Welcome, creatures! It’s been a while. I’ve been frantically editing the sequel to Gay and Catholic. You should get one more post this week (shorter) and then a weirder thing next week. For now, here’s...
Ten Queer Movies You Won’t Find on Other Pride Month Lists
even though they’re probably my own actual top ten! Is it because they’re old-fashioned, displaying the low sensibilities of a less civilized age? Is it because they tend more toward the creepy and sleazy than the uplifting?
Is it because they’re not necessarily that good? ONLY SOMETIMES! Let’s explore. Links are to my reviews. In order of how much I like them for a top-ten queer movies list, not in order of, like, quality or w/e.
10. Beyond the Hills. Atheist Alina comes to an isolated Romanian women’s monastery to rescue her ex-lover Voichita, but when the nun resists her liberation, a chain of events is set in motion which leads to accusations of demonic activity, and ultimately to torture and death. I waffled on even putting this on the list. If I were judging purely on quality it’d be like #2 or 3, but it is so relentlessly painful that it went beyond “lol remember when the only corporate sponsor of Pride was Absolut?” to “lol remember when the only gay emotion was misery?” On the other hand, this grueling movie is also haunting, filmed with attention to all the tasks and sights and sounds of the monastery. It takes the love of God seriously, even when depicting horrifying actions by His followers. It’s a slow-motion disaster film in which the tornado, the flood, the inferno is devotion—first Alina’s fierce devotion to Voichita, which leads Alina to try to protect her without respecting anything she says, and then the other nuns’ devotion to what they know of God.
Based on a true story! So you can say a prayer when you’re done.
9. But I’m a Cheerleader! I came down from the high of the last in-person Revoice by watching this ridiculous, candy-colored ex-gay satire and that was the perfect setting. Its quality is mixed, its satire is sort of popcorny in a way that sometimes blunts it, but the assignment here was, “Make coming out in a conversion-therapy camp somehow a comfort-watch,” and they did that. The color scheme is basically mass-market Shock Treatment (see below) and tbh that’s the ethos too. I always enjoy it! Caveat spectator, the opening credits are extremely challenging for ladies practicing custody of the eyes.
8. Madchen in Uniform. A schoolgirl in a militaristic Prussian school can’t hide her crush on a young, beautiful teacher. I’ve only seen the 1958 remake, not the 1931 original. Given the time period, I expected a much less gentle movie. Madchen doesn’t condemn its heroine, though she indulges in some self-punishing adolescent despair. The psychological explanations are treated with subtlety, mixing social criticism and an attempt to understand how we love, not so much whom. The girl’s sexuality is treated as a personal experience, not an example of a category, if you see what I mean.
7. The Happy Prince. This is another movie where I’m like, “Okay, so it is not great filmmaking, but—no, wait! Hear me out!” Rupert Everett writes, directs, and stars as Oscar Wilde in the years of his swift post-prison decline. Of the Wilde films I’ve seen, this is the one which best captures the Catholic element; camerawork and dialogue emphasize a genuinely Wildean spirituality of love as humiliation. It’s a cringey movie and it overexplains sometimes, but it’s heartfelt and the things that are best in it are things nobody asked it to do.
I will say here that I respect the lists that are like, “Ten great LGBT films that aren’t about coming out,” but for this list I wanted to include only movies I thought were in some important way about the experience of being queer. Ultimately that’s every queer movie, obviously like Can You Ever Forgive Me? has much to show us about that widow among the nations, the gay 1990s. But I’m selecting here for “movies that say something important and unexpected about queerness” over “movies that are good.”
6. The Rocky Horror Picture Show/Shock Treatment. I’ve never seen RHPS in theaters, just watched it with my high-school best friend in his parents’ basement, doing all the audience responses ourselves that we’d learned from a cassette tape. Which if you think that’s a sad version of the experience I’m gonna go ahead and argue that it is just as iconically queer as throwing toast in a crowd, if not moreso. Anyway then in college at the dawn after a long and gnarly debauch a bunch of us stumbled into a video store and rented this thing and once again it was just me and a gay guy doing the responses ourselves, for the education of the youth.
Oh, what is it? These are pastiches of B-movies. They are triumphs of Sensibility. They have a certain theoretical hedonism but it’s all expressed with such camp comedy that it will make you feel a pastiche of lust rather than the sincere sin. Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon are in the first one and I like the second one more than most people. The second one swerves into satire, all televangelism and Stepford therapy, yet remains fundamentally aware of its own blithe ridiculousness. (The title of this newsletter is from Shock Treatment.) God, I love these movies.
