10.1: Screening LGBTQ+ - Overview

What Is LGBTQ+ Film and Media?

What do Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own, and David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) have in common? According to film news website IndieWire, they’re all among “the best queer films you didn’t know were queer.”^[1] The IndieWire reviewer reads homoerotic valences in Fight Club’s plot, which revolves around illicit male-male contact shrouded in secrecy. But if homosexuality never crosses the viewer’s mind, is the film still queer? The question of what counts as LGBTQ+ film and media is anything but straightforward. Many have debated what makes a gay film gay, a queer film queer, and so on. Must the plot revolve around someone’s emergent sexuality, as in Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) or Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985)? Does an LGBTQ+ character suffice? How do we know a character’s sexuality unless it is explicitly stated? Must we assume all film characters are straight until proved queer? What about Charles Herman-Wurmfeld’s Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), in which the title character dates a woman and comes out before finally finding the right man? Are films made by queer-identified directors intrinsically queer?

A range of scholars have explored these questions. In a book on the early lesbian filmmaker Dorothy Arzner, for example, Judith Mayne writes that, though Arzner’s films contain no overtly lesbian characters or plots, they devote “constant and deliberate attention to how women dress and act and perform, as much for each other as for the male figures.”^[2] Alexander Doty, meanwhile, suggests that in many popular texts, 4queerness is “less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered property than the result of acts of production or reception. This does not mean the queerness one attributes to mass culture texts is any less real than the straightness others would claim for these same texts. As with the constructing of sexual identities, constructing the sexualities of texts results in some ‘real thing.’”^[3] In other words, queerness may emanate from the viewer as much as from a same-sex kiss onscreen. As Richard Dyer notes, “In the process of investigation, the by, for, and about category frays at the edges.”^[4] With these concerns in mind, this chapter outlines the history of queer representations in screen media and considers the ways both texts and audiences produce queerness in the face of legal and cultural restrictions on overtly queer content.

Representation is important for marginalized groups, but applying labels to individuals and content raises ethical issues. With the aim of advocacy and comprehensibility, this chapter makes provisional use of categories such as gay and trans while remaining sensitive to historical contexts. Elsewhere, queer operates as a catch-all for nonnormative sexual identities, behaviors, and aesthetics.

Similarly, the sections of this chapter are makeshift, a subjective organizing tool to render the content more easily digestible. Part of the work of queer theory is to scrutinize and deconstruct categories, and the taxonomies of film genre and textbook chapter applied here are no exceptions.

Finally, this chapter critiques many of the texts it describes. Critique does not necessarily indicate that the texts in question are unworthy of watching. Rather, recognizing their flaws as symptoms of the sociopolitical systems in which they are produced and consumed is essential to the viewing process. Helping readers learn to identify and analyze these systems is, I believe, a textbook’s core responsibility.

Form and Content

Although the thoughts and feelings they generate are real things, remember that media texts never present objective realities. From Madeleine Olnek’s outrageously campy Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (2011) to hard-hitting documentaries such as David France’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), films are representations (figure 10.1). They’re created through subjective human processes such as writing, casting, acting, costuming, editing, and more. However realistic and emotionally affecting, characters are works of art and artifice whose lives stop where the film does. Likewise, documentaries are based on real events but are always interpretations of those events—they’re never fully objective.

Analyzing screen media means considering not just what stories are told but also the techniques and processes—cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, casting, and so on—used to tell them and how those elements work alongside the content to construct meaning. In literary contexts, form refers to the way a story is told, and content refers to the events, plotline, and characters of which it consists. Content might be thought of as the what of a text; form as how it’s depicted. Making a film or a TV episode entails many decisions beyond plot and dialogue, ranging from camera angles to casting, to wardrobe, to sound mixing, and they all produce certain effects. The language of film form offers a means for examining these decisions and their effects.

