I’ve been trying to think of a good term for the “weepy movies about tragic queer people aimed at straight audiences” subgenre, and I think I’ve got it:
dead gays for the straight gaze
eh? eh??
queers die for the straight eye
SO YOOOO who wants to learn why this is a thing because the history is actually really fascinating and ties into some of my favorite shit ever?
Okay, so like, back in the mid-twentieth century, when being queer was still totally a crime everywhere in the United States, queer writers started working in pulp fiction–starting with Vin Packer (she is awesome)–and writing pulps to tell our stories.
So one day over lunch, her editor asks her, “Hey, Vin, what’s the story you most want to write?”
And she goes, “Well, I’d like to write a love story about lesbians because I’m, you know, gay.”
He says, “Hey, that’s awesome, I will publish it. One thing, though, the homosexuality has to end badly and the main character has to realize she was never gay in the first place. We can’t seem to support homosexuality. I don’t actually think that’s cool, but the government will literally seize our book shipments and destroy them on the basis of the books being ‘obscene’ if you don’t, so if we want this story actually out there, and not burning in a bonfire somewhere, it’s what you gotta do.”
So Vin goes home and writes Spring Fire, the book that launched the entire lesbian pulp genre. And while one character ends up in an insane asylum and the other ends up realizing she never loved her at all, it’s massively successful, and queer women everywhere snap it up and celebrate quietly in their closets across the nation because HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BOOK ABOUT ME? I’M NOT ALONE and it starts a huge new genre.
But: every publisher is subject to those same government censorship rules, so every story has to end unhappily for the queer characters, or else the book will never see the light of day. So, even though lesbian pulp helps solidify the queer civil rights movement, it’s having to do so subversively or else it’ll end up on the chopping block.
So blah blah blah, this goes on for about twentyyears, until finally in the seventies the censorship laws get relaxed, and people can actually start queer publishing houses! Yay! But the lesbian pulps, in the form they’d been known previously, basically start dying out.
MEANWHILE, OVER IN JAPAN! Yuri, or the “girls love” genre in manga, starts to emerge in the 1970s, and even starts dealing with trans characters in the stories. But, because of the same social mores that helped limit American lesbian pulp, the stories in Japan similarly must end in tragedy or else bad shit will go down for the authors and their books. Once more: tragic ends are the only way to see these stories published rather than destroyed.
The very first really successful yuri story has a younger, naive girl falling into a relationship with an older, more sophisticated girl, but the older girl ends up dying in the end, and subsequent artists/writers repeated the formula until it started getting subverted in the 1990s–again, twenty years later.
And to begin with cinema followed basically the same path as both lesbian pulps and yuri: when homosexuality is completely unacceptable in society, characters die or their stories otherwise end in tragedy, just to get the movies made, and a few come along to subvert that as things evolve.
But unlike the books and manga before them, even though queer people have become sightly more openly accepted, movies are stuck in a loop. See, pulps and yuri are considered pretty disposable, so they were allowed to evolve basically unfettered by concerns of being artistic or important enough to justify their existence, but film is considered art, and especially in snooty film critic circles, tragedy=art.
Since we, in the Western world, put films given Oscar nods on a pedestal, and Oscar nods go to critical darlings rather than boisterous blockbusters (the film equivalent of pulps, basically), and critics loooove their tragedy porn, filmmakers create queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ that win awards that then inspire more queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ until the market is oversaturated with this bullshit.
The Crying Game? Critical darling, tragic trans character.
Brokeback Mountain? Critical darling, tragic queer (? not totally sure if they’d consider themselves gay or bi, tbh?) characters.
And so on and so on VOILA, we now have a whole genre of tragedy porn for straight people, that started out as validation for us and sometimes even manages to slip some more through the cracks occasionally, but got co-opted by pretentious ~literary~ types. While tragic ends made these stories more acceptable to begin with, and in the mid-to-late nineties that started getting subverted a little bit (Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader), eventually that became the point, as more straight audiences started consuming these narratives and got all attached to the feels they got from the ~beauty of our pain~.
you know that trope in shows or movies where the evil character is in captivity and starts talking to the Heroes to try and mess with their minds, and starts analysing them going “face it you’ll never be good enough” … “you try to act tough but inside you’re broken” … and the Hero gets really rattled and upset.
well i want a scene like that where it doesn’t work
Villain: “You have a darkness inside of you. You try to hide it, but it’s there–”
Hero: “Yeah that’s the depression, there’s pills for that.”
