Michael Cera as Allan in 'Barbie'
It’s odd how so much of contemporary queer visibility is illustrating paradoxes in real time. Acceptance and tolerance do seem to be winning, but terribly slowly. And in opposition to this, homophobia and transphobia have gotten louder and even more disruptive and violent. So there is a larger audience for queer narratives, but more presence means painting bigger targets. So for every big gesture or subplot, there are attempted boycotts or international censors lurking with knives ready.
This isn’t new. Vito Russo’s still-essential 1981 book The Celluloid Closet addresses the ways queer audiences had to learn to squint and parse signifiers like grad-school semioticians since the silent era, using coding and trickery to discuss tiny, glittering fragments of hidden lives. And in some instances, filmmakers and studios have returned to that kind of Purloined Letter approach, all the better to dodge overzealous censors or psychos with guns. This summer’s Haunted Mansion, from gay director Justin Simien, illustrates this situation with a weird balancing act between a publicized Dan Levy cameo and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it revelation that happens without words or acknowledgment. Fast X lives and dies based on Jason Momoa’s character Dante, a fashionable crime lord with a peerless accessories game and a love for drama, and any queer viewer can tell you he’s the gayest villain since Saint Taylor Negron’s Mister Milo back in The Last Boy Scout — but he is never explicitly identified as such.
So in 2023 we’re now back to the era of plausible deniability to ease past barriers. There was an uproar about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem made by the right-wing outrage industry having a whole woke/broke scandal. This was due to a marketing miscommunication and people like Andrew Tate being unable to avoid stirring shit up when they thought a mutant rat might be dating a mutant roach. All that matters about Master Splinter, as a character points out in this year’s exuberant Joy Ride, is that he’s a good father. In Talk to Me, popular jerkface Haley is played by trans actor Zoe Terakes. Haley is neither a trans nor a nonbinary character, but the film is still banned in Kuwait because of their presence.
Globally, queer people merely existing is too much for these insecure reactionaries. “We live on a dying planet, facing impossible obstacles.” That’s what Billy (Cole Escola) said in last year’s Please Baby Please, hitting on the big thesis statement for anyone trying to live a truthful life right now. But the despoilers have won. There’s not really any coming back from the climate crisis at this point, and brazen demagogues and Nazis are regaining the apparatus of power throughout the world. So why is it, then, that their anger demands that queer people just not exist at them? They’ve killed the planet — how is that not enough?
There are other paths that can be taken, whether it’s Michael Cera’s Allan in Barbie or how — much in the way that Star Trek’s the Borg always seemed to represent an industrial socialist technarchy — there’s something very elegant and sexy and queer about the way Esai Morales’ Gabriel in Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning — Part One becomes the emissary of AI menace The Entity; a haute couture glow-up with an upgrade in the most intimate of knife-fighting and salt-and-pepper menace. Would love Donna Haraway’s thoughts on the matter.
The recent Theater Camp does a good job of navigating a space where identity is mutable (the defining characteristic of any actor), representing all manner of queer folk of all ages, and it got a PG-13 from the MPA — an organization that loves nothing more than throwing out R or NC-17 ratings at anything even slightly LGBTQIA+. Theater Camp is an immeasurably valuable film because it depicts queer identities that aren’t focused on the sexual side of sexual identity, and it does so with a hospitable and open heart, with a deep appreciation for show-stopping musical numbers. (See also: Celia Rose Gooding’s “Keep Us Connected” in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds musical episode “Subspace Rhapsody,” responsible for the biggest emotional response in anything this year since Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music and The Last of Us episode “Long Long Time,” because game recognize game.)
In some ways an analysis of trends and tropes, in others a tract about the rich bounty of queer cinema currently out there (and coming soon), this piece is trying to get a grip on the trees keeping us culturally above the rising waters of a doomed world. There is no monolithic queer opinion on anything (trust me, I’ve been getting into enough verbal scraps about Bros in the past year to bring back wild flashbacks to the days of Alien3 discourse), but here are some thoughts about The Current State of Queer Cinema.
