lgbt bigotry
by Douglas Messerli
We would all like to imagine that LGBTQ+
individuals, given the suffering, internal and external we have had to endure
throughout history, and our struggles, largely successful, to erase homophobia,
transphobia, and other negative cultural attitudes internationally that we are
primarily a sympathetic, empathetic, and open-minded folk.
But
we all know, deep inside, that that isn’t necessarily true. In terms of
percentages, just as many LGBTQ individuals are conservative fascists and
intolerant individuals as heterosexual people. Early in the rise of Hitler, the
Nazi’s made a cult of homosexuality, And as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò makes
clear, Italian fascism often openly supported homosexuality and pederasty. There
are rightist US gay men and lesbian women. Gays who are adamantly opposed to
transsexuals, lesbians who are intolerant of gay men, and both gays and
lesbians who don’t believe even in the concept of bisexuality. There are,
astonishingly, gays and lesbians who voted for Trump, who support Putin, who
argued for the politics of Bolsonaro’s Brazil and support the iron-fisted
“democracies” of people like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. LGBTQ+ individuals are can
be racist and pro-abortion, can be fanatically religious and even hate the
LGBTQ+ coalition.
It is a sign of how much we have been able to openly express ourselves that in the past couple of decades we have finally seen movies that reveal and discuss such prejudices, bigotries, and close-minded attitudes, admitting to ourselves and others that we are not a unified force of thinkers and believers, that we truly represent the entire spectrum of human experience.
The “bigots” of the four films from 2013-2023 that I have included here,
are not terrible sinners, but commit minor and perhaps correctable attitudes for
their failures by simply saying, as does the character in the most recent film,
“I’m sorry, I was wrong.” But they, nonetheless, do represent biases and flawed
ways of thinking that are worth noting.
I’m sure that there are many others, short films and features, of which
I am not yet aware, but this is my first foray into this important subject. The
film’s I’ve included here, interestingly enough, are all US productions, which
suggest that in the US we most definitely feel free enough to publicize our own
failures, surely an impossible thing to imagine in the many fascist and
dictatorial governments which remain throughout the world, a few even within
Europe.
In
the first of these films, the gay man moved from the city to the country simply
commits the crime of underestimating his fellow rural folk, who hilariously
outwit him concerning his very subject, gay sexuality. In the last discussed
film, the gay figure makes the mistake, once more, of discounting the
open-mindedness of rural America as well as all heterosexuals, a mistake that
shows him not only to be a rube but an outright bigot. The other two films
concern a far more subtle and, one might argue, an in-house kind of
prejudice—which I myself admit sharing—against one of the flags of the LGBTQ+
coalition itself, the Aces, those individuals who are non-sexual. David Bobrow’s
Country People, 2016, Jordan Gear’s Ace of 2018 and Jordan-Paige
Sudduth’s Aces from 2022, and Tyler Cunningham’s I Was Wrong of 2023
all reveal that the LGBTQ+ coalition is not a perfect “nation,” whose diverse
members all tolerate each other.
Los Angeles, March 2, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(March 2023).
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