Figure 10.1. The investigative journalist and documentary maker Dave France (right) and Joy Tomchin (left) accepting a Peabody Award for their documentary How to Survive a Plague. (CC-BY Peabody Awards.)

A trope, meanwhile, is a “common or overused theme or device.”^[5] When overused, it becomes a cliché; tropes are discussed further later in the chapter. The frequent trope of dramatic death in LGBTQ+ film, commonly called Bury Your Gays, includes suicide (William Wyler’s 1961 The Children’s Hour, Lea Pool’s 2001 Lost and Delirious, Atom Egoyan’s 2009 Chloe), homicide (Anthony Minghella’s 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley, Kimberley Peirce’s 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, Ang Lee’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain, Patty Jenks’s 2003 Monster), and HIV/AIDS (Jonathan Demme’s 1993 Philadelphia, Ryan Murphy’s 2014 The Normal Heart, Bryan Singer’s 2018 Bohemian Rhapsody). These tragic plotlines are so ubiquitous that B. Ruby Rich wryly noted that, in 1999, film’s “only lesbian happy ending involve[d] a portal into John Malkovich’s brain.”^[6]

Films involving a queer character’s tragic death aren’t necessarily bad or homophobic, but the persistent, minimally varying association of queerness with unnatural death is reductive and harmful in much the same way that the automatic association of HIV/AIDS with male homosexuality is reductive and harmful. Historically, moreover, these tropes have been cultural or legal requisites for representation to exist at all. To understand the reasons why the definition, production, and consumption of LGBTQ+ film and media remain so complicated today, this chapter devotes significant attention to sociohistorical contexts. Because such context is essential to understanding the contemporary conditions and manifestations of LGBTQ+ film and media, the chapter focuses almost exclusively on the United States.

Kiki and the MXfits: A Short about Being Trans in High School

For LGBTQ+ Pride Month in 2018, them. collaborated with Joey Soloway on a short film series called Queeroes, in which filmmakers created films that deliberately queered the Hollywood narrative. One short, “Kiki and the MXfits: A Short about Being Trans in High School,” makes fun of the Hollywood high school comedy (https://youtu.be/3Zwi-Nceuzs).

• What tropes from teenage comedies can you identify in this short film?
• In what ways have these tropes been queered and reflected through a Latinx lens?
• What techniques does the filmmaker use to tell the story? Do you find them effective

Historical and Legal Contexts

As this chapter’s title suggests, the history of LGBTQ+ film and media is bound up with social and political constraints that have consistently limited the expression and representation of nonnormative genders and sexualities. Restrictions notwithstanding, all sorts of gender and sexual diversity have found ways to make themselves visible and identifiable since cinema’s early days.

Film’s Beginnings through the Hays Code

In the 1930s, the Motion Picture Production Code, often called the Hays Code, established moral guidelines that films produced for public consumption had to follow. These guidelines prohibited or restricted the depiction of subject matter such as profanity, drug trafficking, religious effrontery, and childbirth scenes; a motion picture was not to “lower the moral standards of those who see it.”^[7] But before the Code was imposed, films featured more homosexual content than one might expect. See, for example, Harry Beaumont’s The Broadway Melody (1929) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932).

Pre-Code depictions of gay and lesbian characters were often caricatured and insulting: mincing, dissolute men and unflatteringly mannish women. These stereotyped conceptions of homosexuality reflect the era’s prevailing notions of inversion—the idea that queerness equated to femininity in a male body or vice versa. In sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s words, an invert possessed “the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom.”^[8] Though these stereotypes persist today and have been explored in such venues as David Thorpe’s Do I Sound Gay? (2014), queer and feminist theory have helped dispel the assumption that biological sex (male or female) is inherently connected to gender (masculine or feminine), or indeed that there are only two sexes or two genders.

