CHAPTER 15 AMERICA ON FILM

SEXUALITIES ON FILM SINCE THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

Topic: sexuality representation in Am film from the 60s to the present day.
Sexuality: esp. heterosexual sex outside of marriage was seen as a personal
right and a political tool to combat the repressive doctrines of previous decades.
Homosexuality: began to take on a new visibility became framed as a civil
rights issue and not a medical or criminal one.
White patriarchal heterosexuality.
Sexual revolution: social and cultural changes regarding sex, gender and
sexuality which took place throughout Western culture during the 60s and 70s.
Its intertwined with the rise of the counterculture. Young people and hippies
rejected middle-class values and the sexual hypocrisy of earlier generations.
Playboy: a newly liberated sexual lifestyle.
Hollywood had a hard time coping with sexual revolution. Slowly, it began to
feature heterosexual protagonists and love interests who went to bed
together even though they werent married.
James bond: the epitome of the Playboy male (British).
Hollywood: Straight male protagonists; sexier, more violent; genre formulas and
ideological meanings were basically the same. They defeated the villain and got
the girl. Occasionally, the heterosexual romance is between people of different
races or ethnicities but heterosexual monogamy is almost always the implied
endpoint of those cinematic relationships. Womens films: revolve around the
search for Mr Right.

FILM AND GAY CULTURE FROM STONEWALL TO AIDS

Stonewall Riots (1969): police raid in a bar frequented by all kinds of gay and
lesbian people, transgendered people and queers of colour.
When the lesbian and gay civil rights movement burst forth at the end of the 60s
the number of representations of gay and lesbian people in mainstream cinema
was on the rise.

There were sporadic attempts to provide more realistic images of gay life
among many negative stereotypes.
Many films portrayed homosexual characters that faced tragic endings
murder, disgrace, violence and so forth. In some others, homosexual
stereotypes continued to be used as the butt of jokes.
1970s: Hollywood tended to use its new license to denote more clearly the
same homosexual stereotypes that it had employed connotatively in the past.
In several movies homosexuals are shown as monsters, vampires and
murderous transsexuals. From Psycho (1960) onwards, the cross-dressing
psycho-killer has become an overused stereotype. Killer Fags / Vampire
Lesbians. Homophobic films. Cruising. It seems to equate gay sex with murder.
Examines the murderous effects that can arise from the repression of
homosexuality.
There were now groups of gay and lesbian people willing to challenge the
Hollywood status quo.
Perhaps to atone for such images Hollywood released a handful of more
serious dramatic films to examine issues of gender and sexuality. However,
there was some discomfort in showing two men together, as this is totally
opposed to what is usually expected from a Hollywood film (male gaze,
objectification of women). This discomfort is akin to homosexual panic:
when someone becomes agitated when confronted with his or her own potential
homosexual feelings. The identification is disturbing and some spectators may
want to vocally perform their own heterosexuality, which in psychoanalytic terms
is possibly indicative of a repressed conflict.

THE AIDS CRISIS

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome had first been named GRID (gay-related

immunodeficiency).
HIV: Human immunodeficiency virus.
The disease was associated with homosexuals and intravenous drug users who
were seen as social undesirables. As a result there was not a great concern
for it.
Many conservative political and religious figures used the AIDS epidemic as
proof of Gods vengeance against homosexuals: demonization.

In TV there was a movie who dealt with a gay mans struggle with AIDS and
only eight years later did this occur in a Hollywood film (PHILADELPHIA 1983).
However, both of these movies followed the Hollywood social problem film
format, downplaying politics in favour of molodrama.
The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985): based on Manuel Puigs novel, its main
character was an effeminate gay man imprisoned in a South American jail. It
explored the connections between political and sexual oppression, differing
constructions of masculinity and the role that popular cinema has had in
creating life-sustaining fantasies, as well as politically dangerous illusions.

QUEER THEORY AND NEW QUEER CINEMA

Even if homosexuality was being acknowledged at the time, it was mostly

understood as an either/or binary concept, reducing the diversity of human
sexuality to simplified concepts of gay and /or straight.
Activists began to used the word queer, as in the group name Queer Nation, to
designate a community of difference inclusive of a broad variety of sexual
identities and behaviours. (other minorities for whom the labels homosexual
and/or heterosexual are not adequate are: bisexuals, cross-dressers,
transgendered
people,
interracial
couples,
disabled
sexualities,
sadomasochistic sexualities). Even heterosexuals can be queer the so called
straight queer because queer as a concept encompasses all human sexual
practices while rejecting the opposing binary hierarchies of sexuality and gender
that currently govern our understanding of the term.
Queer theory: these thinkers began to theorize on the fluid and socially
constructed nature of sexuality. Human sexualities / genders are not
propositions, but fluctuation, socially determined positions. These are
performative acts rather than essential identities. It also explored the social
construction of heterosexuality in order to examine the ways and means by
which hegemonic patriarchy constructs and maintains the idea that only one
sexuality is normal and desirable.
Queerness of texts: it can be analyzed according to who wrote it and also who
reads it. It explores how sexuality influences textual production.
Early 90s: the New Queer Cinema. Also called Homo Pomo because of its
relation with the postmodern movement, styles and ideas. Both of them focus
on permeable boundaries, the crossing of styles and genres, and more
generalized border crossings whether sexual, regional, national, ethnic or

racial. It questions models of essentialist identity formation and it often

challenges supposedly objective social constructs such as history itself.
Although these films attempt to focus on the social construction of race, gender,
class and sexuality, many of them still tend to carry a white male bias. Under
white patriarchal capitalism, queer white men are still more readily able to
obtain funding for projects than are women and people of colour.
It is sometimes less audience pleasing because it can challenge audiences
weaned on Hollywood style. It may even criticize it deliberately, such as the
feminist avant-garde films of the 70s.