1990 MOVIES ABOUT THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY
In his song “Bad Reputation”,
Freedy Johnston says that who he loves is his choice. Although I have no reason
to think he’s talking about a homosexual relationship, the line often makes me
think of the gay community. I mean, let’s face it, even though they’ve been
around forever, LGBTQ people are still defending the right to choose their
partners. The movie industry recognized this early on, and
featured gay, lesbian, and transsexual roles from the very start. In 1894, for
instance, ‘The Dickson Experimental Sound Film’ showed two men slow dancing
together, and Wings, the first film ever to win the Academy Award for Best
Picture, portrayed two male soldiers kissing.
Even though movies have
contained LGBTQ characters since the beginning, however, the inclusion has not
been consistent. During times when the political climate was highly
conservative, for instance, the number of films that addressed homosexual
matters declined and what was shown had a negative connotation. Things began to
change around 1990, but movies often depicted gay men as outlandishly
effeminate, like Nathan Lane as Albert in The
Birdcage, and presented
transsexualism as situational, like Dustin Hoffman’s Dorothy in Tootsie or Robin William’s Euphegenia in Mrs.
Doubtfire. Films also portrayed gay
characters as psychopathic like Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine as Jame Gumb) in Silence
of the Lambs, ill like Andrew (Tom Hanks)
in Philadelphia, or as
a victim, like Brandon Teena (Hillary Swank) in Boys
Don’t Cry. In fact, according to
Wikipedia, it wasn’t until 2005 that Brokeback Mountain changed the way films presented homosexual
relationships, treating them with sensitivity. In this post, I discuss three films from the 1990s that
address some of the issues that plagued gay films at the end of the Twentieth
Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality_in_American_film
https://stacker.com/stories/4331/history-lgbtq-representation-film
But I’m A Cheerleader, 1999
But I’m a Cheerleader opens
with a squad of girls practicing cheers with their leader, sixteen-year-old
Megan (Natasha Lyonne). Since her boyfriend Jared (Brandt Wille) is Quarterback
of the football team, her best friend Kimberly (Michelle Williams) is pretty
and popular, and her parents are well-off, Megan’s life seems enviable. She
even has the benefit of a family that sits down to meals together where they
ask God to, “Help (them) obey the roles in life (that He sets for them).” So,
what could possibly be wrong? Actually, there are clues. Megan hates kissing
her exceptionally masculine boyfriend, has pin-up posters of girls taped inside
her school locker, and is turned on by the way her squad mates’ nipples show
through their knitted tops. It isn’t only her behavior at school that people
find suspect, however. At home, Megan appalls her parents by suggesting that
they eat vegetarian, listen to her favorite singer Melissa Etheridge, and take
her to the art museum, so she can enjoy the works of Georgia O’Keeffe.
In fact, Megan’s parents have
become so certain that their daughter is a lesbian, they hold an intervention
to help get her back on the heterosexual track. The gathering includes not only
Megan’s friends and family, but a black man named Mike (RuPaul) who works for
True Directions, a facility that he says made him ex-gay. Mike declares that the clinic’s program, which
is based on Conversion Therapy, works so well, Megan will be straight within
two months. Then, with the family’s blessing, he drags her to his van wearing
only the clothes on her back and carrying her pom poms.
Fittingly, the facility is
housed in a Victorian mansion and is owned by the austere Mary Brown. There are
nine other patients living there, including five boys Peter (Bud Court), Joel
(Joel Michaely), Dolph (Dante Basco), Andre (Douglas Spain), and Rock (Eddie
Cibrian), who is Mary’s son; and four girls Hilary (Melanie Lynskey), Jan
(Katrina Phillips), Sinead (Katherine Towne), and Graham (Clea DuVall). As is
true of many rehab methods, True Directions’ uses steps, but unlike those that
are enlightened, Mary’s facility focuses on Aversion Therapy which utilizes
different forms of punishment to change behavior.