Red, White and Royal Blue currently streaming via Amazon Prime Video
Incredibly popular for an R-rated rom-com about dudes shaking up multinational complacency by doing it, this feel-good fantasy talks about PrEP and actually illustrates the catch-22 paradox about current queer visibility pretty well. And it does all that even while eschewing realism with the same glee with which President Uma Thurman tears into her pan-Southern accent — seriously, it does for American English what Angelina Jolie’s exquisite turn in Alexander did for continental Europe linguistics. Red, White and Royal Blue stars Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine are pleasant without being particularly gritty (the latter much better served by his turn as football star Jeff in Bottoms), and the film delivers the emotions you would expect of it. The only major stumbling block is its villain: Real life has multiple examples of complex queer villains (think Morrissey, Caitlyn Jenner or George Santos), so leaning on a one-and-a-half-dimensional cipher like this film does feels a bit disingenuous. Still, audiences are flocking to it — from the privacy of their own homes.
Bad Girl Boogey currently available via video on demand
Director/co-writer Alice Maio Mackay was 17 when she made Bad Girl Boogey, a gutsy and brutal look that sidesteps all the niceties that allow audiences to not have to engage directly with what they’re viewing. The murderous cruelty that follows a hand-carved mask throughout contemporary Australia in this film resides in everyone. The mask in question merely allows the wearer to access their darkest impulses, and it’s the queer community who bears the brunt of it. This film bolsters LGBTQIA+ representation in horror as both heroes and victims, to the point where it may be too much. But the catharsis this trans director summons is undeniable, and anyone interested in horror that pulls no punches needs to pay attention to whatever Mackay is up to.
Kokomo City coming soon to the Belcourt
Digital monochrome portraits of Black trans sex workers across the nation, this documentary from D. Smith has so much heart, and it will fuck you up. It’s funny and fraught and tragically real in that subject Koko Da Doll was already no longer with us before the festival run even started. These women are smart and resourceful, and they are doing everything they can just to get by. Kokomo City illustrates how transphobia and homophobia are symptoms of corrosive selfishness — how so much of the chaos in this particular historical moment is driven by inexplicably rage-filled people not wanting to even have to peripherally acknowledge that something counter to their way of life, which was their parents’ way of life, exists. It’s the same PragerU denialism we’re seeing in school systems across the country, but focused on the present rather than the still-scarred past. Whatever emotions you’re looking to experience and explore, this has all of them.
'Passages'
Passages opening Aug. 25 at the Belcourt
For a film already infamous for getting slapped with an NC-17 (since surrendered) because of its sexual frankness, Passages is even more shocking because of its emotional forthrightness. Like its 50-year-old progenitor The Mother and the Whore, this is a portrait of what happens when someone (in this case, a filmmaker named Tomas, played by international treasure Franz Rogowski) decides that one person (his husband Martin, played by precious angel/Paddington/Q Ben Whishaw) isn’t enough, bringing schoolteacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos, fresh from magical realist/queer sci-fi epic The Five Devils, still the best film of 2023 and the only film with the power to unmake my own existence, currently streaming on Mubi) into the kind of emotional singularity that happens when you love someone who lacks empathy. This is a great film, but also a bleak one — despite the fact that it stars three of the best (and most intriguing) actors in global cinema, it’s the emotional truths that really stick in your brain. Director and co-writer Ira Sachs pulled off a similar trick with 2012’s Keep the Lights On, which did a very good job of explaining that the cruelties an addict deploys don’t always disappear when they get clean — though he makes films that often deal with a gay milieu, the emotions are relatable to anyone. Thankfully brisk (just over 90 minutes), this is one of those films that speaks enough truth to keep the mind swirling long after the lights come up and you saunter home. If Barbie didn’t help you end your toxic relationship, bet this one will.
'Bottoms'
Bottoms opening in theaters Sept. 1
Uninterested in a protracted coming-out narrative, the latest Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby) joint finds two lesbian high school students (national treasures Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott) crafting a novel solution to their lack of dates and popularity — creating a self-defense course for young women that allows them to win over the objects of their affection. Bottoms is a singular approach to the raunchy teen comedy, and it fires on all cylinders, with great supporting work from Red, White and Royal Blue’s Galitzine as the star quarterback and former NFL star Marshawn Lynch, who is one of the funniest people alive and who should immediately be signed to do more comedies by enterprising filmmakers as soon as the strikes are over. A lot of people are balking at some of the violence in this film, but the violence feels correct if one is being truly honest about American schools, regardless of the general, mildly fanciful tone.
