If Adolf Hitler were gay, would he have acted or spoken any differently? I once had to answer this deepest of philosophical questions, and my answer was that he would probably prance around, talk with a lisp and tuck wildflowers behind his ears. I’m not so good at prancing or lisping, but I can tuck flowers behind my ears as well as anybody. I know this from experience, and unfortunately it was all caught on tape.
I was involved in a rather low-budget, independent film back in good old double aught. By “low budget independent film,” I mean that four friends and I decided we wanted to make a movie without spending too much cash. The film was a collection of short vignettes in German, each written by a different member of our gang of aspiring filmmakers. In one of these shorts, I found myself cast in the unfortunate role of gay Hitler. My co-filmmakers decided I was perfect for it.
I suppose they thought it would be entertaining to see me, grumpy, bitter and ever-complaining, play a flamboyantly cheerful, peppy role. The rest of the group took a vote, and decided that if one man could pull off a gay Hitler most convincingly, it would be Bob Tucker. The official reasons were that I bear the greatest resemblance to Hitler (a complete falsehood, I might add), that I’m a “angry little man” and that the four black-hearted bastards snapped up the other parts of the movie, leaving me to deal with the part they all didn’t want to play.
So there I was, in the woodsy property of one of my oppressive co-creators, dressed as Adolf Hitler, right down to the moustache, which I created with a magic marker, using the lens of the camera as a mirror. That alone wasn’t much to my liking, but that isn’t what made this incident so scarring. My character, in this short entitled “Killing Private Ryan,” was portrayed as a stereotypical (in the minds of five high-school-aged boys) homosexual. So not only was I dressed as Hitler, but I also spoke my lines with a lisp, and placed wildflowers in my hair. We didn’t make any pretense of political correctness in those days.
It took some cajoling for me to play this character as my conniving compatriots wished me to. After a bit of bribery, the camera rolled, I pranced (or at least what I thought would look like prancing) onto my mark and delivered my lines in my best lispy-German voice, which, now that I look at the tape, sounds an awful lot like my drunk-English voice. The whole purpose of the scene, besides making a fool out of me, was to establish the basic plot for this particular vignette. It began with a small troupe of German soldiers wandering through the wilderness with low morale and a vague mission to kill a certain “Private Ryan.”
All of a sudden, they saw a figure in the distance, and unsure of who it might be, they stopped their progress and pulled their weapons. The prancing tipped them off; it could only be Hitler. The soldiers and Hitler ran towards one another, and proceeded to greet each other in the manner of the day, which was a loud and obnoxious “WAAAS AUF?!?” I, in my role as Hitler, expressed my concern for my men, and put them back on track in their mission by telling them where Private Ryan had last been seen. I then departed in a somewhat classier manner than my arrival. (mgtrailer.com) The soldiers gave each other a knowing look and then proceeded on their quest
For my co-filmmakers and much of the audience who later repeatedly watched this on tape, this was the highlight of our film. At the time, I was a little bitter about the whole matter. If one looks at the outtakes provided at the end of our feature, one can see me, in my Hitler regalia still, beating one of my compatriots with a stick, yelling out in time with my swings: “You. Should. Have. Been. Hitler!” I currently own the only copy of the film. The rest have been lost, and I plan on keeping it that way.