Step One — Admitting
Homosexuality
According to Mary,
homosexuals cannot recover from their condition until they admit that they are gay. This is a real
problem for Megan because she is a conformist who cannot face the thought of
being different from her conservative family and friends. In fact, there is
nothing she fears more than being an outsider. Thus, when she has to attend
group in a hospital gown rather than the pretty pink dresses that the real
homosexual girls get to wear, she quickly changes her mind and admits she is
gay, so she can dress like everyone else.
Step Two — Rediscovering Gender Identity
To help the students conform
to the sex they were assigned at birth, there are classes on gender appropriate
behaviors. The boys are taught to chop wood, work on cars, and fight in wars.
The girls are trained to put on make- up, clean house, and dress appropriately
for their weddings. To help the process along, each student has to have a
same-sex partner, but when it’s Megan’s turn to choose, the only person left is
Graham, who is proudly gay and intends to stay that way. Even though Megan
hates Graham’s unconventionality, and Graham hates Megan’s pretentiousness,
they end up together because no one else wants anything to do with either one
of them.
Step Three — Family
Therapy
Family therapy at True
Directions is not about healing the family so much as it is about figuring out
how the patients' home life turned them into queers. Megan, for instance, says
that she thinks it happened when her father's company laid him off and her
mother took on the man’s role of breadwinner. After listening to everyone
else’s excuses, however, Graham rebels. “You are who you are,” she tells them,
“the trick is not getting caught.” At the end of the session, the counselors
give students assignments to help them overcome their disability. Megan’s is to
write a cheer, a task that haunts her throughout the rest of the story.
Step Four — Demystifying the
Opposite Sex
Mary believes that being gay
has kept the kids from learning about the opposite sex, and she designed the
program to rectify this. At night after Mike and Mary are asleep, however, the
kids sneak away to a local gay club. To get there, they hitch a ride with True
Directions dropouts, ex-ex-gays Lloyd and Larry. The men assure the kids that
they will be gay no matter what, so their only options are to hide their
homosexuality or be who they are. The venture proves eye-opening for Megan, who
becomes jealous when she sees Graham dancing with another girl, and finally has
to accept that she really is a lesbian. The next morning, Mary finds the club’s
brochure under Graham’s bed, and since Megan is her partner, she calls both
sets of parents to come in. To prove they are not gay, Graham tells her mom and
dad that she actually has a crush on one of the boys at True Directions, and
Megan says she really misses Jared. Not fully convinced, the parents warn the
girls that they will be disowned if they are lying and leave.
Step Five — Graduation
Before they can graduate, the
kids have to pass a final exam which includes performing gender appropriate
tasks, writing an essay entitled ‘My Root and How It’s Prevented Me from
Heterosexual Loving’, and successfully participating in a hetero-sex
simulation. Unwilling to demean himself any further, Andre proudly declares
that he is a ‘sissy’ and washes out immediately. While Mary is dealing with
that drama, Megan and Graham go outside to smoke, and they kiss. Someone sees
them and reports it. When confronted, Megan stands before the group and readily
admits to being a homosexual, thinking that Graham will do the same, and they
can stay together. To her dismay, however, Graham, who fears being
disinherited, declares that she likes boys, and silently sits by while Mary
expels Megan.
Mary assigns Rock to be
Graham’s hetero sex-simulation partner, and Megan goes to stay with Lloyd and
Larry. After watching how happy the men are together, she decides to give
Graham one last chance by stealing their van and driving to the graduation.
When Graham rejects her once again, Megan interrupts the ceremony by performing
the cheer that she wrote…proudly declaring that she and Graham belong together.
Summary
Although the critics from
both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes didn’t much like But
I’m a Cheerleader (the
ratings are less than 70%) Google viewers loved it (91%). Perhaps that’s
because rather than looking at it as a comedy, as it is classified, they saw it
as a satire. When defined that way, the movie says a lot about this country’s
treatment of the LGBTQ community. For example, there are people who believe
that homosexuals suffer from a curable disease caused by something that
happened in their pasts. This is how Mary defines it, and thus True Directions
uses punishment as a cure to force the students to be heterosexual while
ignoring truly harmful habits like smoking…or cruelty.
