Excellent NYT OpEd piece, R102. Thanks for finding it.
[quote]For over a decade, the unspoken rule of gay cinema and television has been that gay men can be sexy protagonists — as long as they are masculine gay men. Feminine or gender-nonconforming gay men, on the other hand, are desexualized comedic relief. Masculine gay men are central characters, understood as attractive, powerful, interesting and dynamic. Feminine gay men, gender-nonconforming folks and trans people are, at best, guest stars, denied real plots, romantic story lines or central positions in the story.
[quote]Worse, across mainstream movies and television, gay protagonists often gain their status as protagonists and palatability by distancing themselves from femininity. Take “Will & Grace”: Will Truman is acceptable in part because he is not Jack McFarland. Or “Queer as Folk”: Brian Kinney is acceptable in part because he is not Emmett Honeycutt. Or even the reboot of “Queer Eye”: Antoni Porowski and Karamo Brown are the heartthrobs in part because they’re more masculine than Jonathan Van Ness.
[quote]If “Love, Simon” didn’t follow this trope outright, it certainly flirted with it. Early on, the film is careful to establish all of the ways that Simon is not that kind of gay.
[quote]A message that gay young people receive throughout our adolescence is that you need to be the “right type of gay” — masculine, not flamboyant, a man’s man — to be respected, to be affirmed by your family or to be romantically desirable. These messages hurt. They sting. They linger. And they don’t end with adolescence, evidenced by the many online dating profiles proclaiming “no fats, no femmes.”
[quote]I spent the entire movie waiting for Simon and Ethan to reconcile, to have a moment where Simon owned up to being embarrassed to be around someone as feminine as Ethan. I kept waiting for the scene when Simon said something like: “I’m sorry. I was embarrassed by you because I was working on myself. I struggled to affirm your femininity because I was acting from a place of personal shame. Your courage has paved the way for my life to be easier, and I wish I would’ve stood up for you.” But it never happened.
[quote]It’s important to acknowledge that — in 2018, with a $17 million budget — “Love, Simon” is trailblazing, that for L.G.B.T. teenagers, it is the only thing like it out there. But it’s equally important to acknowledge that the “Love, Simon” team reiterated the trope of the queenly, femme supporting character with no real plot. As femme gay men, gender-nonconforming people, and trans folks, we too deserve better than to be caricatured by Hollywood.
.jpg){kind=link}
