A Product of Their Time: How Changing Attitudes on Queer People Affected Cinematic Representation

Note: This piece was originally written in 2019 and discusses the growing acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community within American culture. In the intervening five years, there has been an unfortunate backsliding as the queer community has become a pawn in larger political battles. The optimism of this essay may no longer be fully deserved, though perhaps it can, at the very least, serve as a reminder of the value of diverse stories in media.

Introduction

 In 2017, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty announced La La Land as the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. The La La Land producers took the stage, looked at the envelope, and realized that it was not their film, rather Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight that had won the award. This moment has gone down as one of the most uncomfortable Oscars flubs in the award show’s history and has overshadowed the historic accomplishment of the true winner: Moonlight is the first film about LGBT subjects to win the Best Picture category (Rose 2017). Film is arguably the most accessible medium in America. Unlike theatre, movie tickets are affordable for most families. Unlike museums, movie theaters tend to be accessible regardless of where one lives. The capitalist nature of film requires an audience to accept the content in order for the studio to remain solvent. As such, film acts as a litmus test of American’s views on a variety of issues, notably queer people. 

The queer community is a conglomerate of sexual minorities that encompass gay men and lesbians as well as bisexual, trans, and genderqueer individuals. Like most minority populations, queer people face backlash, violence and abuse from individuals who find their very existence deviant. However, American’s views are slowly becoming more accepting. In 2013, favorable opinions of gay men reached 55%, up eighteen points from 2003. Opinions of lesbian women reached 58%, up nineteen points (Drake 2013). In 2002, 55% of American’s viewed gay and lesbian relations as morally wrong. By 2019, this number decreased to 35% (Gallup 2019). As of 2016, 75% of Americans favored laws that guaranteed equal protection to trans individuals (CNN 2016).  This acceptance has reflected itself not only in the Moonlight Oscar win, but also in the film industry as a whole. As society becomes more accepting of the queer community, queer characters have evolved from coded-representations into stereotypes and, finally, into fully realized characters with autonomy that reflect the true diversity of the queer community. 

Before the Gay Liberation

Queer people did not suddenly appear in America with the advent of the gay civil rights movement at the end of the 1960s. Society knew they existed and worked to keep them in the closet. Ever since America was a fledgling country, most states had laws against homosexual relations (Weinmeyer 2014) and when the American Psychiatric Association published its first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952, it listed homosexuality as a mental disorder (Drescher 2015). 

The early American film landscape reflected this moral puritanism. After a 1915 Supreme Court ruling determining that movies were not classified as protected speech, states began to pass censorship laws aimed at removing “indecency, immorality, and obscenity” from film (Russo 1987, 23). These early attempts at policing content found stronger footing with the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code. Established in 1930 alongside the advent of sound films, this code created by Will Hays, established a self-censorship guideline for film studios based around three main principles:

No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation. (Association of Motion Pictures Producers, Inc. 1930)

Although the early Hays Code did not overtly mention homosexuality, the message was clear: do not let the deviants appear on the screen, and if you do, best not make them sympathetic. Throughout the thirties and forties, film writers subtly coded gay men into film to avoid film censors. These characters were associated with the color lavender, given lisps, and referred to as pansies (Russo 1987). The coded men were not heroic, but weak and feminine. Film noir, an incredibly popular genre at the time, often contrasted the hardboiled detective trope with a coded-gay “sissy” who dressed a bit too flamboyantly. When Cairo first appears in The Maltese Falcon (Huston 1941) he wears a boldly striped bow tie and delicately fondles his folded umbrella—a brazenly phallic object. At the end of the scene he pulls out a derringer, yet another phallic stand-in, though this one is incredibly small—after all Cairo is a sissy, not a man. In this case, size matters. The masculine Casanova, Sam Spade, knocks Cairo out with one punch. 

In The Big Sleep (Hawks 1946), Arthur Geiger’s apartment is rife with gaudy chinoiserie, hinting at the man’s homosexuality far more subtly than in the original Raymond Chandler novel which refers to the character as a “fag” (Chandler 1939, 89). The character’s role as a pornography salesman is just another example of the man’s sexual deviance. Gay men in film noir were mere plot devices that served as “further amplification of images of sexual ‘decadence’ and ‘perversion’ prevalent in the form” (Dyer 1977). In The Big Sleep, Geiger is found dead, a fairly standard fate for queer characters throughout the history of cinema (Russo 1987, 20).