However, of the many human
frailties portrayed in the film, the worst is hypocrisy. Supposedly, Mary’s job
is helping the kids overcome their homosexuality, but she has them sleep in
dorms together. She forbids them to have romantic notions about others of their
gender yet assigns them to same-sex couples. She says that family is essential
to their ‘recovery’, then sits silently by while parents call their children
perverts and threaten them with abandonment. Lastly, although she dresses the
males in blue uniforms and the females in pink dresses, the boys’ sequin
covered graduation attire makes them look gayer than ever.
https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-lies-and-dangers-of-reparative-therapy
https://www.heraldstaronline.com/wire/?category=10073&ID=134798
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/aversion-therapy
The Crying Game, 1994
In 1992, a new song by Boy
George called ‘The Crying Game’ hit the charts. Although the singer’s trans
persona was new to many people (me included), the song nevertheless was a big
hit because it was haunting and beautiful. It wasn’t until later that I learned
it was a cover of a ballad originally written and performed in 1964 by Dave
Berry, and that Boy George actually recorded it for a film by the same
name. The Crying Game takes
place in the early 1990s, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was locked in a
heated battle against the British government. I won't go into the convoluted
history. What is important here is that, even though the movie is not about
politics in and of itself, the ‘Troubles’ between the two cultures provided an
essential catalyst in the plot.
When the movie opens, a black
British soldier named Jody (Forest Whitaker) and an Irish vixen called Jude
(Miranda Richardson) are playing games at a local fair. After a while, she
lures him to a secluded spot for an assignation, and IRA rebels suddenly spring
out of hiding and take him hostage. They shuttle him to an out-of-the-way farm
and warn the British government that they will kill him unless the military
releases one of their comrades that is imprisoned in England. To hide their
identities, the captors cover Jody’s head with a burlap bag, but he manages to
remove it and sees Fergus (Stephen Rea), a new and rather bumbling recruit.
Since he considers the new member virtually worthless, insurgent leader Maguire
(Adrian Dunbar) orders him to take Jody out to the shed and guard him.
With nothing to do but talk,
the two men soon develop a friendship of sorts and when they are exchanging
stories, Jody mentions that he has a girlfriend. In response, Fergus asks why
he was with Jude if he already had someone, to which Jody replies that he isn’t
sure because Jude is not really to his taste. When Fergus scoffs, Jody directs
him to a picture of his girl, Dil (Jaye Davidson). Struck by the woman’s
beauty, Fergus comments that he’d like someone so good-looking, to which Jody
replies that she really wouldn’t be to his liking. Assuming that the soldier is
referring to the fact that Dil is black, Fergus doesn’t pursue the matter.
After three days pass with no
word from the British, Maguire orders Fergus to take Jody into the woods and
shoot him. Doubting that Fergus has it in him to kill anyone, however, Jody
runs. When he makes it to the road, it appears that he’s home free, but just
then an armored truck runs him down. Horrified, Fergus rushes to his side, and
in his dying breath, Jody asks him to go to The Metro bar in London, find Dil,
and tell her what happened. Just then, the British blow up the farm, and Fergus
runs to the home of a friend to borrow enough money for a ticket to England.
Intending to keep his promise, he makes his way to London. Once there, however,
he concentrates on finding a job and renting a room before going to the Metro.
When he finally goes there, he meets the lovely Dil, who is popular not only
for her looks but for the mesmerizing way she lip-syncs the haunting song ‘The
Crying Game’.
From the first moment she
sees Fergus, Dil begin flirting with him, but at the end of the evening, she leaves
with a man named Dave (Ralph Brown). Still determined to keep his promise, the
next day, Fergus goes to the hair salon where Dil works as a stylist. As she
sensuously runs her fingers through his hair, wetting and trimming it, he tells
her that his name is Jimmy and that he is from Scotland. Having limited
knowledge of life outside of London, she believes him, but he isn’t the only
one with secrets. When Dil takes him back to her apartment, there are pictures
of Jody displayed all around, but when he asks questions about the man, she
changes the subject.
