When Moonlight arrived in theaters, less than 20 percent of major movies released in 2016 had LGBT characters. In 2015, LGBT characters appeared in less than 1/5 of Hollywood films. With each year prior to 2015, that number decreases drastically.
As we celebrate Pride month this June, we should remember this lack of LGBT representation in our movies is no accident.
Though we don’t talk about it, supposedly liberal Hollywood prohibited homosexuality in film, starting in the 1920s with the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” censorship. This same censorship banned depictions of interracial couples, nudity, profanity, and ridicule of clergy. Curiously, not a single “Don’t and Be Careful” prohibited violence.
Hollywood banned homosexuality again in 1934 with the Production Code, script approval guidelines Father Daniel Lord wrote at the urging of Catholic groups who believed art should adhere to Catholic philosophy. Despite our country’s founding belief in religious liberty, Catholic doctrine censored and defined our films. Through 1968, Hollywood’s Production Code polices remained in place until the Motion Picture Association of America formed and replaced it. The MPAA, however, left in place prohibitions regarding LGBT folk in film, giving audiences nearly three more decades of LGBT characters missing in our movies.
Well, mostly missing.
From the start of film history in 1895 and through the 1930s, Hollywood presented homosexuality as an object of “ridicule and laughter.” According to MediaSmarts, major movie studios made popular “the archetype of ‘the sissy’—foppish and feminine males, often of delicate sensibilities.” This sissy archetype created an image of effeminate gay men as undesirable amusements for audiences, good for a chuckle.
Moreover, as MediaSmarts notes, from the 1960s through the 80s, gay characters began to appear frequently in films such as The Children’s Hour (1961), The Boys in the Band (1970), Midnight Express (1978), and Vanishing Point (1971) as “dangerous, violent, predatory, or suicidal.”
Re-visit 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2, and watch dream stalker Freddy Krueger become a metaphor for homosexuality as something evil, violent, and horrific.
From these films, a stereotype—LGBT folk as pitiful, monstrous, and scary.
When I saw my first queer characters in 1996’s The Birdcage, it was illegal in Oklahoma to be gay. I was a closeted 9th grader, growing up in the rural suburbs, watching the film with my mother. She fell in love with The Birdcage, quoting it often, telling me frequently she preferred Nathan Lane’s outrageous drag queen, Albert, to Robin Williams’ more subdued character, Armand.
When I came out in 2001 during my freshmen year in film school, I researched the history of LGBT representation in America’s movies. I learned about the Production Code, the Don’ts and Be Carefuls. I discovered how, along with the MPAA, each censorship board was responsible for why I’d grown up in the 80s and 90s rarely, if ever, seeing realistic LGBT characters in movies. In their censorship, they’d erased us.
In film school, then, I learned it’s no accident less than 20 percent of 2016’s major movies featured an LGBT character. Seen in this context, it’s no accident LGBT folk grow up believing something’s wrong with us, not when our movies refused to tell our stories and say we exist.
Lucky me, I came of age in the nineties when the number of stories about LGBT characters increased, if not dramatically, noticeably. I came out of the closet to myself and others just as the British and American versions of Queer as Folk humanized LGBT people for me. So, too, the case with Roseanne’s primetime lesbian kiss on her then-revolutionary hit TV show, Roseanne, MTV’s The Real World, NBC’s Will and Grace, and ABC’s Ellen.
At age 28, when I finally watched Greg Araki’s 1991 New Queer Cinema film The Living End, I saw for the first time a version of myself in a movie. The main character’s a film critic, a disillusioned twenty-something who listens to The Smiths and watches French New Wave films. I cried.
The year before I turned 30, director Andrew Haigh’s Weekend came out in theaters. Watching Weekend, I felt grounded and less alone, a feeling I’m not sure I can put into words. The film’s two male protagonists, queer twenty-somethings, spend a weekend together debating life, love, art, and society. I’d never seen anything like it, and I’m thankful every day a straight friend from graduate film school recommended it.
The Cinematropolis asked me to share my experience with Queer Cinema in this article. It feels fitting, then, to conclude with a list of films with LGBT characters, to recommend movies the way my fellow film student, Greg, recommended Weekend to me.
