These Three Films Helped Shape My Queer Identity in Critical Ways
At three different points in my life
Films and books have always been important to me. Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, they provided me with so much information and many times shaped how I thought and saw myself. I could find so little information or help about being gay, so I turned to novels and films.
Films have given me an insight into how others view a subject. Films are immediate; I usually can watch them in ninety or a hundred minutes. It takes me much longer to read a book. I can lose myself in a good film for an hour or so, before returning to the world around me.
Three films marked important moments in my queer life. They reflected how my life seemed at the time, or how I wanted my life to be.
[Spoiler alert, I discuss the plots of the three different films]
Barrett, a handsome young man, is on the run. He has stolen a large sum from his employer to pay off a blackmailer and to protect the man he loves, barrister Farr. But Farr is the first man to reject his plea for help, and so do all the other men he turns to for help. Barrett ends up hanging himself in a police cell. Only after his death does Farr realise the young man was trying to protect him and reluctantly agrees to help catch the blackmailers.
Though it was produced as an argument for the legalisation of homosexuality, this film paints a grey portrait of gay life as lonely, bleak, loveless, and open to be the victims of heartless blackmailers.
It was 1982, and I was sixteen. My greatest possession was my tiny, black and white, portable television. I still lived with my parents, but I could watch it in my bedroom, away from my father’s control of the remote control and my mother’s disapproval. That little television meant I could watch what I wanted, and I did.
There was so little portrayal of queer life on television then, and what there was seemed always negative. That Friday night, BBC 2 broadcast the 1960’s film Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde. It started late at night, and I watched in fascinated horror as gay life was portrayed on the screen. But I watched intensely, following every scene.
At sixteen, I could barely acknowledge to myself I was gay, I had told no one I feared I was, and I’d certainly not had my first boyfriend. That was years away. This film did nothing to change that. Victim was unrelentingly bleak. A young gay man was in deep trouble and no one, none of the other gay men he approached, offered him any help. They all left him alone, and he ultimately killed himself in desperation.
Was this the life I had to look forward to, the life of the film’s hero, married to a woman to pass as straight, but in the end losing it all when exposed as gay?
I didn’t like what I saw, but I feared that life lay ahead of me. I didn’t know any other way to be gay. Why couldn’t I just be normal?
I found sleep difficult that night. I couldn’t shake the nightmare life that film told me would be mine.
The next day, sat on the backseat of my father’s car with my parents sat in the front, my mother asked me, “Did you watch that film last night, with Dirk Bogarde?”
“No,” I hurriedly replied. How could I admit to watching a film like that? To do so was only one step away from admitting I was gay, and I couldn’t face doing that.
My parents carried on discussing the film, in pitying tones, as I tried to sink down within myself on the car’s backseat, our pet dog sleeping next to me.
[Dirk Bogarde, the star of this film, with his matinee idol good looks, was also a deeply closeted gay man who never came out in his lifetime.]
Robert and Michael are a gay couple, living in 1980s New York. Robert is about to go and work in Africa, leaving Michael behind to wait for him. Set over Robert’s last 24 hours in New York, it follows the couple as they prepare for Robert’s departure, attend a farewell party and as Michael cares for his ex-boyfriend, Nick, who is living with AIDS.
was a subterranean cinema just off Piccadilly Circus. I bought my ticket and then walked down two flights of stairs to reach the cinema’s single screen. This always felt so luxurious and different, actually walking downstairs to see a film, especially for a matinee showing.
It was 1988 and I was twenty-two years old. I had moved to London the year before to live on my own and come out as gay. I’d had my first boyfriend, though it didn’t last long, and finally come out to my parents. I worked in social care and was enjoying having days off during the week. It didn’t matter that I worked the weekend, I was so terminally single.
London offered so much cultural life, and I was eating it up as fast as I could. I saw plays, visited art galleries, heard authors read from their work, and saw a lot of films. Also, this was the first wave of queer cinema, and there were so many small and middle-budget queer films for me to enjoy.
I’d read a couple of reviews of Parting Glances, and it sounded interesting. So that midweek afternoon I went to see it, playing at this quirky cinema.
I settled down in a rather tatty old cinema seat. As the lights dimmed, the film started to sweep me along with its quirky, left-of-centre story and characters.
I was presented with a happy and handsome gay couple facing a challenge, being apart for two years. Could I handle that? If I had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t want to give him up. I’d be broken if he left me for two years to work abroad. I was wrapped up in the story of this struggling couple. This wasn’t a scenario I’d seen before. I’d already seen enough films where the gay couple were having problems and would eventually split up, especially when one partner was being unfaithful. But here was a couple who loved each other facing a situational problem, a problem I’d seen straight couples facing in films and drama before. This was a different and refreshing portrait of a gay couple.
