living in the future
Reading two movie reviews this morning, and thinking about how different the current gay teen romance Love, Simon is from Love, Sidney, the stereotypical and sanitized Tony Randall vehicle that was on TV in 1981. (I loathed it at 23.)
According to NPR, anyway, the most remarkable thing about the former is how ordinary and mundane the story is: queer kids will see themselves in the classic teen first-love story presented without pathology.
Likewise, Call Me By Your Name is presented as a(n incidentally) gay romance without tragedy. The reviewer describes the opening scene, two men dart into an alley behind a bar to make out. They aren't paying attention to their surroundings. Audiences expect them to be interrupted by police lights, or blackmailers, or attackers... but nothing happens. The love story unrolls without AIDS, bashing, disinheritance, or suicide.
And that, my friends, is the news from a future that my gay-teen self could never have foreseen. Time for my husband to get up.
According to NPR, anyway, the most remarkable thing about the former is how ordinary and mundane the story is: queer kids will see themselves in the classic teen first-love story presented without pathology.
Likewise, Call Me By Your Name is presented as a(n incidentally) gay romance without tragedy. The reviewer describes the opening scene, two men dart into an alley behind a bar to make out. They aren't paying attention to their surroundings. Audiences expect them to be interrupted by police lights, or blackmailers, or attackers... but nothing happens. The love story unrolls without AIDS, bashing, disinheritance, or suicide.
And that, my friends, is the news from a future that my gay-teen self could never have foreseen. Time for my husband to get up.