At first, Dil is only willing to give Fergus oral sex, but eventually, she
agrees to go to bed with him. She disappears into the bathroom, comes out
wearing a silk robe, and opens it to reveal male genitalia. To Dil’s surprise,
Fergus immediately becomes enraged, goes into the bathroom to throw up, then
leaves. Honestly confused, as he heads for the door, she tells him she thought
he knew about her since the bar where they met is patronized by gays and
transsexuals. Fergus tries to stay away, but he’s smitten and eventually
returns to the bar looking for her, for the first time noticing that most of
the women there are cross dressers. At this point, he should understand what
Dil tried to tell him, but he either doesn’t or won’t.
As he is dealing with the
conundrum of being in love with someone he prefers not to love, Fergus goes to
his room and finds Jude waiting for him. She explains that she and Maguire also
managed to escape the attack, after which they moved to London and found a new
target to assassinate. She wants Fergus’ help killing the man and threatens to
murder Dil if he refuses. Alarmed, Fergus rushes to the salon, cuts Dil’s hair,
dresses her in Jody’s clothes, and takes her to a hotel room where she will be
safe. Once that is done, he meets with Jude and Maguire, but unable to commit
murder, he returns to the hotel for Dil only to discover the room empty.
Soon he finds her wandering
around drunk and takes her back to her apartment. Meanwhile, determined to
execute his plan, Maguire attempts to carry out the assassination by himself.
He is shot and killed, but Jude manages to escape and also heads to the
apartment. Fortunately, Dil hears her break in, grabs Fergus’ gun, and saves
their lives by shooting her. Then, deciding that there is nothing left to live for,
Dil starts to kill herself, at which point Fergus finally man’s up. He tells
her to run away and hide (his favorite strategy for solving problems) and when
the police show up, he takes responsibility for Jude’s death. The court
sentences him to a short prison term and Dil, who knows that Fergus loves her
despite his protestations, visits as his girlfriend.
Summary
By and large, people liked
this film. Critics gave it a positivity rating of 7.3 (73%) on IMDB and a
whopping 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. In fact, the Rotten Tomatoes critics liked it
better than the general audience did (78%). Perhaps they missed the movie’s irony,
which is not that Dil turns out to be trans, but that she is the best person in
the story. Maguire and Jude are masochists and cold-blooded killers, and Fergus
is a liar, a bigot, and a coward. He uses a false name and nationality, rejects
Dil when he learns that she isn’t anatomically female, and lacks the guts to
tell her the truth about Jody, which is the only reason he’s there in the first
place.
Dil, who has a history of
being victimized by boyfriends like Dave who beats her, is a tortured but nevertheless
loving soul. Even though Jody is dead, she displays photos of him around the
apartment, so she can look at them often, and keeps his soccer uniform on a
manikin, as if it is as precious as the Shroud of Turin. Finally, even though
Fergus treated her horribly when he discovered she was trans, she risks her
freedom to save his life, and displays her undying love for him by visiting him
in prison. Dil doesn’t just perform “The Crying Game”, she lives it, but
despite the unhappiness she has endured, she has a generous nature and a strong
character.
It’s harder to figure out
what’s going with Fergus. He joined the IRA even though he’s a coward, was
warned by Jody that Dil would not be to his liking, yet pursues her anyway, and
pretends to go along with Jude and Maguire’s deadly plans then just runs off. I
don't know if he’s immature or a lost soul, but one thing is certain. He is
completely unreliable, and it’s anybody’s guess how he’ll treat the too
forgiving Dil when he is released from prison.
