FLYING HIGH WITH BURNING BLUE
by chris carpenter Most of us probably think of 1986’s Top Gun as the quintessential big-screen homoerotic depiction
of men in the military. The funny thing, though, is that there isn’t a single gay character in it. While the Tom Cruise-starring adventure is undeniably homoerotic, we’ve had to wait another 28 years for a major studio (Lionsgate) to back a military-set story featuring a gay soldier at its center. Burning Blue, opening in select theaters and available on Video on Demand beginning Friday, June 6, is that long overdue movie.
Lieutenant Dan Lynch (played by Trent Ford) is a
Navy pilot aiming to become an elite fighter along- side his best friend, Lt. Will Stephensen (Morgan Spector, seen as Al Capone’s brother, Frank, in several episodes of Boardwalk Empire last season). Their re- lationship and ambitions are challenged when Dan, who is engaged to a woman, finds himself falling in love with a fellow closeted airman. Complicating matters even more is that the story takes place between 1995 and 2000, at the height of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era.
28 RAGE monthly | JUNE 2014 “It’s very personal but it is a work of fiction,” the
film’s co-writer and director, D.M.W. “David” Greer, recently told me. “I was in the military and came from that world, so it is drawn from personal experience.” Greer reported that he flew helicopters, not the F-16s depicted in Burning Blue and that he was stationed in San Diego for a time. “Many of the situations in the film happened to me and many of the characters are based on people I know.” A successful playwright, Greer is making his mo- tion picture debut with this adaptation of his hit
2002 play. “It was challenging,” he said of the process of transferring Burning Blue from the stage to the screen. “I felt like I had cracked the code on writing a play years ago but I still wasn’t so sure about writing a screenplay. When I first thought of telling this story, though, I saw it very cinematically.” The resulting movie is emotionally gripping and
features some stunning shots of Navy jets in action, for which I assumed Greer had the Navy’s coop- eration. “We had zero cooperation, less than zero,” he replied. Those impressive sequences in the film
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