The title is a quote from the classic movie American Beauty. “I’d rather you were dead than a faggot!” are the gutting words retired Marine Corps Colonel Frank Fitts said to his own Son out of suspicion the teen may be gay. The plot twist? By the end of the movie we learn deeply homophobic Col (Ret) Fitts was secretly gay. So secretly in fact, he hid from himself most earnestly. Consulting Gemini Pro 2.5 on this subject:
“The movie American \ Beauty masterfully demonstrates Colonel Fitts’s repressed homosexuality not through a single overt statement, but through a layered series of behaviors, obsessions, and ultimately, a tragic climactic reveal. His intense homophobia is presented as the primary defense mechanism against his own desires.
Here is a breakdown of how the film achieves this:
1. Obsession with External Control and Order
Characters who are deeply repressing an essential part of themselves often project that internal chaos into an obsessive need for external order.
* Militaristic Household: Colonel Fitts runs his home not like a family, but like a military barracks. Everything is sterile, rigid, and joyless. He demands absolute discipline and structure, famously stating at dinner, “We need structure. We need discipline.” This extreme rigidity is a way to police his own thoughts and impulses.
* Abuse as Control: His physical and emotional abuse of his son, Ricky, is a desperate attempt to control someone who embodies everything he fears and cannot control within himself: rebellion, freedom, and a perceived deviation from masculine norms.
2. Paranoid Fixation on Homosexuality
For Colonel Fitts, homosexuality isn’t just something he dislikes; it is a pervasive, corrupting force that he sees everywhere.
* Disproportionate Anger: His reaction to his new gay neighbors, Jim and Jim, is one of immediate and visceral disgust, far beyond simple prejudice.
* Misinterpretation of Evidence: He becomes obsessed with the relationship between his son Ricky and Lester Burnham. When he discovers Ricky’s tapes filming Lester, he immediately interprets their budding friendship and drug-dealing relationship as a clandestine homosexual affair. His mind is primed to see the one thing he fears most.
3. Psychological Projection
This is the central mechanism at play. Colonel Fitts projects his own self-loathing and desires onto others, then attacks them for it.
* Attacking His Son: He accuses Ricky of being gay and beats him violently. In this act, he is not just attacking his son; he is symbolically attacking the part of himself that he hates and fears. He is trying to beat the “weakness” out of his own bloodline.
* Targeting Lester: He builds Lester up in his mind as a symbol of degeneracy. His rage towards Lester is fueled by the belief that Lester is seducing his son, an act that Fitts unconsciously both desires and is horrified by.
4. The Climactic Reveal: The Kiss
The film moves from subtext to explicit text in its most pivotal scene. After misinterpreting a conversation between Ricky and Lester, Fitts confronts Lester in his garage on a rainy night.
* Vulnerability: For the first time, the Colonel appears without his rigid armor. He is trembling, disheveled, and emotionally exposed.
* The Advance: He completely misreads Lester’s confident, revitalized masculinity as a sign of shared homosexuality. He approaches a bewildered Lester and says, “You’ve been working out… You look good,” before leaning in and kissing him on the lips.
* The Rejection: Lester, surprised but gentle, pushes him away and clarifies the misunderstanding. This rejection is the catalyst for the final tragedy.
5. The Aftermath: Heartbreak and Violence
The Colonel’s reaction to being rejected by Lester is the final, crucial piece of evidence.
* Sorrow, Not Anger: He does not get angry at Lester. Instead, he walks back into the rain utterly heartbroken and defeated. The look on his face is one of pure devastation, confirming his advance came from a place of deep, desperate longing.
* Eliminating the Witness: His subsequent murder of Lester is re-contextualized by this moment. It is not just a random act of violence. It is the act of a man destroying the only person who has seen his true self and, in his mind, rejected it. By killing Lester, he attempts to kill the source of his shame and silence the witness to his ultimate vulnerability.”
