By Jay Ashdown
This article contains spoilers for Saltburn and Passages.
Awards season, the bleakest point of winter, is my time to look back on last year’s film successes. For queers, there’s a lot to celebrate. Bottoms was the high-school comedy dirtbag lesbians have been waiting for. Colman Domingo just scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his role as Rustin’s titular unsung gay civil rights activist. Other gems, like Of an Age and Blue Jean masterfully examined the joys and fears of queer life, despite flying under the radar of most filmgoers.
What didn’t go unnoticed was Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s feature-length Jacob Elordi fancam.
In this pulp flick, Oliver (Barry Keoghan) plays a newcomer to Oxford University who spends the summer at hot, buff, old-money student Felix (Elordi)’s country home. The tale follows Oliver falling in love with his host, immediately plotting various sabotages to earn his full attention, then killing everyone at the estate in increasingly villainous fashion.
Saltburn is splattered with bathtub cum-period blood-insult-filled moments ripped out of a 10-act Twilight polycule fanfic, but what left the worst taste in my mouth was its bland homophobia. The cliches of ‘50s-era Lavender Scare propaganda are palpable, pairing themselves well with the film’s sympathies for Felix’s ever-welcoming straightness. Notably, Evil Twink Keoghan is accompanied with dark spotlighting and dreary scoring every time he engages in some outrageous sex act. It highlights the intended audience—straight people—when comedically weird fucking abruptly shifts the tone from class chuckler to downright horror.
Right now, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community is more visible than we’ve ever been in mainstream media. But it doesn’t really feel like it when the stories that are most celebrated are the ones controlled by—or palpable to—straight people. When gay sex isn’t primed for disgust or the heterosexual gaze, it’s toned down, cut out, or, in the case of sapphic period pieces, expressed solely through intricately-framed delicate caresses.
Queers were, and are, the ones breaking the boundaries of sexual taboos: the standards that kept us in the closet for centuries. So when liberation has taken us so far as to allow R-rated sexuality in mainstream cinemas, why can’t our sex be good?
In 2023’s All of Us Strangers, two loners (Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott) meet in their bleak London condo hallway. They make love and open up to each other—mending while reflecting on their self-induced isolation and childhood emotional scars. Here, sex is transformative, breathing life into the protagonist’s lonely shell, and leaving its audience members in awe (including the homophobic teens sitting behind me, who immediately stopped chattering when Paul Mescal looked up in that scene). Despite Strangers’ buzz among independent and critics’ review boards, however, it was shoved to the corner of the Golden Globes and gained no Oscar recognition.
Last year’s Passages also uses its sexuality as a form of dialogue—one manipulated by its main character. Here, stylish filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) indulges in an affair with a woman, throwing a thrilling wrench in his docile gay marriage. Tomas brings nuanced passion into his sexual escapades, from joy in self-discovery to desperation over his impending breakup. Between his need for stability and longing for freedom, it’s a Baroque portrait of this anti-hero’s clashing desires, with a domestic sophistication I haven’t yet seen in queer film. For those outside Film Twitter or without a MUBI subscription, this gem was likely missed.
Despite industry bigwigs still patting themselves on the back for Moonlight’s 2017 Best Picture win at the Oscars, inventive depictions of queer sexuality have once again faded into the backdrop of awards season. Bohemian Rhapsody was a voter favourite two years later for its scandalizing tabloid gaze, Party City leather gear included, over Freddie Mercury’s sex life. Call Me By Your Name carried the double-whammy of an eyebrow-raising age gap and a tragic ending—notable traits of most other popular big-actor gay dramas.
When witnessing the innovation of each year’s queer-helmed romances and sexcapades, it’s difficult to grasp that the buzziest 2SLGBTQIA+ films could stand to be so, at best, hateful, and at worst, boring.
If I’m spending an hour’s minimum wage at Cineplex to see something that’s supposed to “represent” me, I’d better see some good sex along with all the basic, allocated sad-grief-gross-self-hate-making.
I want it all. And I don’t think that’s a lot to ask for.
Leave a Reply