First, a quick, mostly spoiler-free synopsis of this unique and quirky comedy: Elliot Crane (Lawrence P. Casey) and Danny Devlin (Kevin Coughlin) are a pair of straight male friends who decide to pretend to be gay in order to evade the Vietnam War draft (tagline: “Only his draftboard and his girlfriend know for sure”). The Army places them under surveillance, and they have to take a number of steps to keep up the façade, including moving into a gay apartment complex run by Malcolm (Michael Greer) and his life partner Craig (Sebastian Brook). That setting and couple, along with other aspects of the experience, challenge and change Elliot and Danny’s lives and relationship, to comic effect but also ultimately producing thoughtful examinations of identity.
The most striking social context for the film is the intersection between the Vietnam War-era counterculture and gay identities. Two of the film’s central artists brought to the production significant prior experience with cultural representations of the war and its effects on American society: Actor Lawrence P. Casey (who played Elliot Crane) had been a star of the popular TV show The Rat Patrol (1966-1968) and had gone on USO tours to visit with American troops in Vietnam; and writer Jerome Wish’s two prior screenplays, Angels from Hell (1968) and Run, Angel, Run! (1969), had told two stories of a Vietnam vet turned counterculture motorcycle gang leader.
As The Gay Deceivers’ plot illustrates, in this period gay identities were defined as entirely outside of and contrasting with the U.S. military and thus the war. But one of the film’s final twists (MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW) reveals that the two Army investigators surveilling the main characters are themselves gay men, adding another layer to the intersection of these social issues. The first shot of the film is the famous Uncle Sam “I Want You” recruitment poster, juxtaposed with stereotypical images of gay men, and by the film’s end the tropes have even more thoroughly been reversed, with the Army represented by gay men who don’t want straight phonies to serve.