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Abstract
Queer adolescence films in the US and Britain in the 1990s show positive representations of same‐sex attraction, romance, and confrontations with homophobia. Films like Beautiful Thing, Edge of Seventeen, and Get Real are primarily targeted at young gay and lesbian viewers who need supportive and optimistic visualizations of eroticized queer politics, struggle and success, agony and happiness. These films are characterized, however, by complicated representations of the queer body, eroticization of physical inequality in same‐sex relationships, and the melodramatic coming‐out of agonized protagonists, which highly support the notion of a fixed and stable sexual orientation.
Notes
Gilad Padva is a doctoral student at the Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies and the Film & TV Department in Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is grateful to Regine‐Mihal Friedman, a film professor at the Film & TV Department in Tel Aviv University, and Naomi Paz from Tel Aviv University. Correspondence to: Gilad Padva, PO Box 39985, Tel Aviv, Israel. Email: [email protected]. The financial support of this research is courtesy of Dan David Prize by means of Dan David Prize Scholarship 2004.
Ben Gove, “Framing Gay Youth,” Screen 37, no. 2 (1996): 177.
Gove, 178.
Jennifer I. Downey, “Sexual Orientation Issues in Adolescent Girls,” Women's Health Issues 4 (1994).
Steven D. Harsin, “Pathfinder: Developing a Male Gay Identity,” Collection Building 11, no. 4 (1991): 71.
Joyce Hunter, “Violence against Lesbian and Gay Male Youths,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 5 (1990): 295–300.
Paul Gibson, “Gay Male and Lesbian Youth Suicide,” in Prevention and Intervention in Youth Suicide: Report to the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide, Vol. 3, ed. Marcia R. Feinleib (Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services, 1989), 110–42.
J. W. Edwards, “A Sociological Analysis of an In/visible Minority Group: Male Adolescent Homosexuals,” Youth & Society 27 (3), 1996: 334–55.
Rob Cover, “First Contact: Queer Theory, Sexual Identity, and ‘Mainstream’ Film,” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 5, no. 1 (2000): 71–89.
One of the classic examples is Vincent Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (USA 1956), which focuses on the outsider man who is more sensitive and delicate than his schoolmates in a boarding school. Never, in the film or the play, is it indicated that this student Tom Lee (John Kerr) is gay. Lee's schoolmates call him “Sister Boy” and annoy him, especially after they discover him sitting on the beach with a group of faculty wives, sewing a button on his shirt. At the Happy End, older (and married) Tom visits his old school. Tom's sissiness is depicted in this film as nothing but a phase.
Keith Howes, Broadcasting It: An Encyclopedia of Homosexuality in Film, Radio and TV in the UK 1923–1993 (London: Cassell, 1993), 954–5.
Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1987 [1981]), 252.
Alfred P. Kielswasser and Michelle A. Wolf, “Mainstream Television, Adolescent Homosexuality, and Significant Silence,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9 (1992): 362.
Beautiful Thing (UK, 1995). Directed by Hettie MacDonald; Produced by Tony Garnett and Bill Shapter; Screenwriter: Jonathan Harvey; Channel Four/Film Four Distribution/World Productions; 89 min.
Edge of Seventeen (USA, 1998). Directed by David Moreton; Produced by David Moreton and Todd Stephens; Screenwriter: Todd Stephens; Blue Streak Films/Luna Pictures; 99 min.
Get Real (UK/South Africa, 1998). Directed by Simon Shore; Produced by Stephen Taylor; Screenwriter: Patrick Wile; Distant Horizon/Graphite Film/British Screen/Art Council of England/National Film TruSte Company; 110 min.
Dyer, Richard, The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002): 167.
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue‐Ellen Case (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–82.
Eric's visit to Angie's club is similar to other cinematic subcultural initiations located in gay venues. Jamie and Ste's first visit to The Gloucester, for example, was also their first encounter with camp subculture, represented by a drag queen who sings the traditional Israeli song “Hava Nagila” (in Hebrew: “let's be happy/gay and sing together”), and welcomes the boys to the club in his/her sarcastic style. The gay venues are politicized in these films as a liminal sphere, public and private at the same time, where queer adolescents can express their affection freely within a supportive community.
Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 21.
Laura Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 75–9.
See Sedgwick, 4, and Thomas Elsaesser (1972), “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 2002 [1987]), 43–69.
Nicole Alderice, The Theatre and the Dramatic Theory. (London: Harrap, 1965); Jane Feuer, “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television,” Screen 25, no. 1 (1984): 4–16.
Martha Vicinus, “Helpless and Unfriended: Nineteenth Century Domestic Melodrama,” New Literary History, 13, no. 1 (1981).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage 1977 [1975]).
Cover, 71–89.
Michael Wilmington, “Get Real,” Film Comment, March–April 1999, 79. Wilmington arguably notes that where the Catholic Capra wanted his heroes to confess, to extract themselves from the web of social hypocrisy in which they were entangled—and incidentally, win their lovers as well—Steven's situation here is more hopeless.
Steven Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 20.
See Gilad Padva, “Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine,” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7, no. 4 (2002): 281–92.
Avner Bernheimer, “One More Love Story” [in Hebrew], 7 Days (a weekly supplement of Yediot Aharonot), 3 March, 1997, 84.
Until the British Channel Four's series Queer as Folk was broadcast in the late 1990s, followed by an extended American adaptation in the early twenty‐first century, there were almost no homosexual sex scenes in television films, soap operas and sitcoms. According to Kielswasser and Wolf, when homosexual genital activity was depicted (or suggested) among adolescents and young adults in television movies in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was often identified as the result of some intense, overpowering social force, such as violence and imprisonment, madness and military service, or poverty and a dysfunctional family environment. Gay and lesbian adolescents may find themselves in such situations, but note that these situations do not create gay or lesbian identities. “On television, a young straight male may lose his virginity simply as part of ‘growing up’ … [but] the ‘homosexual’ loss of virginity for a young male, if it were to be explored on television, would portray him not as the proud voice of a gay identity but as another pathetic victim of situational homosexuality” (Kielwasser and Wolf, 361–2).
Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorship (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000), 205–6.
Earl Jackson, Jr., Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 17.
Tim Edwards, Erotics & Politics: Gay Male Sexuality, Masculinity and Feminism (London: Routledge, 1994), 88.
Jeffrey A. Brown, “Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Superhero,” African American Review 33 (1), 1999: 26–7.
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (London: Allison & Busby, 1978), 87.
Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 191.
Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Calvin Thomas, Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 35.
Richard Dyer, “Seen to Be Believed: Some Problems in the Representation of Gay People as Typical,” in Dyer's The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London: Routledge, 1993), 42.
For an analysis of queer politicization of camp subculture, see Gilad Padva, “Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24 (2), 2000: 216–43.
Simon Button, “Best Friends,” Attitude 75, July 2000, 46.
Stephen Maddison, Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 194.
Barbara Klinger, “‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited: The Progressive Text,” Screen, January–February (1984): 36.
Dyer, The Culture of Queers, 47.
Cover, 77
Larry Gross, “You're the First Person I've Ever Told: Letters to a Fictional Gay Teen,” in Talking Liberties: Gay Men's Essays on Politics, Culture, and Sex, ed. Michael Bronsky (New York: Richard Kosak, 1996), 383–4.
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 105.
Farmer.
Mulvey, 76.
B. Rubi Rich (“New Queer Cinema,” Sight and Sound 2 [5], August 1992: 31–4) suggests that in new queer films there are traces of appropriation and pastiche, of irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism. Rich contends that these works are irreverent, energetic, alternatively minimalist and excessive, and, above all, full of pleasure.