Lesbians did not escape the overt stereotyping of the era either. Much like filmmakers coded gay men through flamboyance, lesbian characters were coded through their masculinity. Wearing pants, having financial independence, or simply not being connected to a man could imply a female character’s aberrant sexuality (Lugowski 1999). The queer-coded women in film noir were fat, brutish, and severe (Dyer 1977), contrasting the stunning, long-legged femme fatales of the genre who often seduced the hard-boiled detectives.

Throughout the early history of cinema, gay men and lesbians were consistently shrouded in stereotype—a direct result of a production code that viewed a queer lifestyle as an attack on natural law and morality. Queer characters were hidden in the shadows—often quite literally, in the film noir genre—by a Production Code Administration that reflected the cultural mores of America in the early twentieth century. They were at best plot devices, at worst representatives of morally repugnant criminal institutions, and very often left for dead.

“We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It”

On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in lower Manhattan. These raids had become standard, and the queer community had had enough. No one knows exactly who threw the first brick at Stonewall (or if it was even a brick at all), but that night, a group of lesbians, drag queens, trans individuals, and gay men fought back, launching the gay civil rights movement that we know today (Salam 2019). Even as queer people pushed for equality, attitudes on homosexuality by and large remained negative. A September 1969 Harris poll found that “by a margin of 63% to 1%, Americans said homosexuals were more harmful than helpful; 25% said homosexuals neither helped nor harmed and 10% were not sure” (Motel 2013). 

The societal recognition that came to a head during Stonewall had been festering beneath the surface for almost a decade. Eight years before the uprising, the Hays code had received another update, and “the words fag, faggot, fruit, dyke, pansy, lezzie and sometimes even gay were used unequivocally as labels for lesbians and gay men” (Russo 1987, 38). This update was short lived when, in 1968, age-appropriate ratings replaced the Production Code. Films could choose which content to show, but they would be assigned a G, M (later replaced with PG), R, or X rating (Benshoff and Griffin 2006, 136). 

One of the earliest films to receive this new X rating—and the only X-rated film to ever receive an Academy Award for Best Picture—was John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969). The filmmakers use contempt for gay men as a tactic to justify to audiences the lead characters’ intimate yet platonic relationship (Russo 1987, 60). At one point in the film, Joe, an aspiring hustler receives oral sex from another man in a movie theater. When the young man cannot pay the agreed upon fee, the two fight in the bathroom. Joe is broad and tall with the swagger and costume of John Wayne. The gay man is short, spectacled, and weak. The contrast makes clear Joe’s heterosexuality, while portraying gay men in a negative light—they are so morally reprehensible they cannot even pay their debts for their sodomy. The film, with its liberal use of the word “faggot,” portrays characters whose views on homosexuality reflect American attitudes of homosexuality at the time. To its credit, Midnight Cowboys themes of performative masculinity and homosocial relationships remain relevant over fifty years after its release.

Another essential representation of queer cinema of the time is William Friedkin’s The Boys in The Band (1970). Centered on a group of gay men in New York City celebrating a birthday party, the story addresses issues of “same-sex romance, the closet, the possibility of blackmail and job loss, internalized homophobia, and the burgeoning (but still mostly underground) gay and lesbian culture of many cities” (Benshoff and Griffin 2006, 137). Released just a few months after Stonewall, members of the queer community criticized the film for falling into stereotypes and portraying self-hating gays (Friedkin and Hays 2015). However, the playwright behind the source material, Matt Crowley, notes that his characters are based on his own experiences as a gay man in New York (Benshoff and Griffin 2006, 138). Further, the film cast many gay actors for gay roles, a step that many contemporary gay films have not taken. The unfortunate reality of early mainstream gay cinema is that, due to a lack of breadth, Americans who had not met an out gay man took the self-hating view portrayed in The Boys in The Band as representative of the whole. While the gay men were written as individuals, many fell into classic stereotypes, reinforcing those stereotypes for an audience who did not know better.  