In My Own Private Rodeo, the 18th episode of the sixth season of the American animated television series King of the Hill (Fox Network, April 28, 2002), we meet Dale Gribble’s Father. We learn Dale is estranged from his Father, Bug, because Bug would rather have Dale believe he kissed Dale’s bride on Dale’s wedding day twenty years ago, than to admit to Dale he is gay. Can anyone blame Bug? Movies, television, churches, the news, and now social media, are full of examples of gay-bashing and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric even in 2025, let alone in 1999 and 2002 respectively, as in the examples above. …and there are countless more of those stories, most importantly, in real life, of course.
Can all who identify (or dare not to identify) as part of the LGBTQ community stand up to all of this condemnation? Sometimes. Sometimes the pain of hiding one’s full self becomes greater than the pain of being shunned for it. In many cases however, those who feel different from the mainstream cannot bear to represent themselves fully. It’s beyond what their psyche can endure. Who would ever choose to submit to such judgement and with that, danger?
Many people learn early in their childhoods their identity is unacceptable, shameful and forbidden. Perhaps they sense they are a gender on the inside different from what they are being held to, or they realize they are attracted to the same sex and not to whom they are assumed and encouraged to be. They will either begin to hide and therefore cope with a secret, or they begin to outwardly reject what’s expected of them, often at great peril. Actually, the peril will occur no matter what. When we aren’t accepted for who we are, we risk becoming at great odds within ourselves or with the outside world. Depending on the degree of unacceptance, the individual can suffer a great deal both mentally and physically. Colonel Frank Fitts is a perfect example of an individual whose exhausted coping mechanism went very awry. There are much more subtle versions of him (but he, too, sadly) among us today.
When I first became active in the LGBTQ community, I learned of the other side of the gay-bashing stories. I met men with boyfriends who were married to women or who were members of the clergy and those who were loudly homophobic through and through. I met women who were enthusiastic flirts in the company of men, but who were living with their girlfriend no one knew. Leading two lives, a public, socially revered one and a private, behind the scenes one, is more common than people wish to believe. In fact, my LGBTQ lesson number one was just how deeply and covertly “straight” people were intertwined in the LGBTQ world. I learned the louder the homophobia, the more likely the individual is non-straight. The rest is propaganda, a cover-up, just like Colonel Frank Fitts.
So next time you hear someone emphatically condemn gay or trans people, automatically inquire: “Whose cover-up are they carrying?” …or as Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude said in Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
If one dives into queer history, it’s easy now to read about how far Hollywood went to cover up the sexuality of their most-employed golden stars of the 1950s and 60s. There were the orchestrated, high-profile opposite-sex dates, the curated pictures of happy couples and weddings, as well as people bribed to keep the secret same-sex relationships and living arrangements exactly that. A secret. Why would two successful leading men live in the same Beverly Hills home for a whole decade if they are so women-obsessed? Well, someone got paid handsomely to explain that away. Male bonding…the simplistic “don’t look here” that works even today, and most alarmingly, works best at churches. …but I digress.
The other day, my younger Son and I came across a black-and-white movie and he, absent of the LGBTQ history I learned in the last decade, commented on the primary character. I mentioned the man had been gay. To his surprise, I explained a bit about how that works in the world of hypocrisies and cover-ups, then out of curiosity, put the actor’s name into Gemini 2.5 Pro, prompting it to provide information on whether this long-dead man had been gay. The result was truly hysterical. Gemini declared the man wasn’t gay because he had been married and had Children. Yes. Excellent proof of heterosexuality. Tell that to our gay community riddled with closeted married men who magically find themselves in unmentionable places possessing unmentionable desires during business, fishing and hunting trips, as well as church outings.
I used to tell people in case of an emergency, find a couple of Drag Queens to care for my three Children and under no circumstances allow someone from a church to be alone with them. As far as I was concerned, Drag Queens already passed the security test by being themselves. I’m not taking chances with someone who is a member of a repressive community. Nothing good comes from forcing people to cut off parts of who they are. My sentiment was a major oversimplification of a complex topic of course, but I felt the risk numbers, statistically speaking, were in the favor of my Children’s safety in the company of those willing to publicly acknowledge who they were, despite the potential societal disapproval.
Today, I still fear those who run from themselves, especially when they use their internalized homophobia to feed hate for others. I also resent religious and political institutions pushing a narrative that makes it difficult for people to safely be who they are, forcing them to shrink and contort to conform.
One More Perspective 
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