#HAYS CODE! HAYS! gays code. thats what I live by

[bahoreal]

cant stop thinking abt something i saw earlier

[mariacallous]

I know you rag on YA and understandably, but (and maybe its because of my work) I do think YA is important, and I think that YA for LGBT kids is super important, an outlet and safe space for kids in places where thats just not available

so like the... Hays coding? of YA books and YA books by Queer people about Queer people most of all, to me thats the most tragic? when I was young and gay (rather than old and gay like now) I had a huge amount of shame around sex, that what I wanted to do was disgusting and no one would really ever want to do it with me. I was luckily enough to run across a show that was NOT! for teens and would today be burned as PROBLEMATIC! but it showed a world where cool gay people lived independent gay lives and had A LOT of sex with different people. It was life changing and life saving to know that what I wanted wasn't gross, and that there were or would be lots of people happy to do that with me and I could be cool while being gay.

point being kids don't need their internalized homophobia reenforced by puritanism dressed as progress, they don't need to be shamed for being less than prefect at a time when they feel fragile, and finally, you won't educate any one through hectoring monologues that are just (very slightly) reworked twitter threads in a YA book of fiction, you might if you write a flawed, complicated human character and have them live the lived experience and feel the feelings that come from these experiences help a white kid understand and empathize with a black teen, rather than teaching them empty words they don't really get but can repeat on social media.

I don't disagree with any of this - and especially because I do think YA is an important genre or section of literature for the reasons you listed. I resent the way that other people have made it totemic and both sanitized and like some kind of universal good and mandate, and the way that people use it to avoid having to deal with "adult themes" and situations.

[gg-selvish]

Hello! Happy June! It's Pride and I have another question (4/30)

Today we are talking about queer representation in media. In 1894 "The Dickson Experimental Sound Film" is released, becoming the first "gay film". It was also known as "The Gay Brothers", it feature two men dancing together and it reportedly "shocked audiences with its subversion of conventional male behaviour". Unfortunately, in 1934 the USA introduced the Hays Code, which, while it didn't explicitly ban queerness, banned queerness in effect. This resulted in three decades of queer-coded villains, such as Joel Cairo in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and Jack Favell in "Rebecca" (1940).

The Hays Code was lifted in 1968, and the queer cult classic "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was released in 1975, and gave a much-needed positive and FUN representation of queer people and queerness. Unfortunately, this was short-lived, as the rising AIDs crisis worsened the stigma around the gay community. This didn't stop everyone though, and in 1985 "Desert Hearts" was released; regarded as the first mainstream lesbian film with a happy ending.

Further on, the first gay kiss on TV in the UK was on "EastEnders" in 1989, "Ellen" became the first American tv show with an openly gay lead in 1997, and other show such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" started to add recurring LGBTQ+ characters. An important show in the UK was "Queer as Folk" (1999) which was one of the first shows to depict the queer community as vibrant and alive.

Even further forward, and "Moonlight" (2017) became the first LGBTQ+ film (and the first all-black cast) to win Best Picture at the Oscars. GLAAD publishes an annual report showing how representation is changing. 2005-2006 1.4% of regular characters vs 2020-2021 the figure is at 9.1%. So, there is still a long way to go obviously, especially because media is often the main or only place that young people have an insight into the community at all.

Because of this, I want to ask you for a recommendation: What is a piece of queer media that you think more people should see? (it can be literally anything, big/small, funny/sad, smart/stupid <- just anything you think deserves to be watched!:))

(I'll go first: "Eu Não Quero Voltar Sozinho" (or "I Don't Want to Go Back Alone) is a really really cute Brazillian short film available on Youtube! (if you enjoy it, there is also a full-length film version called "Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho" (or "The Way He Looks"))

Happy Pride 🌈 🎉

its pretty dark but Kill Your Darlings (2013) was my favourite film for the first few years after it came out i really recommend it to gay writers who like things a little fucked up. theres a lot of heavy topics and drugs and sex and stuff but dane dehaan and daniel radcliffe?? hello????? thats reason enough imo

[falsebooles123]

Finding The First Gay Kiss - Diary of a Big Ole Gay 1/14/23

Hey Whores, so first some good news. I may have a new job. Its tenous but I should have some breathing room and at least some part time stuff so thank god for that.

Second, um can we talk about M3GAN?

(yass qween slay)

So I just say it in theaters and its great and its about like parenting, and grief, and adulification and also the robot does a silly dance for no reason. Because she fucking can and its like this perfect encapsulation of this dicotomy between Innocence/Danger and Child/Adult. IDK Good Shit.

So as always sluts lets get into the Good Stuff

City Lights (1931) dir Charlie Chaplin

This is one of those films thats included a lot in general discussion of absolute kino. Not only is this one of the last silent films and the last of Charlie Chaplins films its also considered a favorite not only by the director himself but a lot of the later autuers that have graced the silver screen.

My opinion is that its .... alright.

