Douglas Messerli | What Is a Gay Movie? (2) [Introduction]

what is a gay movie? (2)

by Douglas Messerli

 

Throughout much of the 20th century, since homosexuality was outlawed and beginning in the 1930s films presenting homosexual figures were not permitted due to industry codes, the representation of LGBTQ figures was either limited to the peripheral or highly coded. One of the reasons for my publication, as I have indicated again and again in these volumes, is to help people reperceive what was being shown just outside of the films’ central action to help those unable to read through the coding performed by writers, directors, and actors.

    Beginning in the 1960s, a few brave Hollywood film directors and several independent cineastes began to actually portray gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and even transgender figures, flouting code restrictions. And by the 1990s, homosexual and transsexual representation was rather permissible and increasingly common in film depictions.

    And with the beginning of the new century, LGBTQ representation burgeoned into the vast representations revealed in these pages. Yet another new phenomenon also begin to appear which I recently noted, and which I now will briefly focus on.

     A significant number of films advertising themselves to be gay or lesbian or, at least, attracting the attention of gay and lesbian audiences, often being shown in the LGBTQ festival circuits have begun to take a much coyer approach to their characters, either returning to code or simply blurring the identities of their homosexual characters. In a number of films in the first quarter of the 21st century is simply hard to tell whether or not the figures represented were in fact gay, and whether the companions and friends to which they seem attached represent truly “gay” relationships or those simply of male/male or female/female friendships or familial associations. The kinds of characters one might find in heterosexual bromances or in stories of communal living, or even in tales of best friends seem to be more and more evident.

      Part of this, surely, may have to do with is perceived as the general acceptance of LGBTQ relationships, suggesting the kind of “spillover” of open-minded heterosexuals and sexually unsure beings that now make up much of the regulars at what used to exclusively “gay” or “lesbian” bars. As more and more people come to question their gender, moreover, characterizing themselves with a question or plural pronouns such as “we” or “they,” the entire issue of love between two individuals, no matter what sex, begins to take on new meaning. All of which one might argue is something for the better.

      Yet, one cannot wonder that whether through this modulation of LGBTQ expression we are not losing the very distinction or definition of LGBTQ cinema is. If all relationships, whether sexual or not, can now described as falling under the embrace of the rainbow, then what is a gay film, or more crucially, what is a gay relationship and why is it significant or important to represent it as being different from the still far more vast representation in cinema of exclusive heterosexuality? Has gay cinema lost its purpose? Does it even mean anything to define an LGBTQ relationship as being “different” from any other form of love? These are important questions, and I am not dismissing the possibility that we, as LGBTQ individuals, may have so thoroughly defined our relationships to our smaller movie-going audiences that we may not have much new to say.

      But then why, we must ask, do heterosexual loves and relationships continue to attract the majority of audiences other than the fact that the majority of individuals are heterosexual. If we feel we, homosexual and transsexual individuals, no longer truly need to represent ourselves as sexual beings why to heterosexuals still feel it so very necessary to express their sexuality in movies? Or, one might even wonder, is sexuality itself slowly being ousted from the cinematic canon. Have diseases such as AIDS and the COVID pandemic and similar events, gradually drawn us away from representing sex, just a several early LGBTQ pioneers so feared?

      Perhaps, in some of these films, I am just not able to read these relationships as easily as younger people might? The way I might argue for what seems obvious to me in the coded movies of the 1940s and 1950s, now appears obvious to young directors while am confused and unsure.

      More likely, I fear, during this period homosexuality had become so accepted upon young audiences and filmmakers that they simply adopted the tropes and structural patterns of gay films, perhaps even hoping to draw a larger audience than an independent film about heterosexual friendships might. After all, the LGBTQ+ community now had numerous festivals around the world, while there were few spaces in which to show short independent heterosexual works.

     Throughout my years of writing these volumes, I have been often seen as having imposed my notions of sexuality upon films that, some people argued, were not saying anything about LGBTQ sex. It seems strange, accordingly that am now resisting reading films as gay that others insist most certainly are.

   No matter what the answers, it has become time for me to discuss some examples of this phenomenon, which I see as almost the inverse of films about “coming out.” For me these films appear to be as afraid to talk about sex as were the vast majority of films made in the heyday of the Hays code.

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema April 16, 2022.