Poverty stopped many from attending movies when the Great Depression hit, so filmmakers tried shock-value tactics to lure audiences. These tactics encompassed controversial material ranging from unprecedented violence to sexual “perversion,” including homosexual characters.^[9] Partially in response to this trend, Will Hays, then president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (now Motion Picture Association of America) banned all gay male characters in film in 1933.^[10] Representations of homosexuality were barred under this ban on the basis of representing “sex perversion or any inference of it”; depictions of interracial relationships were also forbidden.^[11]

Just because the Hays Code forbade queer content doesn’t mean none existed, however. Think of the pink elephant game, in which the objective is not to think about pink elephants. Knowing something is not supposed to be present often seems to make the possibility of its presence more acute. For this reason, censorship is notoriously ineffective for enforcing silence on a topic. Further, censorship often begets interpretive tendencies that seek out subtexts whose direct expression has been foreclosed—tendencies Chon Noriega has called “reading against the grain.”^[12]

McCarthyism and Onward

The Hays Code’s later years dovetailed with the Red Scare of the 1950s and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist smear campaigns. Josh Howard’s documentary The Lavender Scare (2017) explores the wave of homophobia that arose in conjunction with the Red Scare. The 1950s were a time of extreme scrutiny for gay men and lesbians, leading to firings and other forms of discrimination against individuals suspected of same-sex inclinations. Homosexuality was viewed as dangerously subversive and associated with communist activity—a huge stigma during the Cold War years.

Still, film depictions of queer men and occasionally women proliferated during this time. Partly because of the Hays Code’s proscription on positive portrayals of “perversion,” these characters were often villainous or mentally ill. Indeed, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual listed homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973 and renamed “gender identity disorder” as gender dysphoria only in 2013. It’s unsurprising that depictions of queer characters have frequently conformed to prevailing popular and medical opinion. Queerness and psychological disturbance remain linked in productions such as Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), Sonny Mallhi’s The Roommate (2011), and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve (2018–).

Post–Hays Code Film and Television

The 1960s saw pushes for civil rights and freedom of expression in many walks of life. Uncoincidentally, the Hays Code was finally laid to rest in 1968. Having proved unpopular and largely unenforceable, it was replaced by the precursor to the current rating system, again from the Motion Picture Association of America: G (general audiences), M (mature), R (restricted), and X (under 16 not admitted). The ratings of PG (parental guidance suggested), PG-13 (parental-guidance suggested for those under 13), and NC-17 (under 17 not admitted, replacing X) were added later.

Vito Russo standing on the street corner with cars and buildings behind him at Castro District in San Francisco.

Figure 10.2 Celluloid Activist is the biography of gay-rights activist Vito Russo.

As Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet (adapted into a 1995 documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman) points out, same-sex representations historically have a much lower threshold for obscenity than do those of heterosexual relations (figure 10.2). That is, a scene where a man kisses another man has been treated as much more obscene—likelier to incur an R rating—than a man kissing a woman.^[13]

Free Expression: Then and Now

The first U.S. Supreme Court case to address homosexuality in terms of free speech was One, Inc. v. Olesen in 1958. In it, the court ruled that neutral or positive homosexual content was not inherently obscene. The case had major implications for the media industry, because productions with LGBTQ+ content or themes could not be instantly labeled as pornography even if they flouted the constrictions of the Comstock laws, which blocked content considered obscene from being distributed by mail, or other moral strictures that had historically mandated content considered obscene.

Progressive changes in the portrayal of LGBTQ+ individuals, communities, and issues across media owe much to the continued activism of many groups, from local to international, and changes in public opinion. In 1985, Vito Russo and Jewelle Gomez, among others, founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (now simply called GLAAD so as not to erase those who identify in ways other than gay or lesbian) in response to negative media coverage of the AIDS crisis. GLAAD promotes inclusive language that does not pathologize. For example, it successfully lobbied the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other outlets to drop “homosexual” in favor of “gay” in 1987. GLAAD also hosts a media awards ceremony each year, compiles indexes related to LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream film, and publishes an annual report addressing the inclusion of LGBTQ+ elements in television.^[14]