Don't get me wrong this is a really great film, its enjoyable and I enjoy the vibe but I don't get the hype for it. The main reason why this is on the list is because the tramp basically has a sugar daddy in this. So Theres this Drunk Millionaire who whenever hes drunk he basically just wants to give the Tramp Money and kiss him on the mouth, and sleep in the same bed as him.

Basically what I'm saying is that the millionaire is tramp-curious.

Side Note: So random guy at the bar called himself "Bi-flitatious" and I kinda love that for him.

Besides that this movie is very straight and the Tramp gets up to a variety of antics.

Some LIke It Hot (1959) dir. Billy Wilder

So if you know anything about this film then you know that at the end of the film the guys goes, "I can't marry you I'm a man" in which his fiance says "Well Nobody's Perfect"

(honestly that line is raw, we stan)

I think I also summerized the queer aspects of this really well on letterboxd and since I'm having a lazy day I'm just gonna Copy & Paste this shit there.

"This cross-dressing comedy is more like the 60s and 70s ones were these filthy men are invading womens spaces!!!!

thats a joke, anyway this film of course has ride or die Osgood Fielding III who likes "Pobodies Nerfect". at the same time the bottom in the relationship is honestly kinda gender fluid in this to the point where hes just perfectly comfortable marrying a man and living with she/her pronouns so like thats a thing."

This is also to the best of my knowledge the last of the "Role-reversal" comedys which is ironic since this is also a movie so slutty it broke the hays code, (though I just watched the "Sadian Trilogy" and that was only a few years later and they were so god damn slutty).

Its hard to pinpoint why the role reversal comedy fell out of favor my best guess is that the lavender scare and the general culteral hatred for those filthy queers eating donuts. Thats not to say that there is not any drag comedies moving forward but the next resurgance I can think of in mainstream popular culture is in the 90s and 2000s and obvously in our modern decade drag queens are once again becoming popular. Its been an intersting experience within this niche genre because its always fascinating to see how different eras constructed gender.

Suddently, Last Summer (1959) dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Ok there are a lot of great clips from this film but you just know I had to show a clip of Elizabeth Taylor being STUNNING.

so this is one of several adaptations made by GIANT GAY Tenessee Williams which deals with homosexual subtext. Along with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Rebel without a Cause or something.

This film follows hot doctor, Montgomery Clift, (also gay), who is being ara ara between Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor and its this amazing southern gothic vibe of incest and insanity and just being horny on main for the surrogate of your gay ass son.

There is definetly a subtext to the play that deals with the mental healtcare of the past and its hard not to draw the comparision between Taylor's threat of a lobotomy with the way that many queer people with lobotomized during the time. It should also be noted that Williams sister was lobotomized in real life so there is definetly a personal aspect to this story telling.

Also on the BTS Big Gay Time, Gore Vidal, Famous Bisexual, wrote the script for this film.

This film is textually about Elizabeth Taylor hanging out with her cousin who may or may not be paying the locals to suck his dick. Its very colonalistic. Anyway , Spoilers, he does get cannabilized by the locals like its a kenneth anger film.

Subtextually this film is just CAMP AF and so it also has this amazing amount of divas chewing the furniture. It is amazing.

Vampry (1932) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

Vampry ... Der Traum des Allan Grey , (ugh you know I have to say the full ass german name because I AM AN ASSHOLE). is just this random ass vampire movie made by Dreyer I think after he did his religious epic with that one saint the lesbians like.

(ok I also love Joan of Arc, who doesn't she was a bad bitch)

this is on this list because according to Dreyer he based this off of Carmilla and also so like super random short story he read. This film is a lot like Nosferatu in the sense that the tropes for vampires wern't solidified and this is super artsy. A lot of these early non Dracula Vampire films were just doing the most and while this movie is probably the least gay vampire film i've ever seen it was v v cool.

The Blood of a Poet (1932) dir. Jean Cocteau

So basically Jean Cocteau, (Gay), was talking to his rich friend who gave him a bunch of money and was like. Hey whore I want you to make the artsiest art film, just whatever goes throught that gay gay gay GAY gay gay brain of yours.

So this film is giving us Eux d'artifice vibes but at the same time this movie is not gay enough for me needs to be gayer. That being said there is two more of these films so I expect symbolic sucking and fucking in the sequels.

Also Tonight I'm watching some of Julian Eltinges Filmography. A lot of his work is lost so if your gonna watch twitch tonight ge ready for Isle of Love and Madame Behave. anyway Sluts and Slanterns you have a good night.

[nopeferatu]

I never watched Brokeback but I agree with your points based on what I know about the movie. BYG was more or less birthed by the Hayes Code, where effeminate men and sexually deviant women (thereby queer coded) could not be a) good guys and/or b) live at the end. Hence so many queer coded villains giving us baby queers pur first sexual awakenings.