My real confusion about the
movie is why Irish scriptwriter Neil Jordan portrays a trans woman as a
sympathetic character but denigrates his countrymen. Maguire and Jude, who make
Fergus their flunky, start mistreating Jody before they even hear back from the
British government. Further, their plan to kill an English target with a bomb
even though many innocent people will be hurt, is chilling. Those two are so
bad, in fact, that by the end of the movie, you feel like cheering when Dil
blows Jude’s ass away.
The best explanation I can
come up with is that Jordan may suffer from “Internalized Racism”. This
phenomenon occurs when members of a racial minority experience self-loathing
because they have unconsciously adopted the majority’s negative opinions about
them. Granted, relations between the British and Irish are not racial, but this
effect found between other groups as well. For instance, it is common in the
United States among those women who believe that males are superior to females.
When surveyed about sexual preference of children, significant numbers of
American women say they’d rather have sons than daughters. The same trend
appears in rape trials, where females often are harder on the victims than they
are on the accused. Thus, it may be that Jordan, who comes from Sligo, a region
that borders Northern Ireland, unconsciously learned to see his countrymen
negatively from the British, or maybe he just hates the IRA. Who knows?
www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2017/11/24/crying-game-scene/
www.alphahistory.com/northernireland/1994-ceasefire/
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resources/fundamentals/core-concepts/internalized-racism
And the Band Played On, 1993
According to Wikipedia, a
docudrama is a “film which…features dramatized reenactments of true events.”
This definition certainly fits the 1993 HBO film And
the Band Played On, taken
from Randy Shilts’ bestselling book published in 1987. Shilts, a journalist for
the San Francisco Chronicle who was known for his articles about the impact of
AIDS on the gay community, died from the disease in February 1994. Over the
course of his career, he also penned a biography about the gay activist Harvey
Milk, and wrote Conduct Unbecoming, which looked at homosexuals in the U.S. Military
from the 1960s to the early 1990s. HBO’s 1993 production cast well-known
celebrities like Ian McKellen, Richard Gere, Lilly Tomlin, and Phil Collins to
play the people caught up in the battle that raged between the gay community,
the CDC, Congress, and the White House in the early 1980s.
The movie opens much like the
book, with Dr. Don Francis (Matthew Modine), an epidemiologist who was involved
in the 1976 outbreak of the Ebola virus in Zaire, joining the CDC in its
attempt to understand a new affliction that was appearing in gay communities
across the U.S. As he watches the illness spread like wildfire, Dr. Francis
compares the U.S. government’s nonchalant handling of the crisis to the
methodology the World Health Organization used to contain Ebola. These included
burning corpses to keep people from catching the disease from the dead,
isolating the area where the infected were located, and instructing the
community on how to avoid catching the disease. Unfortunately, in the United
States, Shilts argues, neither the government nor medical community did any of
these things primarily because the people affected were homosexuals.
A big problem in the story is
lack of the funding needed to determine causation. Without adequate money to
launch appropriate research, members of the CDC task force develop a less
expensive two-pronged approach. They look for contaminated products in
bathhouses that gay men frequent and begin interviewing the ill to learn about
their sexual contacts. As the media heartlessly refers to the disease as the Gay
Plague, Gay Cancer, or Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), essentially
blaming the victims and further fueling homophobia, the scientists plod along
virtually unaided.
What they learn is that many
of the men who have the disease have had sexual contact with others who have it
also leading them to conclude that there is an infection that is passed via
“semen depositors”. Unfortunately, their
suspicion doesn’t qualify as the evidence needed to convince Washington to fund
research, so they begin to focus on patterns of transmission. Their methodology
involves asking doctors in large gay communities if they have encountered
patients with odd symptoms like life-threatening KS (Kaposi’s Sarcoma), a form
of skin cancer with symptoms that have heretofore been inconsequential,
Pneumocystis Carinii, a rare pneumonia caused by a fungus, or dangerously low
T-cell counts. One of the physicians introduces Sociologist Dr. William Darrow
(Richard Masur) to a gay Canadian flight attendant suffering from KS named Gaetan
Dugas (Jeffrey Nordling). The man says he has hundreds of sexual encounters a
year across the country and provides a list of 72 names. Using this
information, Darrow can pinpoint a group of forty men who either had sex with
Dugas or had contact with someone who had sex with him. This places him at the
center of that group, seemingly pinpointing him as “patient zero”.
