GLR May-June 2024

bates in agony, is helpless before mental illness, dies by pas sive suicide, and—in a moment of dazzling vulgarity—as cends heavenward in beatific white light while dying. The bravest and most beautiful thing a queer person can do in Aronofsky’s world is to leave it, and the Academy agrees. Going TheWhale one better, 2021’s The Power of the Dog combined the gay murderer trope with the gay victim trope and fetched a 2022 Best Director Award for Jane Campion. If the wins of Bohemian Rhapsody , TheWhale, and The Power of the Dog are any indication, the Academy’s taste for doomed gay charac ters continues undiminished into the 21st century. Straight writ ers and filmmakers aren’t entirely to blame for this; they’ve had their share of LGBT collaborators. The murderous gay narcissist of Dorian Gray , the dying pederast in Death in Venice , and the murderous bisexual bartender of Giovanni’s Room have been among the fictional avatars our finest writers have invented for us. A perfect emblem for this internalized homophobia may be the naked man—the corpse of the protagonist’s boyfriend— who sinks through a dark ocean at the beginning of Tom Ford’s ASin gle Man, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s novel. Gay, dead, and—thanks to some determined camerawork— devoid of sex organs, this slowly sinking man occupies the condition our culture would most like to see us in, if we must be seen at all. That LGBT writers and filmmakers failed for so long to imagine a better story for ourselves is evidence of how the families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and cinemas we grew up in destroyed even our ability to dream. The second half of the two-part question with which this essay began—Might it have been otherwise?—can no doubt be answered in a number of ways. Television—longstanding enemy of box office receipts—offers a myriad of possibilities. Week by week, on Netflix, Prime, Max, and other streamers, we see LGBT royals, commoners, explorers, students, teachers, performers, pirates, werewolves, superheroes, and mortals who fall in love, face adversity, support each other, enjoy sex, set out on adventures, and manage not to kill each other or themselves. While the unhappy LGBT past reeks to high heaven at the Os cars, LGBT futures are happily imagined on the small screen. Red, White, and Royal Blue , Love Victor , Heartstopper , Pose , It’s a Sin , Dear White People , Our Flag Means Death, Wolf Pack , Wreck , and even the animated Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and Dead End: Paranormal Park speed beyond tol eration to welcome sexual and gender diversity as... human. Prestige cinema has much to learn from television. If Colman Domingo had won Best Actor for the title role in Rustin , we might have gotten another answer to this essay’s opening question. Bayard Rustin’s biopic acknowledges the shadowy paths LGBT people have walked to participate and survive; its final moments show the pivotal Civil Rights leader helping to pick up trash on the National Mall while the people he worked with to plan the 1963 March on Washington would later meet with President Kennedy. But Rustin is also a story of triumph and survival. Domingo’s radiant vitality as Rustin lights up the screen, and in the film’s conclusion he’s alive and smil ing. For an LGBT role to have a pulse and a smile at its dé nouement and win its actor an Oscar could have been a turning point for the Academy. Instead, the golden swordman remains mired in toxic conservatism, and I’ll be chilling with Netflix on

at Is Pride Month yMonth Ever

“Exq o in particular t for queer people what it means Exquisitely captures Electric Literature ” quotidian. he find solace in t

Entertainment Weekly w.” lands quite a blow Defending Pornography hties. since the early eig g for a forensic bruisin g have been cruisin

“

d fl id Nice is Not Enough C.J. Pascoe, author of gone.” buildin world, they are actively etter dreaming of a b enot just folksar gender fluid young g

h t The Tragedy of of Jane Ward, author analysis.” er of our to thecent bringing the outskirts is to be gained from hat demonstration of w Heterosexuality g y ti f t d

Oscar night 2025. May–June 2024

15