Villain: “You try every day to make your mother proud. Even after death, it still haunts you. But she’ll never be proud of.”
Hero: “Well yeah, she was an emotionally abusive narcissist, she was never proud of anything I did, what else is new.”
Villain: “You put on a good show, but deep inside I know you don’t feel worthy.”
Hero: “I know, man, I’ve been trying to work on that in therapy.”
Like… give me characters who know they’re mentally ill and traumatised who can’t have it used against them because they’ve fully accepted it
Hi. It me.
I believe the exchange OP is looking for is:
“This is going to hurt.”
“Man, shut the hell up.”
THIS HAS BEEN DONE AND GLORIOUSLY!
I was really enjoying this, and then it got gay, and now I love it.
I LITERALLY WENT AND LOOKED UP EVERYTHING THESE TWO ARE IN AND I’M SERIOUSLY IN LOVE NOW
IN OTHER NEWS, WICCAN IS ME IF I WERE A REALITY-WARPING MAGICAL MESSIAH
welcome to the Young Avengers fandom, you can pick up your
complementary homosexuality at the door
Get you a man who’ll kiss you moments after watching you unvore a squid.
Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, are you?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular – but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place – when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
I’d reblog this a thousand times if I could.
Stop attacking allies. Educate. Not hate.
This is incredibly important. Please read!
Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving.
Gonna Reblog this every time
Reblogging because this is really fucking important
This is so important there is enough hate out in the world already .try to be alittle kinder to each other .love not hate.
Good advice.
I sometimes wonder if the disproportionate anger I see among those of us who should all be on the same side is transference. We can’t retaliate against the ones who hurt us most, the ones who break bones and pass cruel laws and yell slurs in RL. The things we can do to change their behavior are slow and indirect: joining in protests, supporting lawsuits, voting, educating, explaining the basics over and over to people who are somehow still ignorant.
So when a person on social media uses the wrong pronouns or a term that’s no longer appropriate, or disagrees with us on the nature of the word “queer”, etc, etc, we unleash the frustrated burning fury of a thousand nazi-punching suns on them. We try to gatekeep our community so that it feels as safe as possible for us. We don’t want to do the work of educating and tolerating and openness and patience, for the millionth time. We’re tired and we only want allies who will support us exactly and precisely on OUR terms. Don’t we deserve that?
And that understandable feeling….has a lot in common with “I won’t vote unless there’s a candidate I can genuinely support” and “Anything said by any person in X demographic is garbage” and “I don’t care how much good this program is doing, one of the people involved has done or said a Bad Thing in the past and so the whole enterprise must be shunned”.
(I’m using “we” here not to try and claim any kind of membership or entitlement, but to acknowledge shared responsibility. I get frustrated too. But perfect is the enemy of done, in activism as much as in art or business. Now more than ever, what matters is that the work gets done.)
A lot of it is indeed transference, I think. People are angry, someone has to get hit, they’re not gonna hit someone who’d crush them in retaliation.
Stop treating words like “gay” and “lesbian” like they’re bad words that can’t be said around children. They aren’t. Quit treating us like something inappropriate that should be shielded from pure eyes.
Stop treating queer relationships as if they’re more sexual than straight relationships. Newsflash, they aren’t. They can be just as innocent and pure as hetero relationships. They are not inherently sexual.
Stop telling us to not wear or have or say “gay” things because “you might anger someone!” Yet not telling them to stop saying crud like “ it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Maybe their homophobic and misguided comments anger me.
I am tired. Tired of being treated like something dirty. Like something gross. Like my entire existence is something to be wary of and inherently angered by. And I’m sick and tired of it.
artherra 