5. Cruising aka Hey There Little Red Riding Handkerchief. A serial-killer flick set in the late-’70s, pre-AIDS world of gay s&m clubs. It’s got an unexpected fairy-tale atmosphere, all glowing mist in dark wild parks; everything’s so skillful, from the music to the camera to Al Pacino as a straight (?????) cop going undercover in a world where lots of people costume themselves as what he’s hiding. For obvious reasons this earned protests when it opened. It is obscene and violent in that 1970s “what are limits? We just don’t know” way, and it doesn’t escape the homophobic tropes it tries clumsily to counter. But the most phantasmagoric scene of surreal horror is the one where the villain is the police.
Let me just say, I would pick this over Silence of the Lambs in a heartbeat.
4. Dracula’s Daughter, Rope, Bride of Frankenstein. This spot reserved for pre-Stonewall genre flicks whose ardent emotions and high-contrast, stylized sensibilities make them must-see queer cinema even though if you think about the metaphors for ten seconds they’re tres homophobique. In ascending order of quality—first the tale of the doomed vampire Countess Zaleska and her gorgeous, gorgeous hands (I had the Celluloid Closet photo of her entrancing some ingenue with her magnificent mitts taped up in my locker in high school), then Hitchcock’s entry in the Leopold and Loeb Film Festival (v. hot slapping scene); then an extraordinary, genre-defining dreamscape, by a gay director and about the conflict between creativity and procreativity, which inspired approx one million other movies and also Rebecca Brown’s brilliant ’90s dyke experimental short-story collection The Terrible Girls.
If you want a fourth for this item you can probably cram the Nazimova Salome in there.
3. Chocolate Babies. Black queer terrorists suffer, drink, gossip, sing, shoot up, bone down, kiss on the mouth, visit their mothers, and kidnap closeted local politicians. The budget for this movie was $3.76 and a bag of Andy Capp’s Hot Fries. I want to set your expectations appropriately: This movie is unsubtle, not in control of its tone, unconcerned with matters of taste; there are some professional actors in the mix but the ethos is all the opposite of professionalism. I don’t care (“I don’t have to care about that” is the refrain of this list, I see), because our heroes wear all their glittering damage like a stolen ballgown.
2. Desert Hearts. This Las Vegas love story has a moral (about straight hypocrisy and gay wholesomeness), but I forgive it, because it’s perfect, from the first moment when grave Vivian in her staid skirt suit sees wild Cay driving backwards blasting rock’n’roll. Perfect art direction, perfect actors, perfect music: I only think of this movie now whenever I hear “Blue Moon.” Lush, romantic, an ingenue version of the idolatry of eros which now appears before us in its strident maturity. I note that the sex scene is meant to turn you on and imho is best understood as softcore porn, so don’t watch that part.
1. My Beautiful Laundrette. My single favorite gay movie. Written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen “Prick Up Your” Frears (aka Stephen “The Queen” Frears, also apropos). Omar, a young Pakistani Briton whose family is trying to milk Thatcher’s England for all it’s worth, lost his best friend Johnny back in high school, when Johnny joined up with white supremacists. When Omar gets saddled with the family’s struggling laundromat, he uses it as an opportunity to hire/gloat over/gaze longingly at destitute squatter Johnny. It’s a Mobius strip where the revenge side is the forgiveness side.
This is a comedy at once hard-edged and softhearted. Daniel Day-Lewis as Johnny is the celebrity from this movie, so early in his career that he hadn’t earned his surname hyphen, but Gordon Warnecke is the star. Warnecke brings such a rueful charm to Omar, to his folly and his hopes. Kureishi also wrote the coming-of-age novel The Buddha of Suburbia, which I remember really liking and hope to reread pretty soon.
Honorable, if that’s what we’re calling it, mention: Withnail & I, which I only remembered at the last minute. One of my very favorite films of all time... very very funny and also heartbreaking.
NB: I haven’t watched Tongues Untied since the ’90s and assume once I rewatch it will topple somebody from this list.
I have now abased myself sufficiently (Cruising in the top five? really???) that you all owe me your own lists. Go and do it.
icymi
I did a joint review of two very different, complementary “Internet novels,” Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This and Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits.
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