And while it's possible writing choices made in Brokeback were influenced by pressures by the studio, its also possible the mirroring of hetero tragedies was done specifically so that the death would be seen as exactly that, a tragedy, rather than punishment for his ~sexual deviance ~

And while it can be a good topic to talk about, I personally have had a hard time taking a lot of BYG discourse seriously lately, with too many people seeing that a gay person dies and then saying "Thing Bad, cancelled." Like with that show Bly Manor or the book They Both Die At the End (which is supposed to he a Romeo and Juliet retelling so yeah dead dove, do not eat).

so the 2005 movie brokeback mountain was based almost word-for-word (including the ending where jack dies) on a short story written in 1997 by author annie proulx, in which she stated that despite the fact that the critics dubbed the short story a romance between two gay cowboys, the reality was that she specifically wrote it to be "a story of destructive rural homophobia"

so from the very start, jack and ennis' story was to be a critique not only abt rural queer history (given that the story takes place in wyoming from 1963-1983), but also what was, at the time, the rural queer present -- just a year after brokeback was published in the new yorker, the famous real life hate crime against matthew shepard occured in laramie, wyoming.

thats why i cant in full faith agree w a lot of people calling the story an example of the bury your gays trope bc like i said from the start the story set out to be a critique about what homophobia does, and what does homophobia do? unfortunately it kills gays

but yeah like i totally agree with you on the whole "bury your gays" thing being a really tiring discussion. like i mentioner it in a reply on the og post but i think the damage that the hays code did is such a shame. its done so much to stifle queer storytelling bc now that gay characters are actually allowed to exist qnd be happy w less pushback, i feel like a lot of storytellers feel the need to "make up for the sins of the past" by keeping their narratives rly sanitized and unchallenging or else they will be met with pushback for having dared to have a queer person die, even if their death hae nothing to do w their queerness JUST like in the case of Bly Manor (i cant speak on thenother one just cause idk what that is).

But yeah :( it just. it really is a shame all around

[unproduciblesmackdown]

honestly yet another reason "reading too much into it" for gay/trans material in media is a shit argument based on nothing but ones fragile bigotry is that since the early days there was pearl clutching about what could be shown in movies and the first attempt to regulate what could be shown in theaters was a bunch of states saying that police chiefs would choose which movies could be shown within their locality. and then the mpaa was created in an attempt to preempt federal censorship, and the hays code was created to require each film to be certified by the mpaa and it was not only a list of stuff that wasn't allowed but also a "moral code" that films needed to promote, and guess whom wrote that moral code? that's right, an actual catholic priest. so that involves a fuckton of guidelines on how to properly present the Genders, which mostly means no women's chests and skirts down to the fingertips ok. betty boop was a threat to america. but most of all there was the obsession with sex, and how it really wasn't even allowed to be alluded to so even when telling cishet stories, if you wanted to talk about sex as a concept or activity or topic of which anyone had any knowledge of interest, you had to encode everything and make everything really subtle and metaphorical. kinda like the "school dance supervisor" gag where someones running around making sure nobody's touching too much while they share a passionate gaze and that all kisses are brief and chaste enough and follow a properly moral christian hetero wooing. there was some movie later that edgily cheats the guidelines of "kisses can only last so long" by making a really long kiss scene that just so happens to have precisely timed pauses to exhange words. i dont remember what it is and i dont care to look it up becoz i dont want to be reminded of being made to look at olden straight kissing scenes where the guy is always 20 yrs older and it has all the awkward stuff to say "this is passionate and sexual ok but there has to be No Tongue" the hays code stuff started in the 30s and fighting it off really started to make headway in the 50s when some films just decided not to get the certified approval, and then when some like it hot and psycho both lacked the certification but were also hugely successful, that was a huge boost for the "not adhering to promoting catholic moral standards" agenda and by the time you got to the 60s it began to be more of a thing to consider having mainstream movies not be all about white cishet straightedge waiting-til-marriage characters living catholic-white-jesus-approved lives so basically when you look at old b&w movies and it's like "oh there's a kinda gay moment but clearly they're just smiling and looking at each other and standing kinda close and expressing an emotional connection but calling it gay naturally is a corruption of purity and wholesomeness and somehow bringing up sexuality of any kind taints and nullifies other bonds so" thats bs. even the straight stuff could barely involve kissing and gay shit couldnt involve kissing OR speaking of it. since yknow gay people didnt exist back then all over the place. and then its not like that didnt bleed into tv when the time came, tho that was a common fixture only by the time the hays code was being more frequently challenged, still it was built on everything media had been doing for the past half century or so. and then of course there's the cheat of "gay love stories are allowed only if it leads to showing how being gay leads to tragedy in ruin, so we just make a regular love story until you get someone killed at the end and the other is probably destitute or whatever," which totally didnt become the only story the straights knew how to tell and why gayness always leads to being killed or some other form of doom anyways i know very little about film history so i dont know specifics about the weird particulars of the hays code or the production of early films that didnt adhere to the code coz i know they existed before the 50s. and also especially before the 30s coz there wasn't really any official enforcement prior to trying to require that approval. tfw watching tcm with a pad of paper to play Spot The Gay Stuff. tell me all about it ben mankiewicz