INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT: REVIEWS OF GAY-THEMED MOVIES

REVIEWS OF GAY-THEMED MOVIES: A BLOG

This blog is a personal project I developed over a bumpy, but pleasant, journey. I would like to start by listing my reasons for choosing to develop a study on gay-themed movies.

I decided to focus on this subject after my original plan of creating a bibliographic review of gay-themed literature proved to be an unrealistic task, as each text I reviewed led me to others in a never-ending sequence. It worked out perfectly, because I have always been fascinated by movies and, together with reading, they have helped me in my search for the meaning of life through the adventures and misfortunes faced by the characters on the screen. Even before I came up with the idea of this study, I had already seen at least 100 of the 470 movies selected for this project. 
 
Another important factor behind my decision is the very nature of movies: cinema is an artistic medium that revolutionized mass culture over a century ago. Since then, moviemaking has become a space both to reflect the mainstream culture in all the countries where movies have been made, as well as to challenge such hegemonic culture and foster its transformation. This transformation is apparent in societal perception of homosexuality and its representation on the screen throughout the century covered by the review, and it is one of the hypotheses that I aim to confirm through this blog.
 
Unlike other fields in arts and culture (such as literature, theatre, painting, sculpture, etc.), the history of movie production is documented in its entirety. Being a relatively recent medium as compared to other forms of cultural expression, movie archives do not present the unfortunate and significant gaps one can find in libraries, museums and art collections. More importantly: unlike other forms of art and culture that require the individual to be in in a certain space or have access to an object, like literature, theater, painting or sculpture, moviemaking has been essentially conceived to reproduce its creations ad aeternum before large audiences and to broadcast them simultaneously throughout the world, a process that has been recently strengthened with new tools such as digital audiovisual technology and the Internet, which expand its cultural and social impact and makes it virtually accessible to any modern global citizen.
 
As a modern medium with technical capacities available worldwide, the understanding of this medium is also universal, which means that the language of the movies can be appreciated and understood throughout cultures and time.
 

While this review was more manageable, it is not exhaustive. The 470 selected movies do not constitute a complete list of all gay-themed movies ever made, and they are not a selection of the best movies either. The blog project does not pretend to stay always current and updated -- therefore, it will not include "the latest" gay-themed movies produced.  Some movies in the list are widely known by the general public and have received important awards; in other cases, it will be a surprise to see that some titles have gone totally unnoticed. 

My collection includes some European precursory movies (mainly German but also Austrian, Swedish, French and British), as well as some titles produced by Hollywood before the imposition of the Hays Code (early 1930s until the late 1960s), which for decades censored movie contents in the U.S. on moral grounds. I also include movies produced during and after this period. Major production of gay-themed movies in the U.S. took place between the 1980s and 1990s and, since then, we find more titles from the rest of the world, including Latin America, with titles mostly from Brazil and Mexico, but also from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela and Peru – almost all of this modern Latin American production of gay-themed movies is recent.

 
The selection process included historical, geographic, and thematic considerations. This final aspect is the least varied in our sample, since the vast majority of movies in the selection fall into the category of drama. (This is another hypothesis of the review: that the transformation of societal perception of homosexuality goes hand-in-hand with the expansion of its representation on the screen, beyond the dramatic genre).
 
The list of movies also follows an arbitrary order as it is not organized alphabetically, geographically or chronologically. There are 470 movies produced in 56 countries and spanning approximately one century. Likewise, the list includes a few curiosities, like a handful of short films and some made-for-TV movies, which were widely broadcast. In a way, the selection criteria was like snowball, exploring Internet lists, web sites and blogs that share information on gay-themed movies, which led to finding more and more related titles (the Internet is perfect for that). This first draft list has been subsequently checked against a large list on Wikipedia titled "List of LGBT-related films" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT-related_films#V); although my list has more titles than most of the other lists circulating online, it is much shorter than the list on Wikipedia but, in fact, we have many titles that are not integrated into the list on Wikipedia^*.

 
I have deliberately excluded pornographic movies because, although I believe that they also reflect a progressive openness in society regarding sexual matters, they constitute a huge universe in terms of place of origin and volume of production, and the stories represented are extremely difficult to connect with the issues I would like to analyze. However, I believe that readers will be interested in the phenomenon of crossover in certain titles I have included in the list, when characters who come from the world of gay porn like Brent Corrigan/Sean Lockhart, Johnny Hazzard/Frank Valenti, Francois Sagat, Dylan Vox/Brad Benton, Colton Ford/Glen Soukesian, David Bradberry, and others, become involved in conventional movies, for the enjoyment of a broader audience.
 
Another criterion I used to limit the content (which sometimes clashes with how other web sites build their lists of gay-themed movies) has been to disregard movies that have a gay character who is marginal to the plot; or movies showing an actor/actress because they are gay in real life, or where the leading actor/actress is considered a gay icon (like Rock Hudson o James Dean), even though there is no reference to gay identity issues in the movie; or movies where a male actor plays the role of a heterosexual woman (for example, the series of movies headlined by Divine). Therefore, with very few exceptions, the list includes titles that have gay identity as the central, not a marginal theme of the story.
 
