Borrow a streaming service password from family– however you define it!–and dive in. There’s a lot of history to explore, and there’s never been a better time to do it. While gay characters tended until much too recently to be one-dimensional, white, and doomed, in 2018 Barry Jenkins won a Best Picture Oscar telling the layered and hopeful story of a gay Black man in Moonlight.
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1982’s tentative Making Love derailed the careers of its two lead actors 2017’s Call Me By Your Name cemented its pair as movie stars. The range runs from the shoestring brilliance of The Watermelon Woman to the big-budget glitter-bomb that is Rocketman. We’ve come a ways in fifty years, from the self-loathing middle-aged men of The Boys In The Band to the peppy teens of Love, Simon. The conditions are optimal for you to catch up on your queer cinema. The few bars that have reopened are for the reckless and foolish, and let's be honest: there’s only so much dancing a person can do on Zoom. We’re stuck inside unless we’re marching for police reform. This year, the public events of LGBTQ Pride Month-much like sports, school, and life itself-are cancelled. And if you can bear the crowds, you leave a Pride festival with a draft-beer buzz, an application for a rainbow-flag credit card, and a paper fan with Chelsea Handler’s face on it. Your bank, cable company and sandwich shop rush to remind you of their support for the LGBTQ+ community.
The gay neighborhood thumps with house music. Under normal circumstances, June busts out all over with Pride Month parties and parades. That means it's likely to be seen by a much wider audience than any of the films listed below, which were smaller, quirkier, independent productions.The good news: this year you have time for some movies. Love, Simon isn't the first film to tackle what it's like to come out in high school, but it is the first one released by a major studio. That's admirable, even if the film's chaste attitude toward sex means they're seeing only a part of a version of themselves onscreen. It's entirely intentional - in interviews, filmmaker Greg Berlanti says Love, Simon presents a well-scrubbed version of the coming out process so that queer kids can finally see an idealized version of themselves onscreen. But once again that familiar apportioning occurs - Simon's sexuality is kept feathery and abstract, and any depiction of same-sex attraction is saved for the film's emotional crescendo. Love, Simon is also set in a high school, and also features a young man struggling to come out - it's the story of its main character's private and public acknowledgement of his Queer Identity. Monkey See A Gay Teen Romance, Sealed With A Peck: 'Love, Simon'
That fact also serves, intentionally or not, to cause these films to concern themselves more expressly with Queer Identity than Queer Desire. In American films like Making Love (1982), In & Out (1997), Beginners (2010) and 4th Man Out (2016), the process of coming out is complicated by the fact that it occurs later in life than is usual. Which is probably why we keep making movies about it. It's marked by fits and starts, denials and avowals, fraught conversations in somebody's car, the fear of rejection and, hopefully, the relief of acceptance.
It has a timeline, and not necessarily a smooth one. Director: Gabriele Muccino Stars: Brando Pacitto, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Taylor Frey, Joseph Haro. What does not vary in the process of coming out is the fact that it is a process. A gay couple living in San Francisco takes in two strangers traveling from Italy to start a new life in America, discovering each other and forming the most unlikely of relationships along the way. The process of coming to terms with one's sexuality varies widely, depending on the individual - it can be scary, invigorating, heartbreaking, life-affirming usually it's some complex combination of those feelings and more. Billy (Alex Lawther) and Blah Blah Blah (AnnaSophia Robb) in 2018's Freak Show.