Underground and Experimental Film

In spite of these legal and cultural restrictions, a gay underground cinema arose with iconoclastic independent filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. Warhol’s Blow Job (1964) consists of a single long take—implicitly of the face of a man on whom another man is performing oral sex. Anger, who worked with the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, made experimental films with homoerotic undertones (and sometimes overtones). Fireworks (1947), which features a group of muscular male sailors and sexually suggestive imagery, led to obscenity charges against a distributor who screened it. A theater manager who screened Anger’s Scorpio Rising in 1963 faced similar charges. In both cases, the charges were dismissed.

Though born in Hollywood, the lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer spurned the mainstream (figure 10.3). She directed the groundbreaking Dyketactics in 1973—a four-minute short that consists primarily of fragmented, nonlinear images of naked women walking around outdoors. The later Nitrate Kisses (1992), funded partially by the National Endowment for the Arts, features intimate footage of “deviant” couples, a thread related to the author Willa Cather and her rumored lesbianism, and the victimization of lesbians in Nazi Germany. Unprecedented and avant-garde as Hammer’s style was, she has met criticism from within the feminist community for her association of female bodies with fruit, trees, and other natural images that some view as complicit with the heteropatriarchal construction of women as passive, flowery, and fertile.

Check Your Knowledge

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. Which of the following best explains why the “Bury Your Gays” trope persists in mainstream film, according to the chapter?
A) It reflects audience demand for tragic stories
B) It was reductive and harmful but requisites for queer representation to exist at all at that particular time
C) It is considered empowering by LGBTQ+ communities at that time
D) It is mandated by current film rating systems

2. The chapter suggests that the automatic association of HIV/AIDS with male homosexuality in film is problematic because:
A) it accurately reflects medical statistics.
B) it increases awareness of public health issues.
C) it reinforces reductive and harmful stereotypes.
D) it is required by censorship laws.

3. In the context of LGBTQ+ film, what is the significance of “reading against the grain” as described by Chon Noriega?
A) it refers to interpreting queer subtexts in films where direct representation is censored
B) it is a method of film production
C) it involves ignoring subtext in favor of explicit content
D) it means only analyzing mainstream films

4. How does the chapter critique Barbara Hammer’s experimental film style from a feminist perspective?
A) It celebrates her use of mainstream Hollywood techniques.
B) It claims her work is universally accepted within feminist circles.
C) It argues that her films lack artistic merit.
D) It claims her work is universally accepted within feminist circles It questions her association of female bodies with natural imagery, which may reinforce heteropatriarchal constructions.

5. The chapter argues that critique of LGBTQ+ media texts is essential because:
A) It helps viewers avoid problematic content
B) It reveals flaws as symptoms of broader sociopolitical systems
C) It discourages the production of queer films
D) It ensures only positive portrayals are shown

1. How do recurring tropes like “Bury Your Gays” shape public perceptions of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities in media
2. In what ways have legal decisions, such as One, Inc. v. Olesen, influenced the representation of LGBTQ+ themes in film and media?
3. Discuss the role of organizations like GLAAD in changing language and representation in mainstream media. Why is inclusive language important?
4. How do underground and experimental filmmakers challenge mainstream narratives about LGBTQ+ identities? Give examples from the chapter.
5. What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of associating female bodies with natural imagery in lesbian experimental film, as seen in Barbara Hammer’s work?

Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers

1. B) It was reductive and harmful but requisites for queer representation to exist at all at that particular time
2. C) it reinforces reductive and harmful stereotypes.
3. A) it refers to interpreting queer subtexts in films where direct representation is censored
4. D) It claims her work is universally accepted within feminist circles It questions her association of female bodies with natural imagery, which may reinforce heteropatriarchal constructions
5. B) It reveals flaws as symptoms of broader sociopolitical systems