Making Love was the first mainstream Hollywood drama to address the subjects of homosexuality, coming out and the effect that being closeted and coming out has on a marriage. The film contrasts two visions of the “gay lifestyle.” Zack wants to settle into a long-term monogamous relationship, while Bart is shown as promiscuous and uninterested in forming commitments.

 

The core concept for Making Love purportedly occurred to writer Scott Berg while he was touring to promote his 1978 biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius: the tour occasioned Berg’s touching base with several male friends from his college days who confided that they were opting out of marriages for same-sex relationships. Berg  said, “I thought this is the next big social movement of our country. What the black [rights] movement was, translated into film in the ’60s, what the feminist movement was in the ’70s, the gay movement will be in the ’80s.”

 

Opening February 12, 1982, Making Love was originally hailed as a hit, earning an inaugural four-day box office tally of $3 million and swiftly expanding its theatre count from 300 venues to 700. However the strong opening of Making Love evidently exhausted any potential public interest in the film which would soon prove a costly flop.

 

Making Love was typically dismissed by critics as a glossy soap opera which dodged its sensitive ostensibly core issue. Gay film historian Vito Russo wrote in The Celluloid Closet that straight critics found the film boring while gay critics, glad for any attention paid to the subject, praised it. The gay rights activist Dennis Altman argued in The Homosexualisation of America (1982) that Making Love was the only one that “suggested a willingness to portray homosexual relations as equally valid as heterosexual ones” and that “the wariness with which the film was promoted suggests real change will be slow.”