Exploring how queer characters journeyed from cutting room floor to a staple of modern cinema.
Queer inclusion in film has been a minefield since the early inception of the medium. Industry guidelines such as Hollywood’s Hays Code as well as censorship laws across different nations, have made Queer stories a complete commercial risk.
Queer film dates back to around the late 1800s with “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film”, released in 1894, often referenced as the first “queer” motion-picture project due to its portrayal of two men sharing a dance together. Not long afterwards, the likes of Chaplin used a variety of queer comedy gags across a few different productions. other films featured lesser or more explicit queer illustrations, but this quickly diminished in the 1930s. Many nations began enforcing what can be described as the “no homo promo” laws to different extremities claiming it was a matter of ethics and Hollywood followed suit when they saw the inception of the Motion Picture Production Code which prohibited a list of obscenities being shown in productions. One of these was any portrayal of homosexuality.
After the restrictions on promoting homosexuality in film were enforced, screenwriters had to find crafty ways to include queer characters in their creations. The Celluloid Closet states that “For all its efforts, the Production Code didn’t erase homosexuals from the screen; it just made them harder to find. And now they had a new identity, as cold-blooded villains”. We can see this play out in Joel Cairo, the antagonist in The Maltese Falcon who is distinguished through his effeminate conduct and apparent love of perfume.
Moving into the 1950s and 60s the film landscape saw occasional mentions of queerness such as Rebel Without a Cause, a film that is referenced as featuring the first gay teenager, and Victim, a film that criticised the rampant homophobia in Britain at the time. It wasn’t until the end of the 60s that the Hays Code was finally lifted. As social attitudes slowly became more progressive, the queer character could attempt to move into the mainstream.
The 70s and 80s saw an increase in representation both explicitly and implicitly. Films like Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence featured displays of queer attraction without offering itself as an exclusively queer creation. Other directors like John Waters – who created the cult film Pink Flamingos, an experimental and inescapably queer film – challenged norms and the definitive idea of camp.
The 1990s is where everything truly took off. Tensions around the HIV/AIDS epidemic were high, as wider society questioned the morality of the increasing numbers of LGBT movements, particularly those involving the youth. This created a two-way split when it came to the mainstream inclusion of queer characters, they were either the victim or the perpetrator.
The queer villain was no longer merely just a flamboyant stereotype, but instead a heartless pervert. Films like Cruising, the story of a detective searching for a serial killer who was involved with the gay BDSM community presented homosexuals as solely sex-crazed lunatics, a stereotype that while having no evident basis, still finds its way into portrayal.
On the other hand, many films developed a somewhat-problematic feeling of sympathy from the viewers perspective such as in Boys Don’t Cry, in which a transgender young adult suffers various hate-crimes once their biological sex is discovered. While examples of this are not inherently problematic by themselves, the development and the normalisation of this type of plotline are up for question about whether they spread openness or instead portray the homosexual as something to pity.
The New Queer Cinema movement of the 90s led by directors such as Gregg Araki fought the stigmas and stereotypes and led a generation of LGBT viewership towards a brighter hope into the new millennium. With many countries easing restrictions on LGBT cinema, queer characters are more prevalent than ever, but does this lead to a new problem: commodification?
On the matter of historical queer representation in cinema, Caspar Salmon, a film critic who specialises in LGBT and arthouse cinema, believes that the queer villain trope has been damaging. It has played on a massively hateful and discriminatory trope, namely that queer people living among ‘normal’ people in society represented something to be feared. The idea of queer villainy played on pre-existing fears and must have reinforced damaging prejudices, while keeping homosexuals from being seen in more positive light.” Despite the damage these tropes may have caused, Salmon feels that queer people have always had a discerning eye: “Queer audiences have always been able to look at society from an angle, and some quite thrillingly reclaimed villainy as a positive, with many villains becoming camp icons.”
Are we now commodifying queer characters? Salmon thinks so. “We see this most notably with Disney at the moment, where the idea of making such and such a character “gay” in order to appease certain audiences, comes at the expense of creating rich characters, and can be used as a prop to push the commercial machine forward”. Despite Disney claiming allyship their openly queer representation is truly sour. LGBT viewers struggle to candidly relate to something like Toy Story 4’s background lesbian characters, something which still managed to fuel a negative press campaign despite being so insignificant.
“I’ll give you another example: the customised Netflix Twitter accounts that operate under the banner of minority rights. Netflix has several Twitter accounts – “Most” and “Strong and Black Lead” are the ones dealing with LGBTQ+ and Black/African-American content – which market Netflix content from the point of view of queer and Black representation. It seems inarguable to me that representation, in this case, has been successfully commodified by an enormous corporation”.
The modern issue is no longer a lack of visibility, rather, two-dimensional characters that make you wonder if their existence in the script was merely marked by “token character #1”.
The concept of this idealism evolving from once being a commercial risk into a product of corporate greed is not only incredibly warped but reinforces a sentiment that we need to support uniquely queer stories. We need smaller and indie queer creators in a landscape dominated by plastic imagery.
In London alone, a multitude of organizations such as Fringe!, Queer East and BFI Flare all run film festivals dedicated to shedding light on independent queer audiovisual projects and aim to exemplify the unheard stories of the people who deserve the loudest voices.
Now that queer characters have found their place in the mainstream there is a whole new battle to fight, one which ensures depth and true insight, instead of trivial empty shells. It may be an uphill battle but with an extended history of fighting for what’s right it seems that anything is possible.