“I’m just like you except I have one huge-ass secret,” he says. He lives in a big two-story house his parents are played by L.L.Bean catalogue models Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel he gets a car with a big red ribbon on it for his birthday like a holiday car commercial. “For the most part, my life is totally normal,” he says in the expository voice-over. Simon is a blandly handsome high-school teenager (Nick Robinson) who spends much of the film assuring the (hetero) audience that he’s just like them. The most egregious example is one of the most recent: Love, Simon, a gay bildungsroman whose political and moral center is that its protagonist Simon is Not That Kind of Gay.
“That’s how it becomes more normalized.”īeyond discourse, the question of what makes a film queer has become subsumed by aesthetics and narratives that display a straight gaze. And we’re just watching that person’s life,” she told Vulture.
“Eventually I want to get to the point where we’re watching movies and the story’s not about the fact that they’re gay, or about the fact that they’re black, or about the fact that they’re trans - they just are.
Luca Guadagnino has called Call Me by Your Name a “family film” Rachel Weisz called Disobedience, her recent passion project about a lesbian relationship in an Orthodox Jewish community in London, a “universal story.” Alia Shawkat, the star and writer of Duck Butter, a movie about a 24-hour relationship between two women, emphasized the importance of normalization. Part of this is a rhetorical strategy to sell movies to a heterosexual public. The political language around sameness - that “they” are just like “us” - moved out of the ballot box and into film. “I think Will and Grace did more to educate the American public more than almost anything anybody has done so far.
“More and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition: Who do you love?” then–Vice-President Joe Biden said a few years before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2013, ten years after it become the prevailing LGBT issue. The rhetoric - love is love (is love is love) - was generic and effective, suggesting that the only thing that separates gay people from straight ones was semantics. It was a beloved cause for progressives, but a philosophically conservative one. They’re safe, often boring, and sentimental, following familiar emotional arcs to tell a “universal story.” In short, we’re in a movie moment defined by the political sensibility of the gay-marriage movement.ĭepending on your viewpoint, the legalization of gay marriage is either the greatest recent civil-rights victory or a myopic apportionment of rights. While these films vary in intent, provenance, and quality, they encapsulate a similar catholic spirit: rather than assert difference, they point out similarities. There have been Oscar-validated prestige pictures ( Milk, The Kids Are All Right, The Dallas Buyers Club, Call Me by Your Name), and corresponding flops ( Stonewall, Freeheld), indie films ( Princess Cyd, Tangerine), and commercial middlebrow ones ( Love, Simon). We’ve entered a boom time for LGBT film, and the movies released in the past decade boast a mainstream appeal, with straight actors now more than ever willing to play an LGBT character. The critique would apply to any number of films from the past decade that are nominally LGBT in content, but not queer in structure. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that,” he asked, “then what kind of a structure would it be?” It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. “Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. “People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film,” he said in an interview in the spring 1993 issue of Film Quarterly. When Todd Haynes was working on Safe, the 1995 film starring Julianne Moore as a housewife who becomes increasingly allergic to the world around her, he expressed frustration over the classification of “gay cinema.” It wasn’t that he felt the category was pigeonholing, like some might today, but rather that it should be more exacting.