Film treatment of queer womanhood in the sixties and seventies was markedly more distasteful. Freed from the Production Code, producers were exploring new uses of the film medium. One result was the sexploitation film. While still forbidden from showing homosexual sex acts on the screen, directors were creating what would now be classified as soft-core porn featuring women (Benshoff and Griffin 2006, 132). Heterosexual directors created these works for heterosexual men. They could hardly be called queer representation. However, some of the less overtly sexualized films of this era—when viewed by modern queer theorists with the understanding that these outdated exploitative portrayals of queer individuals have little impact on current public opinion—prove to be interesting frameworks through which to discuss both historic and contemporary attitudes on queer representation (Crémieux 2015).

Queer film representation in the years following Stonewall once again reflected American attitudes on queer people. While overt representation had increased from the Hays Code era, the depictions of queer people that had emerged were often negative, stereotypical or both. Filmmakers were doing such a mediocre job representing the queer population that in 1973 the Gay Activist Alliance released a set of guidelines regarding the treatment of homosexuality in film and television. The guidelines requested that homosexuality not be treated as a joke, that it not be written only as stereotype, and that it not be treated as an illness (Russo 157). The final point reflected the fact that in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association had declassified homosexuality as a mental illness (Drescher 2015). By this time, the gay civil rights movement was in full force, but it would be a mere seven years later that an even more pressing concern would confront the community. 

Silence = Death

The first cases of AIDS in the United States appeared in 1981. By the end of the year, 121 gay men had died of AIDS related complications (Avert 2019). In the following years, the then nameless disease would ravage the gay community, create global panic, and reinforce negative public opinion. Between 1981 and 1991, there was a slight, steady increase in American’s belief that same-sex relations were always wrong, peaking at 77% (Motel 2013). This increase once again reflected itself in cinema, this time in the form of both the killer queer trope and sexual erasure. Whereas post-Stonewall films dealt with the issue of sex overtly, puritanism once again began to take charge and gays in mainstream American films were rendered impotent. 

In the years following the start of the AIDS epidemic, slasher films often featured a gay-coded villain, sexually active characters were often brutally murdered, and the virginal woman often survived. All of these elements reflected AIDS-related panic with a message that “those who have sex will die horribly” (Benshoff and Griffin 2006, 180).  During the same period, in non-horror films, queer sex was often downplayed or removed entirely. 

When Steven Spielberg adapted Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1985) for the screen, he removed any hint of lesbianism, sanitizing “a sexually explicit love affair in an existing work…into a series of chaste kisses to beg acceptance from a mass audience” (Russo 1987, 197).  The enormously successful French film La Cage aux Folles (Molinaro 1978), with 1980 and 1985 sequels as well as an American adaptation retitled The Birdcage (Nichols 1996), is also fairly chaste. Aside from a few pieces of erotic art stored around Renato and Albin’s home—serving as comic elements, rather than sexual ones—the series of films finds humor in palatable queer stereotypes.

In many ways, the AIDS epidemic humanized the queer community. The in-your-face activism of organizations like ACT UP NY - AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power forced Americans to confront the fact that queer people were not simply deviants living in New York and San Francisco, but rather neighbors, friends, and even family. Images of gay men and women putting together the AIDS Memorial Quilt or protesting lack of government action by dumping ashes of their partners and friends who had died of AIDS related complications onto the White House lawn shocked and saddened viewers, but also reinforced the ways in which queer people were just people—they wanted to love and share a life with someone, they wanted their government to work for them, they wanted to live. After 1991, the number of Americans who believed that same-sex relations were always wrong steadily declined (Motel 2013). By 2000, 23% of American adults said they would not be upset if their child told them he or she was gay, up from 9% in 1985 (Drake 2013). With this growing acceptance emerged a quickly changing landscape of queer film and television personalities that continues to evolve today.

