transforming a real situation), one can distinguish in it the failure to-attain-bliss, the debacle of a perversion crushed by its own code and no longer able to invent itself: Conflict is always coded, aggression is merely the most worn-out of languages.”
It seems to me that Rock Hudson’s screen roles confronted this issue of conflict in numerous instructive ways, in a variety of films that passing time has made precious. We will look at some of these films in this essay.