By the 1980s, things had improved ever so slightly. The gay community was thriving, although the advent of AIDS started to scare everyone. You can turn to the 1980s for several notable gay films that actually started to focus on gay romance, rather than just the gay milieu. The 1980s were the first time wherein homosexuality was seen as an emotional thing rather than just a sexual thing. For every film that flipped out a “faggot,” you had a film like Making Love from 1982, which was about how Harry Hamlin came to the realization that he was gay. That film did, however, come packaged with a special warning, cautioning audiences that men would be having sex in it. No such warning came with the same year’s Personal Best, a drama about female athletes who occasionally bed one another. Lesbian romance, it has been said, is more accepted than gay male romance. Lesbians are titillating to straight men. Gay men are only challenging.
A name to know: Pedro Almodóvar. No study of gay cinema of the 1980s and 1990s would be complete without a mention of him. Look him up.
Occasionally, though, sexuality had to be hidden in violence. With lesbians, it was common to learn they were also vampires (we all know about The Hunger, right?). Indeed, the “violencization” of sexuality has been a common dramatic trope for centuries. Those who are aggressively sexual are either villains or buffoons. Think of the femme fatale from noir films. Or the randy Falstaff. In the 1980s, this vilification of sexuality took a dark turn, starting with films like Cruising, one of the most notorious gay films ever made. In that film, Al Pacino goes undercover in the rough-sex gay-bar scene to track down a serial killer who kills gay men. The film is meant to lend credence and realism to the gay underground, but feels campy at the same time. In the past, gay people were victims and suicidal mopers. Now they had been upgraded to killers. Perhaps this was a panic surrounding AIDS. Some people saw gay men as killers who were spreading sexual violence, and movies, naively, reflected that. Cruising is a great/awful film, and is revered and hated with equal fervor.
In the 1990s, there was a boom in the indie film markets (which I’ve written about before), and queer dramas began cropping up with even regularity. In the 1990s, gay characters became downright common in this indie film world, and sexuality was regularly handled. Films like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, or My Own Private Idaho, or Silkwood, or The Living End began to hit theaters in big cities, and they were a welcome breath of fresh air. Some were violent, some were sweet, and many of them were not very good. It was a refreshing sign that gay romcom characters could finally be made just as bland and as boring as their straight counterparts. That they were gay was no longer interesting. I was a teenager during the 1990s, and I saw many, many queer films over the course of the decade from Todd Haynes’ Poison to Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy.
During the 1990s, the dominant ethos was one of political correctness, and language changed as to not offend any minority groups. As such, gay characters came to be more strongly represented in the media. This is a sign that equality had finally been achieved. Although there was a kind-of backlash to all this. Gay characters in movies now ran the risk of being the token minority character. The best friend to the straight hero. They are still allowed to be gay, to fall in love, to have relationships, but they also were rarely the center of the film, and served as a magical and wise sage to a heterosexual. This is better than being a killer or a suicidal walking tragedy, but it’s certainly not ensuring that gay characters simply be.
