“‘Homosexuality is experienced as a stigmatizing mark as well as a form of romantic exceptionalism,’ writes the queer theorist Heather Love. This exceptionalism ‘appears at the structural level in the gap between mass-mediated images of attractive, well-to-do gays and lesbians and the reality of ongoing violence and inequality.’ Here is the often head-whipping experience of being queer in our contemporary world: we constantly negotiate between modes of pride and shame. A steady diet of flag waving and rainbow-colored June programming (‘The ten best LGBTQ+ shows currently streaming!’) encourages us to believe these modes cannot exist side by side, even if it infiltrates our thinking about the media we consume—those movies and shows that are good for us or not, that shed a positive or negative light on our history and being. As Love writes, ‘Many contemporary critics dismiss negative or dark representations entirely, arguing that the depiction of same-sex love as impossible, tragic, and doomed to failure is purely ideological.’
But to erase a text like The Children’s Hour is to assume that something truer has surfaced to take its place…What if, on the contrary, accepting and even embracing ‘negative,’ unwanted, or retrograde images in our entertainment could deepen our understanding of the present?”
Michael Koresky, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness
