QUEER CINEMA AND CIS GAY MEN: A LOVE STORY
I recently checked Kuang-Hui Liu's film, Your Name Engraved Herein (刻在你心底的名字), off my watchlist. The movie follows two high school boys in 1980s Taiwan whose friendship develops into an unspoken romantic relationship. I won't spoil the ending, but if you have ever watched a queer film before, I am sure you can form your own conclusions about how their relationship pans out.
Rightfully so, Your Name Engraved Herein was well-received by critics and average movie-lovers alike. As good as it was, though, I couldn't help but consider the trajectory of queer cinema, especially within the U.S., as the credits rolled down the screen.
Like other notable box office hits, Moonlight and, Call Me By Your Name, the movie is another addition to the laundry list of cis gay male films. These films' prominence within the queer cinema arena reflects a prevalent mistake made by the film industry, that mistake being actively choosing palatability over representation.
In a 2018 study of 110 films released by the US's major production studios, researchers found an equal number of films that included gay and lesbian characters; however, only 3 movies had bisexual characters. No mainstream film releases included non-binary or trans characters. The study also found that the number of POC characters in LGBTQ-inclusive films decreased to 42 percent.
Really, the figures are not surprising. It is also no surprise that movies with cis gay male characters hold most Oscar nominations and wins for queer cinema at-large. Of course, misogyny can be much to blame here, but there are many other methods that Hollywood uses to make queerness more digestible to mainstream audiences:
Detaching queerness from present-day reality in period pieces
Making queer identity look like roleplay by casting straight actors to play non-straight, non-gender conforming roles
Reducing queer relationships to only a need for sexual satisfaction via overly erotic entertainment
Attaching queerness to mental illness, most noticeable in movies with lesbian and/or trans women leads.
Movies like the aforementioned Call Me also legitimize whiteness as an integral factor in queer acceptance, which lends to why LGBTQ-inclusive films that gain widespread recognition often have White leads. I love Timmy! But there is something weird, not to mention unrelatable, about a White guy grooming his professor's son in the Italian countryside. Even when the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning set a precedent for giving visibility to the Black and Latinx American drag community, movies like The Birdcage and, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar ran with everything except the people of color (I know To Wong Foo starred Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo, but their characters heavily reinforced Black and Latinx stereotypes).
The point being, queer cinema has a long road ahead of itself in making the representation of queerness more diverse and intersectional, especially for non-binary and trans folks. Movies are not full-service stops for understanding one's own sexual identity and gender, but there is no shame in wanting to see your own reality on the big screen.
*If you are in search of some good LGBTQIA+ movies, here is a short list of some of my favorites and where you can stream them:
The Color Purple (Amazon, HBOMax)
A Portrait of A Lady on Fire (Hulu)
Pariah (Amazon)
The Watermelon Woman (Amazon, Youtube, iTunes)
Tangerine (Amazon)
The Handmaiden (Amazon, Youtube)
The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (Netflix)
Gia (Hulu)