GLR May-June 2024

(1982) and Silkwood (1983) featured secondary or ensemble LGBT characters who were integral to the plot and better de veloped than the usual gay best friends. And a number of films, including Making Love , Personal Best, Partners (all from 1982), and—wait for it— Zorro the Gay Blade (1981), stumbled toward the possibility of LGBT characters as protagonists and even as heroes. And yet, as many a screenwriter knows, midway through the story our hero faces imminent destruction and is robbed of all hope. Just so, in 1985, Rock Hudson died of AIDS, the FDA approved the first HIV test kit , Ryan White was barred from at tending middle school, and, according to the CDC, more people were diagnosed with AIDS than in all preceding years com bined. The parcel of cultural ground that we had gained in the early 1980s was lost to a kind of devastation that was so vast as to overwhelm any fragile gains we had made in the realm of

diagnosis drove the plot of Philadelphia, and HIV, along with glum perseverance, was his defining attribute. In the current century, conflating gay identity with HIV / AIDS is lazy at best, heartless at worst. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) flaunted AIDS as the motive force behind Freddie Mercury’s 1985 Live Aid per formance, even though his diagnosis did not come until two years after Live Aid’s final bow. This historical error did not disqualify Bohemian Rhapsody from a Best Picture nomination or bar Remi Malek, who portrayed a depressed and vocally fried Freddie Mercury, from winning the award for Best Actor. Mer cury, if memory serves, was the queer genius who stole the show at Live Aid, had a three-octave vocal range, wrote more than half of Queen’s seventeen biggest hits, and looked devil ishly clean-cut in a blue tuxedo beside opera diva Montserrat Caballé while filming the video for his contest-winning Olympics theme on a Mediterranean island, by torchlight, in

1987. His tragic fall can never eclipse his flash of life, yet Bohemian Rhapsody pre sented his life as a sad and irreversible slog toward death. Somehow this portrayal seems reminis cent of 2002’s The Hours , when Virginia Woolf is asked why a certain character in Mrs Dalloway dies, and she solemnly replies that someone must die “in order that the rest

popular culture. There were a few sympa thetic portrayals of people with AIDS early on— Buddies (1983) , Parting Glances (1986) , Tongues Untied (1989), and Long time Companion (1989)—all of them di rected by gay men who fell ill themselves and were dead by 1996. The four directors— Bill Sherwood, Arthur J. Bressan Jr., Mar lon Riggs, and Norman René—never got to

From the onset of HIV to today, Oscar winning movies have honored the homophobic tropes of films like Rope (1948) and The Children’s Hour (1961).

of us should value life more.” This ghoulish platitude is found nowhere in Woolf’s work or in Michael Cunningham’s source novel, but it does express a certain kind of LGBT martyrdom that the Academy loves. For enacting TheHours’ central—but not only—queer human sacrifice, Nicole Kidman won the award for Best Actress. Following TheHours ’ success, Ang Lee won Best Director for Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Best Actor and Actress Awards were given for fatal LGBT roles in Monster (2003) , Black Swan (2010) , and Milk (2010) (though I concede that Sean Penn’s respectful and joyful portrayal of Harvey Milk leaves an afterimage so defiantly alive that it almost, for a mo ment, eclipses the horror of Milk’s murder). 2016’s Moonlight might have heralded a truce between the Academy and Our Peo

make sequels depicting HIV survivors facing unexpected longevity, survivor guilt, or the growing LGBT acceptance of the 21st century (at least until the current backlash). From the onset of HIV to today, Oscar-winning mainstream movies have continued to honor the tradition of homophobic narrative tropes that hark back to such mid-20th-century films as Rope (1948) and The Children’s Hour (1961). The depiction of doomed or murderous (or doomed and murderous) LGBT people this far into the 21st century, and the Academy’s accept ance of such films, can only be explained as a deliberate or un conscious embrace of anti-gay prejudice in the service of straight supremacy. Framing gay identity as tethered to HIV / AIDS was perhaps understandable, however simplistic, in 1993. Andrew Beckett’s

ple. Chiron, the gay character, was still alive at the end of this Oscar-winning film, pensively alone but still harboring the possibility of a satisfying life. Also auspicious: Olivia Coleman earned the award for Best Actress for steering Queen Anne through The Favourite in 2018, and Mahershala Ali got a Best Supporting Actor that year for escaping Green Book with Don Shirley intact . On the other hand, the Best Actor wins of the leading—and bleeding— men of 2019’s Bohemian Rhapsody and2022’s The Whale showed that being queer remains a terminal condition for films that get an Oscar nod . Salvaging meaning from the Sargasso tangle of TheWhale may best be accomplished by viewing this film as an anthropomorphized MobyDick with the whale upstaged by a tidal sinkhole named Charlie, who pulls any possible suspense or inter est into his inescapable undertow. Like the bisex ual Nina in director Darren Aronofsky’s previous Black Swan , 2011’s Best Picture, Charlie mastur

Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody , 2018.

TheG & LR

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