I have not deliberately excluded lesbian titles but I have found that there are significantly less movies on the experience of homosexual women, as compared to the number of titles on the experience of homosexual men. Additionally, I probably do not possess the sensibility required to do justice to this genre for the sake of the analysis I would like to apply to these movies. At any rate, some classic and well-known lesbian titles have been included in the list, and I will give them my best effort.
 
I have not excluded movies that represent the experience of “minorities” (both as a percentage within the larger population and in terms of the representation of their interests in society as a whole); rather, I have found only a few movies that deal with the homosexual experience among poor, non-Caucasian people, or that reflect controversial/non-traditional life choices besides their homosexuality. Therefore, when I have found titles that reflect those issues, I have done a bit of “cherry-picking” as a way of fostering their inclusion in the analysis.
 
In order to help interested readers locate each movie, I have gathered the following information: 1: Commercial title, 2: Original title (in case of a language other than English or Spanish), 3: Language, 4: Genre(s), 5: Name of director, 6: Cast, 7: Duration (in minutes), 8: Year of release, 9: Country of production, 10: Awards, 11: Brief movie review, and 12: Link to access movie trailer. Naturally, in some cases we have not been able to fill in the sections 2, 10 and 12.

In fact, with a bit of patience and a strong wi-fi connection, this information will enable the blog readers to locate and download from the Internet all the movies listed in the review, and I can attest that I have not accessed any of them through a paid system. This is important because a point of this study is to encourage readers to look for and enjoy these and other titles online.

 
Another comment pertinent to the selection criteria is that it does reflect certain situations. For example, the production of the gay-themed movies in our sample originates overwhelmingly in the northern hemisphere, mainly in the U.S. and (second place) in the United Kingdom. A proper understanding of the contents of many movies that are not subtitled in Spanish, and even of many that are subtitled but with an awful translation, requires that the viewer understand English. This comment not only applies to gay-themed movies but it has definitely determined my ability to conduct reviews in Spanish on the actual content of the dialogue in these movies, despite the abysmal quality of the translation.

 
Another situation reflected in the selection process is the transformation of the societal perception of homosexuality over time, apparent in the representation of the homosexual experience from a perspective that is alternatively scientific, justifying, vengeful, weepy, romantic, celebratory, comical, erotic, etc., according to the expanding space for these expressions and of the societal understanding about the homosexual condition. Obviously, another goal of this review is to determine how these expressions reflect the societies where the movies are produced, be it as efforts to offer a new image of the homosexual experience in a context of victimization or oppression, or as a recognition of a new conception of the experience, in the case of titles that find acceptance in more established gay communities. 
 
I must also clarify that the goal of this blog is not to judge the merits of the movies regarding performing talent, development of the story line, plausibility, quality of the mise-en-scène, etc. The comments in the blog do not constitute specialized reviews, nor are they an academic or scholarly analysis of the production, but rather a commentary on the gay-themed stories depicted on the screen, from the perspective of a viewer who has been involved in the gay liberation movement in Peru since the 1980s. The goal is to initiate a dialogue to foster democratization in our societies, including issues of sexuality.

 
A final goal of this study would be to establish a historical and political sequence for these productions, in relation to the proposals of the gay liberation movement (where applicable) or another movement to foster democratization in the societies where the movies were produced. But this goal might only be achievable in the long term, because the list of movies is quite long and titles are coming up every day.
 
This latter comment brings up another relevant point. The blog contains a long list of titles and a proposal to analyze gay-themed movies, but so far I have posted only three reviews. The idea is to continue adding to the blog until the whole list has been reviewed – which can take many months, even years. I am not concerned about posting an incomplete project online, because the alternative would be to withhold this launching until the project is finished – for a long time, or maybe forever—, when in fact the idea is to offer these reviews as a way to encourage reflection and debate about the contents of these movies, and to engage as many people as possible to discuss these issues in a dynamic way, and this process can start right away. 
 
Finally, I must confess that even though this is a very personal project and I take full responsibility for any shortcomings, I am in debt to many people who have provided encouragement and support to this effort. I dedicate this blog to all of them.

* A list of gay-themed movies offered by Wikipedia, the largest and most complete of the lists circulating on this issue, contains 2,519 titles, although a portion of them (between 5% and 10%) are listed twice as they appear both in their original language and in English. Most of the 470 titles selected in our study are included among those 2,519 listed by Wikipedia – approximately one third of our sample has not been integrated in the list ran by Wikipedia; and the missing titles are not always the most recent ones, so the omission does not mean the list on Wikipedia is outdated, but rather it is a reflection of the difficulty of maintaining a strict and uniform criteria when listing these kind of movies in the dynamic global movie market; it also makes us feel better about the sample of 470 movies we have identified, catalogued and downloaded for analysis.