Out and Proud

As more Americans began to approve—or at the very least, not disapprove—of queer people, new stories emerged. The late nineties and early-2000s brought about a new, though still imperfect degree of representation. Sitcoms like Will and Grace (1998) and Sex and the City (1998) featured queer characters. The former contrasted the stereotypical, sissy Jack with the slightly less stereotypical, masculine Will. While the jokes surrounding both characters often fell back on tropes, the fact that one-half of the main cast in a popular sitcom was queer boded well for representation. Further, the two characters had distinct personalities. The era of individualism was arriving. 

Another popular show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy first aired in 2003, once again playing on the stereotype of gay men understanding all there is to understand about culture, food, and grooming. However, a five-person cast of real gay men delivered directly into American households once a week led to exposure, an essential step towards further acceptance. While the show may have commodified the talents of the fab five and been an early iteration of the “gay best friend” trope, it represented the progress that the queer community had made in regard to social equality. 

Brokeback Mountain (Lee 2005) represents one of the best examples of the emergence of queer character over stereotype. Jack and Ennis, two cowboys herding sheep are as far from sissies as two characters can be. In fact, the film never truly labels them as gay, opting instead to open up a conversation about fluid sexuality. Perhaps neither Jack nor Ennis are attracted to men as a whole, but they are certainly attracted to each other. Audiences are affected not by the tragic gay love story, but by the far more universal story of two people who simply cannot be together. It is through the specificity of character that the audience connects with the plot. It also does not hurt that the actors are both straight, allowing audiences to avoid thinking too deeply about “how it works” between two men—the sex scenes are just acting after all. Though the film does fall back on the dead gay trope that emerged in the Hays Code era, the massive success of Brokeback Mountain marks an equally massive leap towards fair representation of queer characters, sex and all. 

The current slate of films and television shows continues both to play into old tropes and to start new conversations. Modern Family’s (2009) Mitch and Cam, a gay couple with an adopted daughter, show that gay parents can be just as embarrassing as straight parents. The reboot of Queer Eye (2018) features five queer men ranging from the “femme” Jonathan to the “masc” Karamo, with varying degrees in-between, showing audiences that there is no one way to be queer. The reboot of Will and Grace (2017) showcases the same characters as the original, but they are all more comfortable in their skin. Jack still loves Patti LuPone and Will is still uppity, but each character has become less presentational, allowing sexuality, even when stereotypical, to be just another aspect, not the only aspect, of the character. 

The future for queer media looks bright. Streaming services like Netflix , freed from the time-slots of traditional television, can take risks on innovative content. Special (2019), starring a gay man with cerebral palsy, recognizes that not all gay men are able-bodied. BONDiNG (2019), a series about a gay man who acts as an assistant to a dominatrix, showcases a gay man who is more sexually reserved than his straight counterparts and furthers the conversation about fluid sexuality. Schitt’s Creek (2015) introduces a pansexual character, who, even when in a gay relationship, never faces homophobia at the hands of the fellow citizens of his rural town. The show’s creator made the choice intentionally deciding, “if you put something like that out of the equation, you’re saying that doesn’t exist and shouldn’t exist” (Ivie 2018). Even trans people are finally making their way onto the screen not as tragic figures like Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry (Peirce 1999), but as fully developed characters like Sophia in Orange is the New Black (2013) portrayed by trans actress Laverne Cox. The number of current characters whose sexuality and gender identity are but one aspect of, not the sum of, their personality is unprecedented in film history and reflects American’s increasingly accepting attitudes towards queer individuals.

Conclusion

Queer characters have come a long way from their coded and censored roots. Throughout the history of American cinema—and more recently television—the representation of these characters changed in lockstep with American attitudes. While producers throughout the last century often handled queer characters at best unfairly and at worst cruelly—reflecting society’s negative views of queer people—we have now arrived in an era of unprecedented acceptance. The “they’re just like us” and “born this way” arguments that won hard-fought battles for equal rights are appearing in modern queer characters. However, as Hollywood finds its footing in the world of fair representation, creative teams behind new media must be aware of swinging the pendulum too far towards normalcy. Showing only confident characters who “just happen to be queer” has the potential to reduce the painful experience of existing as a minority, delegitimizing the often isolating and difficult self-discovery process of queer youth. The subtext of the “being queer does not define me” argument is one of shame, rejecting one’s queerness as an unfortunate reality rather than an important aspect of a personality in which one should take pride. With careful consideration, Hollywood can ensure that the trend of fair queer representation continues, while simultaneously ensuring that equality does not lead to erasure.