Around them was a collection of different characters, including a gay man married to a woman who knew he was gay, and a man living with AIDS. He was living, facing the problems of his diagnosis, but not dying from it. There were no scenes of him in a hospital bed looking like a living corpse.
The characters in this film were quirky, fun, and felt real. Real people with real problems.
But it was the ending that left the deepest impression. There was no tragedy. This was the opposite of so many queer dramas I’d seen. At twenty-two, I still harboured the internalised homophobia that somehow my gay sexuality wasn’t as good as straight. I expected my relationships to fail, and AIDS was a danger lurking around the corner. But here, the gay couple stayed together, and the man with AIDS was alive as the film ended.
I left the cinema and returned to the bright spring afternoon. Could I make a film for myself where I managed to stay together with a boyfriend?
I walked to the underground station. I wanted a relationship, but so many gay men I’d met in London were single too. Could I make a relationship work if I could find someone?
Everything I’d experienced, growing up, told me being gay was wrong and gay relationships didn’t last. But I had just watched the portrayal of a gay relationship that did work and looked like it would last. I couldn’t shift the thought from my mind.
Parting Glances has become one of those films I return to, over and over again, and still enjoy. I have a tired video copy that I still watch, every year or so. I still enjoy it, and the gay couple still remain together at the end.
Three drag queens, two gay men and a trans woman, take a road trip to Alice Springs in the heart of Australia, to perform at a cabaret in a resort managed by the estranged lesbian wife of one of the men. Like all great road movies, the adventures they have and the friendships they form make the movie, plus great one-liners.
It was 1994 and I was twenty-eight. I was in a room full of other gay men, on the last day of my holiday. We were watching The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. We were all laughing, and at every joke. I wasn’t suddenly outing myself in a cinema audience as one of the few who understood those jokes. Here I didn’t have to worry; everyone else got those jokes too.
For the last week, I had been on my first gay holiday, but it wasn’t a typical gay holiday, whatever that is. This was run by , dedicated to community-building, creativity, personal growth, friendship and fun for gay men. Those might sound very lofty ideals, but in reality it was a very relaxing holiday.
Myself and about forty other gay men spent the week in a holiday center in the Scottish countryside. There were workshops, fun events, sports, a dress-up dinner, evening entertainment, a cabaret night and even drag volleyball. It was the opposite environment to the London gay bars and nightclubs I’d been frequenting in my endless and depressingly negative search for a boyfriend. Suddenly, I was holidaying in a relaxed environment where my sexuality wasn’t an issue, and neither was my appearance. I didn’t have to comply with the latest ideals of fashion, which I rarely did.
I didn’t have to work at being liked, people there just liked me, and there was no pressure to couple up and pair off. If I went to bed on my own, that wasn’t a failure. Suddenly, being gay wasn’t the main thing about me. I could relax back into the other facets of my personality. I could explore my creativity without embarrassment, without someone questioning, “who did I think I was” doing that.
I even had a holiday romance with a Scottish man called Bill. A man I would not have normally met. But I also knew it was only for a handful of days, a holiday romance, and I wasn’t chasing after the impossible.
Now, on our last night, we were watching The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert together. We were watching it as one audience, all laughing at the same jokes, all enjoying the musical moments, all moving along with the story. Watching this film captured the feeling of community I had been enjoying all week, and Bill and I were curled together watching it. It also helped that this film was a joyous celebration of being queer and different, but it wasn’t angst laden, no one was sad-to-be-gay, no one died at the end, though the jokes were very gay and rude.
The next day, we would all leave and return to our ordinary lives, but that evening we were joined together in the enjoyment of this very gay film. I was enjoying myself.
[Unfortunately, some elements of this film haven’t aged as well as others. None of the three leads had any previous experience of performing drag, a trans woman character is played by a cis-gender man and this character is dead-named for a crude joke.]
Now.
Victim is deeply homophobic and negative, and deeply uncomfortable to watch. It was considered forward-thinking in the early sixties, but it scared me in the early eighties. I didn’t want to live that life. But it also reflected my own homophobia. I wasn’t ready for a positive ending.
Parting Glances was a breath of fresh air, focusing on the characters’ stories and giving me a refreshing portrait of a gay couple and a man living with AIDS. I only saw it six years after seeing Victim, but my life and queer identity were already changing and growing. Parting Glances inspired me to want more.
The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert is a glorious celebration of being queer and different. It caught that moment in my life where I was finally enjoying being gay and moving forward with my life.
I now live with my husband in East London. But a good film is more than just a film; it can mark an important point in my life, and it has done so many times.
Happy viewing.
Drew
[Find my published books and .
Read my short stories and serialised fiction .
Read my own coming out story here on Medium.]
