For any member of a marginalised group, searching for representations of oneself in pop culture can be a lonely experience. For people who identify as queer, they have never been entirely invisible in film. However, the representations of homosexual relationships and queer identity have often served a wider political purpose in their attempts to ridicule homosexuality or have had to cleverly mask the representation.
Until recent decades, cinema was filled with sparse, fleeting and mostly covert hints at queerness. Movies in the early part of the 20th century often relied on homosexuality as a form of humour. When strict censorship rules came about, representations dwindled even further, often leaving it to the audience to do the work by picking up on subtle aspects or ‘looks’. Queerness was also fetishised or villainized, with films like Dracula’s Daughter (1936).
In recent years, the success of a number of mainstream films featuring gay characters, including Power Rangers (2017), and Disney’s first ever gay character in Beauty and the Beast (2017), attracted media attention and may suggest a shift of attitudes in Hollywood and what audiences expect from films.
Often, it has fallen on the indie movie arena to provide pictures that give us an image of queer life and identity. Moonlight (2016) garnered particular acclaim as a film with a gay central character, winning an Academy Award. The Handmaiden (2016), which featured a lesbian romance was also popular amongst critics.
Moonlight allowed for a gay person of colour to explore their sexuality as they grow onscreen, against the background of American poverty, and unpicks the construction of black masculinity. Its intersectionality and success are encouraging. Many would perhaps now name it among the likes of Brokeback Mountain (2005), and even Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), films which often come to mind when thinking of films with same sex romances.
Richard Dyer, professor in film, speaks in the docufilm The Celluloid Closet (1995) about issues facing the LGBTQ community in filmmaking throughout the 20th century. The strict censorship laws and taboos surrounding gay themes meant that gay people felt those limitations in their everyday lives. “We could only express ourselves indirectly, just as people on the screen… we were in the closet.”
Film, for Dyer, is like a mirror in which we look for images of ourselves ‘to not be alone’. It has an impact beyond simple entertainment, especially in the times before the widespread availability of different forms of media. “We learn from the movies what it is to be a man or a woman, what it means to have a sexuality.”
The ‘new queer cinema’ movement beginning in the 1990’s moved away from the clichés Hollywood had thus far presented. Now, much of independent gay films aim to challenge heteronormativity. Films such as The Living End (1992) challenged stigmas surrounding both gay relationships and AIDS.
Moonlight’s achievements have not been enough to allow it to “be heralded as some kind of flag-bearer for new queer cinema, heartening as its mainstream success is for the movement,” writes Guy Dodge in The Guardian. Nor have the gay characters in recent Hollywood pictures been more than “fleeting moments of overblown significance,” writes Jude Dry in IndieWire.
On one hand, representation of queer life in film is desirable to allow it to be normalised, and to allow audiences to develop empathy for queer characters, which can help build understanding and acceptance. This has resulted in perhaps more palatable depictions of queer identity, particularly when it comes to sex.
Dodge argues that although Moonlight’s “depiction of emerging alternative sexuality may be beautifully articulated and modulated, there’s a level of cautiousness that has enabled its broader acceptance thus far: it’s a gay romance with no on-screen sexual activity beyond an unseen handjob.” This more bland approach is what is easier for Hollywood to sell to its big buyers, which include China, who have much less tolerance for depictions of gay characters.
On the other hand, films such as Blue is the Warmest Colour and The Handmaiden are criticised for being too sexually explicit, and for adopting a heterosexual male gaze on female sexuality. Films with same-sex sexual scenes are often more readily rated R than their heterosexual counterparts, which is part of the construction of the fear and mystery surrounding same sex or queer sexual content for cinemagoers.
New queer film has been expected to challenge heteronormativity and subvert gender norms, but films that do that are not necessarily going to get made, or get the budget of a safer storyline such as Moonlight. Films such as The Misandrists (2017), and Princess Cyd (2017), are films which challenge binary notions of gender and allow characters to be much less defined in their sexual orientation. These films won’t be shown in Cineworld.
Films have moved away from gay characters being solely a source of humour, ridicule or fear. It would be a faux pas for even mainstream cinema to fetishise homosexuality or use it explicitly as a gimmick. However, the films that have the widest reach may not ask audiences to challenge their view on sexuality at all, if they are lacking in material that is unlike the homogeneous version of heterosexuality that is presented to us by the majority of the media we consume.
If, as Dyer argues, films help us learn about ourselves and the world, and shapes our notion of what is acceptable within and outside of ourselves, then it should be of importance that queer representation is pushed by those in the industry with the power to do so. Films which force us to consider more fluid notions of identity can help lives that are alternative to the Westernised rigid sexual identities we are raised with be represented. They can help everyone out of the closet, if heterogeneous sexual identities can be more vividly portrayed.
