Song of the Loon (1970) Online

This film is available. I got a copy and enjoyed it. I suggest you read the book (it is available again)and then watch the movie. Some of the actions in the movie are explained in the book so it makes better sense. If you watch this movie understanding when it was made and the attitude toward gay books and movies, it is amazing it was made at all. The story tells of love and learning between several men and shows the problems the characters had in the story still exist today. The acting is a little stilted and the filming was not great; however, it is a classic which will go down in movie history as ground breaking. I hope you can get a copy to watch.

Filmed in 1970 from Richard AMORY's 1966 pulp novel of the same title, it is the story of a young man searching for love and happiness in the American West of the 1870's, coming to accept his homosexuality and through that self-acceptance becoming the man he was born to be.

Thirty years on it is painfully obvious that the Native Americans are played by European-Americans with bad make-up and for the more mature actors, gym-buffed bodies. The scenery is real, however, and the acting, if not up to "A" standards is no worse than the acting in most "B" pictures. However, whatever its faults, this film tells it's story with an honesty not found in American films until the late 1980's. I strongly recommend it for students of Gay Studies.

There is full-frontal male nudity and the film is erotic. It is not, however, pornographic. (It does not have an all-male cast.) While not rated by the MPAA, I would give it an "R".

Released in VHS in 1994 by Something Weird Video, it is available in both colour and black and white. If you are buying, insist on the colour version.

Early in the summer of 2000 this film was not in the IMDb to-day it is listed with only a director's credit. A "people" search for the actors credited on the box comes-up with only one name match, Jon EVANS. If he is the same man, I do not yet know.

This takes place in the American West of the 1870s. A young man named Ephiram (Morgan Royce) is in the wilderness fleeing a vicious male lover. He runs into Indians and hunky Cyrus Wheelwright (John Iverson). He begins to realize he's gay but has trouble coming to grips with it because of his ex. Can Cyrus and some Indian mystics help Ephiram realize that being gay is not bad?

For its time this was groundbreaking. It's probably the first gay coming of age story caught on film. It was shot in color but I unfortunately saw it in black & white on an old VHS tape. Still the cinematography was beautiful. It looks good in b&w--I can only imagine how color would look. The script is interesting--some of the talks about men loving men are fascinating (for its time). There's also a beautiful fireside talk between Ephram and Cyrus leading to a tender kiss. There is male nudity (including frontal) but nothing explicit. The two sex scenes show absolutely nothing that could be considered hard core. Still, the MPAA seems to have issues with male nudity so they would probably slap it with an NC-17. The cast themselves are all handsome men with nice bodies. Surprisingly even the acting is good--especially by Iverson. The only debit is Royce. He is beautiful--but can't act. The poor guy DOES try but it's no go. Because of that I can only give this a 9. Still well worth catching. Try to see it in color--I'm sure it must be beautiful.

Song of the Loon is a peculiar soft-core gay film, based on a popular pulp novel which was published in the mid-1960s. Gay soft-core from that era is a historical curiosity. Shortly after certain financially strapped cinemas began trading to the gay crowd, there was a testing of the legal limits of representation. Hardcore was not yet licensed, so a handful of soft-core gay features were produced; the most ambitious of these is probably Song of the Loon.

The film, like the book, tells the story of a naïve frontiersman who comes to terms with his sexual orientation through his encounters with an Indian tribe, the Loon, who practise free love and homosexuality. As such, this is what came to be known as a 'coming out drama'. The intriguing thing here is that the drama is played as an allegory, with the Loon standing in for the out gay man and the villains of the piece - a preacher and another, closet-case frontiersman – stand for those men who have not come to terms with themselves and so turn into homophobic hypocrites. The preacher's name is Calvin, so in part the film's allegory is a theological argument on the merits of a sex-denying Christian Puritanism versus a pagan liberation theology.

Song of the Loon intersperses narrative with montage sequences, the latter mostly involving soft-core episodes of lovemaking; there are some dodgy effects used to give these episodes an arty feel. The film was clearly made on a low budget; much of the editing and all of the acting is poor. The film is very earnest – there is hardly a moment of humour in the entire running time. There is also no sense of historicity, which emphasises the allegorical nature of the story; the idea of coming to terms which your sexual orientation is something that would have meant little-to-nothing to 19th century frontiersmen. Yet as a cultural and historical document of the time it was made, replete with coy eroticism, free-love preachiness and enlightenment through hallucinatory vision-quests, this has considerable value.