When a significant number of
non-homosexual patients including a community of Haitians in Miami along with
several hemophiliacs and RH babies who received blood transfusions come down
with symptoms, the task force is finally confident that it is dealing with a
disease. The scientists postulate that the agent is most probably a virus that
is transmitted through bodily fluids, meaning that everyone is at risk. They
are particularly concerned about people who often receive transfusions like
hemophiliacs and surgical patients and contend that both the blood on hand and
blood donors need to be screened. Unfortunately, the virus has not been identified,
and there is no way to test for it, but instead of providing more money for
research, the Reagan administration increases the military’s budget and cuts
the CDC’s funding.
Although they haven’t yet
identified the virus, the scientists note a positive correlation between people
suffering from AIDS and having been diagnosed with Hepatitis B (for which there
is a test). Therefore, they recommend using the Hep B test to determine which
blood can be used and which donors can donate. Blood banks, which are powerful
and stand to lose a lot of money, however, successfully block the measure. What
finally turns things around is the case of an infected RH baby from a prominent
family who can only have gotten the disease via transfusion. At that point, the
blood banks realize how much money they will lose through multimillion dollar
lawsuits. They agree to cooperate, and GRID is renamed Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, signifying that the disease has nothing to
do with sexual orientation.
Once evidence exists that
there is a new virus which attacks T-cells, virologist Dr. Robert Gallo (Alan
Alda) notes how much it acts like the human retrovirus HTLV-1 he discovered in 1979
and starts researching AIDS. At the same time French scientists in Paris, doctors
Barre’-Sinoussi (Nathali Baye) and Montagnier (Patrick Bauchau), who also
suspect that the causative agent is a retrovirus, begin studying it as well.
Soon the institutes are completing, each intent on isolating the cause of AIDS
and paving the way to developing a treatment. In the end, both facilities claim
success, but the French receive the Nobel Prize because some scientists suspect
that Gallo cheated. The accusations will continue for years, but what is
important is that their findings save countless lives.
On July 25th, 1985,
Rock Hudson’s publicist reveals that he is gay, and two months later President
Reagan speaks of AIDS publicly for the first time. The actor succumbs sixteen
days later, just a little over four years after Ken Horne became the first
American diagnosed with AIDS related KS. Soon thereafter, celebrities like Joan
Rivers and Elizabeth Taylor begin pressuring Congress to fund the research
needed to fight the lethal disease. At the end of the movie, most of the
characters from the beginning of the story have died, Don has moved to San
Francisco to work on AIDS research, and the bathhouses have become a thing of
the past. In all, during that period, Aids has killed over 13000 Americans and
the AIDS virus has infected unknown more.
Summary
Shilts’ book was the first
and still one of the most informative exposes about what happens when the
government, the media, and people in power refuse to protect those who don’t
matter. Shilts, who was himself gay, believed the Aids epidemic spread the way
it did because right-wing conservatives refused to fund research to save
homosexuals. He pointed out that some religious leaders even claimed that the
disease was God’s way of punishing them. However, some have called the author’s
attitudes into question. According to the documentary entitled Killing
Patient Zero, based on Richard A. McKay’s
book Patient Zero and the Making of an Epidemic. Shilts' book contains numerous examples of homophobic judgements about the gay
community, and it ruined Gaetan Dugas’ reputation.
In the movie, Dugas only appears in a couple of scenes, one where
he acts as though being asked to identify his sexual partners is a bother, and
another showing him nonchalantly having unprotected sex in a bathhouse. In the
book, however, Shilts depicts him as a vain and selfish man who justifies his
irresponsible behavior by heartlessly stating that he doesn’t feel guilty about
giving other people AIDS since someone gave it to him. Even more damning, the
author revealed that Dugas was “Patient Zero”.
