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When I was in high school, a group of friends and I bought tickets to see “The Chronicles of Narnia” and then discreetly walked into “Brokeback Mountain” across the hall, trying to look as chill and over-17 as possible. It worked. No employee stopped us, and we got to see a rare queer love story on the big screen.
Today, almost 15 years later, L.G.B.T.Q. people have more options. “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s gripping coming-of-age story of a queer black man, won the Academy Award for best picture in 2017. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” about two women falling in love in 18th-century France, has garnered critical buzz since its showing at the Cannes Film Festival last year. “Rocketman,” about Elton John’s rise to fame, featured a sex scene between the actors playing the musician and his manager. “Love, Simon” was extremely cute, extremely gay and extremely PG-13, so queer teenagers didn’t have to buy a ticket for the movie next door.
Given the success of queer love stories, it strikes me as silly when creators wait until after the fact to reveal that their movies had L.G.B.T.Q. characters, or stay deliberately vague about whether they exist at all.
Take, for example, the director Elizabeth Banks’s thoughts on Kristen Stewart’s character in the new “Charlie’s Angels” movie. As part of its press tour in November, Ms. Banks said to a reporter that Ms. Stewart’s character was “definitely gay” and told The Advocate that “letting her flirt with that woman” was “really important” to both her and the actress.
But flirting is a comically small gesture. While a 20-something is likely to pick up on how queer Ms. Stewart and her Miley Cyrus-circa-2012 haircut are, Ms. Stewart’s romantic advances are so subtle that an older, straighter audience might miss them altogether. It’s hard not to cynically presume that was the director’s intention: Appeal to more progressive audiences without alienating the conservative ones.
To be clear, I loved “Charlie’s Angels.” I enjoy subtext, whether or not it’s intentional, and it can be fun and fulfilling to recognize queerness where straight people might not. Sometimes, it feels like a secret code to a club only other queers have the password for. I also think there’s a space for movies to explore the complexities of deep relationships that aren’t sexual or romantic.
It can be soul-draining over time, though, to hear creators and directors assure audiences after the fact that queerness does exist in their work; they just didn’t apparently want to take the last step of, you know, putting it onscreen in any meaningful way.
Who could forget the much-anticipated gay character in the latest “Avengers” movie who turned out to be — get ready for it — a single, grieving man whose name was Grieving Man? Or “Bohemian Rhapsody’s” barely there acknowledgment of Freddie Mercury’s sexuality? The “L.G.B.T.Q. representation” that the director J.J. Abrams hyped in the newest “Star Wars” movie turns out to be a kiss between two minor characters at the end of the film.
The bar could not be lower. It’s practically underground.
This isn’t limited to movies, of course. J.K. Rowling assured readers that Hogwarts’s headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, was gay long after the Harry Potter books had been published, information that, in turn, wasn’t explicit in the “Fantastic Beasts” movie about Dumbledore’s early life. That was before she alienated trans readers by supporting an anti-trans activist. Autostraddle, a queer website focusing on women and nonbinary people, published a roundup in September of all the television shows that need to “lean into the truth,” including “Doctor Who,” whose now-female protagonist is married to a woman but has yet to kiss her onscreen.
Choosing to meaningfully feature L.G.B.T.Q. people in media — by giving major, named characters queer story lines — has a real impact, especially on children and teenagers. Portrayals of same-sex relationships onscreen can be beneficial for young queer people’s psychological well-being. Early L.G.B.T.Q. role models in media influenced queer people’s identity well into their adulthood. By contrast, implicitly suggesting that there is something shameful or risky about being queer can bleed over into our own feelings about ourselves.
This came to mind when I watched the press junkets for “Frozen 2.” Before the film’s release, many fans speculated that Elsa’s feelings of being an outsider or having to hide from her family intentionally mirrored some queer experiences. Some even started a campaign to “get Elsa a girlfriend.” Eventually, the film’s co-director, who is also chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, responded, first saying Elsa is “telling me where she needs to go, and she’ll continue to tell us,” later adding, “there are no limits to the characters we can have.”
Elsa did not get a girlfriend in “Frozen 2.” What might have happened if she did? International studios may have censored the film, endangering Disney’s profits overseas. But the millions of young people watching the movie could have had confirmation that being L.G.B.T.Q. is worthy of inclusion.
To me, that’s worth it.
Kat Jercich (@KJercich) is a writer and editor in Chicago.
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