References

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Association of Motion Pictures Producers, Inc. 1930. The Motion Picture Production Code (as Published 31 March, 1930). Accessed November 4, 2019. https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms200s/total-readings/MotionPictureProductionCode.pdf

Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. 2006. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Genre and Beyond. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. https://search-ebscohost-com.du.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=246976&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Chandler, Raymond. 1939. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Books, Random House.

CNN. 2016. “Do You Favor Or Oppose Laws That Guarantee Equal Protection For Transgender People In Jobs, Housing and Public Accommodations?” Chart. May 9, 2016. Statista. https://www-statista-com.du.idm.oclc.org/statistics/545067/equal-protection-laws-for-transgender-people-us/.

Crémieux, Anne. 2016. “Exploitation Cinema and the Lesbian Imagination.” 

Transatlantica 2 (2015) http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7869

Drake, Bruce. 2013. “How LGBT Adults See Society and How the Public Sees Them.” Pew Research Center. June 25, 2013. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/25/how-lgbt-adults-see-society-and-how-the-public-sees-them/.

Drescher, Jack. 2015. “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality.” Behavioral Sciences (Basel, Switzerland) 5, no. 4 (December): 565-75. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs5040565.

Dyer, Richard. 1977. “Homosexuality and Film Noir.” Jump Cut no. 16: 18-21. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC16folder/HomosexFilmNoir.html

Friedkin, William, and Matthew Hays. "Back to the "Boys": An Interview with William Friedkin." Cinéaste 40, no. 4 (2015): 13-15.http://www.jstor.org.du.idm.oclc.org/stable/26356456.

Gallup. 2019. "Are Gay Or Lesbian Relationships Morally Acceptable?" Chart. August 1, 2019. Statista. https://www-statista-com.du.idm.oclc.org/statistics/226147/americans-moral-views-on-gay-or-lesbian-relations-in-the-united-states/.

Ivie, Devon. 2018. “Dan Levy Explains Why Homophobia Will Never Infiltrate Schitt’s Creek.” Vulture. November 18, 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/dan-levy-explains-why-schitts-creek-has-no-homophobia.html.

Lugowski, David M. 1999. “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood’s Production Code.” Cinema Journal 38, no. 2: 3–35. https://search-ebscohost-com.du.idm.oclc.org/.login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=12549369&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Motel, Seth. 2013. “On Stonewall Anniversary, A Reminder of How Much Public Opinion Has Changed.” Pew Research Center. June 26, 2013. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/26/on-stonewall-anniversary-a-reminder-of-how-much-public-opinion-has-changed/.

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Filmography

BONDiNG. 2019. Netflix.

Friedkin, William, director. 1970. The Boys in The Band. Cinema Center Films.

Hawks, Howard, director. 1946. The Big Sleep. Warner Bros. Pictures. 

Huston, John, director. 1941. The Maltese Falcon. Warner Bros. Pictures.

Jenkins, Barry, director. 2016. Moonlight. A24. 

Lee, Ang, director. 2005. Brokeback Mountain. Focus Features.

Modern Family. 2009. ABC.

Molinaro, Édouard, director. 1978. La Cage aux Folles. United Artists. 

Nichols, Mike, director. 1996. The Birdcage. United Artists.

Orange is the New Black. 2013. Netflix.

Peirce, Kimberly, director. 1999. Boys Don’t Cry. Fox Searchlight Picrures.

Queer Eye. 2018. Netflix.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. 2003. Bravo. 

Schitt’s Creek. 2015. CBC.

Schlesinger, John, director. 1969. Midnight Cowboy. United Artists.

Sex and the City. 1998. HBO.

Special. 2019. Netflix. 

Spielberg, Steven, director. 1985. The Color Purple. Warner Bros. Pictures.

Will and Grace. 1998. NBC. 

Will and Grace. 2017. NBC.