According to the documentary, this was a misnomer. When Dr. Darrow
interviewed Dugas in San Francisco, he assigned the flight attendant the number
057-O to protect his identity and indicate that he lived Outside California. It
wasn’t until after people mistook the letter O for the number 0 that Dugas
became “Patient Zero.” In reality, rather than being difficult, Dugas was
actually a willing subject. He provided names of men with whom he’d been
intimate, a contribution which enabled Darrow to show that the disease was an
infection transmitted through sexual contact, and even flew to Atlanta to
donate blood samples. When Shilts revealed the man’s identity, however, he
turned Gaetan Dugas from being the person who went out of his way to help the
CDC understand AIDS into being the person responsible for the epidemic.
Currently, Killing Patient Zero is streaming on Tubi, a free channel that has many good
documentaries.
https://www.livescience.com/48170-ebola-outbreak-in-1976-revisited.html
https://www.acon.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/History_of_HIV_5th-Edition.pdf
https://www.on-curating.org/issue-42-reader/legacy-a-timeline-of-hiv-aids.html#.YOdrp-hKga4
Conclusion
I only have a few words to say before closing this series out. I
have always tried not to be judgmental, (which is probably what draws me to
Sociology) but after I taught Human Sexuality, my feelings about how people
handle their sex lives became really flexible. In reality, perversion, like so
many norms, is a social concept. Other than crazy stuff like murder or torture,
there is probably a society somewhere that condones pretty much anything else.
That doesn’t mean that sex is not a big deal, however. In fact, the only
universal taboo that exists is incest. Keep in mind, though, that incest, like
everything else about sexual behavior, is culturally defined. One country might
say it’s okay to have sex with your cousin, but not with your sibling, or will
allow you to do it with your aunts and uncles but not with your parents. These
rules at least partially correlate with other social constructs like wealth and
inheritance.
In cultures where people don’t own anything, there are few set
rules about sex, since there isn’t anything for parents to pass to their heirs.
In societies where people have possessions, however, there are many rules, and
most are clearly defined because men want to be sure that the children who
benefit from their labors are actually theirs. The issue of heirs and passing
down of possessions might also play a part in societies that outlaw, either
legally or normatively, homosexuality. As a rule, gay couples don’t have
children, unless they adopt, of course. What would happen, however, if a
society’s population owned lots of stuff, but there weren’t any clear-cut rules
about who gets what when the owners die? What impact would that have on social
stability? How would it affect not only ownership of wealth but of social
status or power?
In Sociology, we understand that mores, norms, and laws exist to
keep things the way they are. If the rules are broken, the society that uses
them as a foundation will be forced to change. Maybe people who claim to
disapprove of homosexuality, don’t really disapprove of it at all. Maybe they
are just afraid that it endangers life as they know it. That brings us to the
real crux of the issue. Is social change so bad? How do we know it won’t
improve things unless we try it? At least that’s how I see
it.
Right now, But I’m A Cheerleader is available on Roku, Tubi, Pluto, VUDU, and Plex for free or for
rent on streaming services like Apple TV, Fandango, and Prime. If you’d like to
own it, Amazon, eBay, and Walmart are selling the DVD for nine or ten bucks.
The only way you can watch The Crying Game for free is on Showtime
with a subscription. Otherwise, you’ll have to rent it from the usual streaming
services for three or four dollars. There is a DVD, but you might have to buy
it used on places like eBay because the only site that had it new was Amazon,
and it was thirty dollars. And the Band Played On is on HBO, as it has been
for years, so you can watch it there or rent it for around three dollars on
Prime Video, Fandango, VUDU, or Apple TV. You can also buy it on the usual
sites (Amazon, Walmart, Google Play) for ten dollars or less.
This concludes my series on films about minorities. A lot of work
goes into my posts, so I’m taking the rest of the summer off, but will be back
in the fall to discuss movies that are a little less emotionally taxing. Until
then, watch bunches of films and stay cool.
Peace out
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