It’s so amusing to witness the great lengths white LGBT people will ascend to justify their apathy and dismissal toward LGBT films starring/centering people of color and nonwestern people.
Even if you guys don’t admit it, we all know that white gays think that gayness is centered around whiteness, and that people of color are inherently homophobic and transphobic. I’ve always been aware of this orientalist binary that white LGBT people construct, between the “progressive” cultures of the West and the “regressive” cultures of the East, between white people who are intrinsically either gay (victims) or progressives (willing to learn) and nonwhite people who are static, barbaric homophobes, never moving forward. We all know that white gays think only they are capable of being gay or trans. Even if they don’t admit it, their entire lens of gayness is filtered through whiteness, thorugh eurocentrism, through orientalism/antiblackness/racism/antisemitism/islamophobia/etc.
This is incredibly obvious when you look at what white gays consider to be “good” LGBT representation in films versus bad or mediocre representation.
We’re not just talking about what random white kids on tumblr want to watch. We’re talking about how white critics leave rave reviews about frankly mediocre white LGBT films, while mocking and picking apart and ignoring nonwhite LGBT films. We’re talking about how rich white gay celebrities will pay for movie screenings and will relentlessly advertise those movies on their social media platforms, while giving dust to nonwhite LGBT films (unless those films happen to get critical acclaim, at which point they give a meager shoutout, as if they’d always been caping for those films). We’re talking about which LGBT films The Academy picks for its Oscar nominations versus which ones it habitually leaves by the wayside. We’re talking about, in short, which narratives receive consistent commercial and critical acclaim alike, in spite of narrative flaws or repetition or mediocrity, and which ones don’t receive anything, despite originality or creativity or phenomenal acting.
I’ve seen people say that you can’t “compare” films like Moonlight or The Handmaiden (the former featuring a dark-skinned Black gay man, whose lover is an Afrolatino bisexual man, and the latter featuring two East Asian lesbians) to Love Simon or Carol. Why lump Love Simon and Carol in the same category, knowing that those two movies are as different from each other as they are different from Moonlight or The Handmaiden, and as if Moonlight and The Handmaiden aren’t also incredibly different from each other? Even in an argument like that, white people are showing that they think LGBT representation is only good if it serves their interests and needs.
I’ve then seen people talk about “accessibility”, and this is what really gets me. Yes, Moonlight and The Handmaiden feature adult content, whereas Love Simon is family-oriented. No one is saying that 15 year olds have to go watch Moonlight right now. But the fact of the matter is, you all also lapped up Carol and Blue is the Warmest color! You all are already salivating over The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which is about conversion therapy, a topic that is incredibly graphic and triggering. But because TMCP features a white lesbian narrative, it’s palatable, despite its “mature content”. Or what about Thelma, which white wlw tumblr hypes up? Is action and science-fiction content perfect for 10 year olds to watch?
Also yes, some of these films aren’t readily available. BUT THAT’S THE POINT. Listen, most indie LGBT films are only shown in select theaters in the first place. But again, Love Simon was a commercial hit, which means it could be shown in more theaters. Moonlight was shown in very select theaters at first, AND THE ONLY REASON IT WAS RE-SCREENED IN MORE THEATERS IS BECAUSE CRITICS FINALLY WOKE UP AND SAW HOW GENUINELY GOOD IT WAS. If Moonlight wasn’t critically acclaimed, more audiences wouldn’t have access to it. Because white people are hardly giving nonwhite LGBT films any chances, they’re not going to be readily accessible!
You want to talk about “problematic” content? How about Call Me By Your Name, which featured a relationship between an underage white bisexual teenage boy and a grown-ass white bisexual man? Even Carol, which is the lesbian piece de resistance as told by white lesbians, features a large age gap. Yes, both characters are adults, but age gaps are still fraught with power imbalances and are still a problem within the LGBT community. Meanwhile, Moonlight does showcase sexual content and drug use, but none of the nitty gritty stuff is romanticized as it is in CMBYN or Carol. And again, the sexual content in Carol didn’t stop a bunch of teens and young adults from watching it through any means they could, lol. You all are out here consuming extremely explicit gay fanfiction but balk at an artfully done handjob scene in a poignant movie. Talk about clutching your pearls. But wait, white LGBT people can’t enact racialized homophobia against gays of color :(
Furthermore, it’s so incredibly racist that people expect white LGBT films to be “easily accessible for everyone” but think that all nonwhite LGBT films are “hard to digest” and “not universal”. Listen, globally speaking, there are MORE LGBT people of color than white LGBT people. There is NOTHING accessible to me about some young white lesbian getting it on with an older white lesbian. There is nothing relatable to me about a white bi teenage boy and a grown white bi man falling in love over a picturesque European vacation. There is nothing relatable to me about a gay white teenage boy being accepted immediately by his parents and having a cheesy happy ending. I don’t get to have those kinds of stories, and most LGBT people of color don’t have those types of narratives in their lives either.
You know what is relatable to LGBT people of color? What is “accessible” content? Rafiki, a story about two Kenyan lesbians, is relatable to any lesbian of color growing up in a post-colonial country that has criminalized homosexuality. Moonlight, a story about Black gay and bi men, relatable to any Black gay or bi man who has grown up in poverty, who has seen violence, who has experienced homophobia as a backdrop to every other form of material violence in his life. I could go on and on.
If you all expect us to relate to dominant white narratives and claim that those narratives are universal, it really shouldn’t be difficult to relate to our narratives either. But this just shows the extent of white sociopathy, which penetrates the white LGBT community as well! That you cannot empathize with OUR narratives, despite us being able to empathize with yours.
And what about “diversity of genres”? “Ethnic gays” isn’t a genre. All of us have different films and different narratives. Rafiki is a coming-of-age movie about Kenyan teenage lesbians. Moonlight is a coming-of-age narrative about a Black gay man. The Handmaiden is a period piece and a thriller starring two East Asian lesbians. Pariah is a coming-of-age movie about a Black lesbian. Tangerine is about a Black trans woman. Saturday Church is a fantasy, musical, and drama film about voguing/drag/ballroom in the Black LGBT community. And you guys want “happy representation, because ‘LGBT people’ (we all know you all mean white gays, lmao) deserve it’”? Okay, how about Saving Face, a romcom featuring two East Asian lesbians? Or Signature Move, a comedy-drama movie featuring a Pakistani Muslim lesbian and a Mexican Jewsih lesbian? The Handmaiden and Moonlight both have happy endings, and so does Saturday Church.
LGBT people of color are also writing these narratives on their own. Dee Rees, a Black lesbian, directed Pariah. Moonlight was written by gay Black men. Alia Shawkat, a biracial bisexual Arab woman, co-wrote Duck Butter, a wlw comedy.
All of these films feature people of color of different genders, races, nationalities, ethnicites, and religions, spanning different languages and geographic/cultural context. They are in fact far more diverse than white LGBT films. If you only see them as sad, tragic, or tinged with violence, it’s because you view people of color as sad, tragic, barbaric, or savage, not worth anything more than their pain, deaths, or alleged aggression.
I’ve even seen some freaks have the audacity to claim that “gay culture is only watching foreign films for representation”. So y’all are willing to see nonwhite and nonwestern LGBT films out of “desperation” but then throw them by the wayside when Oscar-bait, commercialized white LGBT films come out, lol. That’s just so hilarious to me.
Y’all don’t have to watch these movies if you don’t want to, but at least stop fucking victimizing yourselves and making it seem as if gays of color are beating you all up just because we’re pointing out the racist hypocrisy inherent in how different LGBT films are received.
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