glitter_n_gore | Entries tagged with lgbt

A couple days late, but who's counting?

When I first saw this movie back in November 2017, this is what I had to say:

“Ragnarok is a queer space opera pride fest made of rainbow fireworks and lightning and I need to see it ten more times.”

Having achieved that (I think--I lost count of my rewatches at 7), I am still not tired of this movie, I still love it to bits, and I want to live in it.

But what I was going to say has been slightly overshadowed by one Tessa Thompson, aka Valkyrie, aka Real Life Badass Warrior Queen, COMING. OUT.

GIF Valkyrie power-walking down the rainbow bridge as fireworks go off behind her
Source.

THAT'S how you drop a mic at the end of Pride Month.

( Read more. . . )

Current Music: AFI, "Summer Shudder"

Starring Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, My Summer of Love (2004) is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: a summer fling love story that just happens to be between two girls. This is one of those rare, but extremely appreciated, cases where the fact that the romance is queer is completely incidental. It’s also interesting that, given the quirkiness and eccentricity on both sides of the romance, in a hetero love story either of them could be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who shakes up the boy’s boring life and shows him how to enjoy himself. They are both messy, flawed, compelling characters who happen to find each other and fall in love.

Watch on YouTube

That said, the plot summary is so vague and deceptive I wonder if they’re trying to hide the romance on purpose, and why. The blurb on the DVD cover ends like this: “[W]hat started as a magical friendship soon becomes laced with deception and danger.” This is the Focus Features “Spotlight Edition” DVD I’m looking at, if that makes a difference.

Two points. 1) They call the relationship a “friendship.” See, there’s this thing in media where if two women are depicted in a romantic setting with each other, the narrative has to pretty much hit the audience over the head with it in order for them to acknowledge it as anything other than a friendship. See also: Heavenly Creatures, which was blurbed in a similar way; and the Harold They’re Lesbians meme. This movie has multiple kissing scenes, sex scenes, and breathless declarations of love. It could not be more blatant.

2) That “deception and danger” thing made me think again of Heavenly Creatures, in which the two girls become so desperate in their desire to stay together that they straight up murder someone. Yeah, that doesn’t happen here. Tamsin and Mona are both rebellious, impulsive, and have a bit of a mean sense of humor, prone to sometimes destructive pranks, but their actions mostly fall under the umbrella of Rebellious Shenanigans. They don’t get into any serious trouble, basically ever. Which is fine with me, but I wonder if there was some underlying sense of menace that I completely missed. Or maybe this blurb-writer thinks getting high and then crashing Mona’s Bible-thumping brother’s praise band meeting is a more serious offense than I do. Who knows?

Those weird false advertising speed bumps aside, this is a compelling, hazy, and dreamlike depiction of a brief but spellbinding intersection of two lives. Their romance is dazzling and beautiful, but as with all summer romances, doomed to drift away like dandelion seeds.

Happy June!

I’m actually taking this month off from most social media stuff for several reasons, but I do have a watch list, and many things checked out from the library or queued up on NetFlix, so we’re going to have a marathon.

First up: Pariah. Directed by Dee Rees in 2011, this movie is a coming-of-age / coming out story for Aleke, aka “Lee” (Adepero Oduye), who knows she’s a lesbian but doesn’t know how to live her truth yet. This hits a lot of familiar beats for a coming out story--the homophobic parents, the experimentation with someone who wasn’t really that into it in the first place, the struggle with what to tell people at school--but it also feels fresh and organic. We have dozens of coming out stories. But we don’t have another one quite like this.

Watch on YouTube

More specifically, we have a lot of coming out stories centered on white, cisgendered men. The fact that Lee is a butch lesbian from a Black family with traditional Christian roots creates additional nuance and texture for her background. There are expectations on her that I didn’t have put on me, being a white kid from a middle class family. Although I will say that the struggle to choose my own clothing is . . . ongoing. What is this thing certain parents have against tom boy type clothes? Lee sneaks different shirts, hats, and jackets into her school bag to change as soon as possible, and fights for her right to wear pants instead of skirts, and I feel her frustration.

Lee’s also a writer trying to find her voice. Her favorite teacher is incredibly supportive and encouraging, and she pushes Lee to go further, dig deeper, try harder. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got writing-was to write about what scares you. Finding your own voice, owning it, and sharing it with the world is scary. That’s what Lee does in the end, and while it does scare her, it also brings her joy and purpose.

Now honestly, I was half-dreading watching this that something irreparably awful would happen. I always have this fear watching new-to-me movies with explicitly queer characters, because it seems to be inevitable so much of the time. And while there is definitely a fair bit of angst and some tense family scenes that are difficult to watch: this has a happy ending. This is a burst of positivity and light. If you haven’t seen it yet, add it to your watch list.

Greetings! We are in our second week of Pride Month and I’m talking about Remus Lupin--more specifically, the question of whether the character is bisexual.

Since Lupin is the only one of the werewolves on my list who is not explicitly confirmed in the text as bi, I took a poll. Here's what it looked like:

Screenshot of Twitter poll with question “Is Remus Lupin Bisexual?” and results
Yes = 63%
No = 13%
Not Sure = 13%
Whatever JK Says = 11%

I asked more informally on my regular blog as well. As you can see, results were mixed. More so than I had anticipated. This is why I wanted to start here. More often than not, LGBT fans do a lot of guesswork to figure out if there are any non-straight, non-cisgender people in the fictional universe we're being shown. Unless it's a world that's helmed by a writer/director/producer who's actively trying to create more diversity in that particular area, it’s down to the audience to interpret what we’re given.

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Pride Month has arrived once again, and I actually picked a theme this year: Werewolves.

Left to right: Ethan Chandler, Ruby, and Remus Lupin
in Bisexual Pride colors

I know this might seem confusing or random at first, so let me explain.

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Let's.

Blogger’s Note: This is a revision/amalgamation of two previous blog posts I made elseweb, entitled “#GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend” and “The Trouble With Agent 13” respectively. Expanded my thoughts on both after rewatching Civil War, and reading Ed Brubaker’s The Winter Soldier. For *ahem* “research.”

It’s been eight years since the first official MCU movie came out--Iron Man in 2008.

Do you guys realize how long ago that was? Obama was in the process of moving into the White House. Heath Ledger had just died, and the dark, gritty, realistic Christopher Nolan-verse Batman movies were the exception, not the norm. David Tennant was still playing The Doctor. Okay, eight years isn’t really an astronomically long time. BUT the MCU has churned out thirteen two-hour-plus episodes of their staggeringly successful franchise on a regular basis since it started. And we are still waiting for one--Just one!--canonically LGBT character.

HI THERE!

It is Bisexual Awareness Week, and if you didn’t know this, I am not straight. I’m bisexual more or less, although a more apt description is “panromantic demisexual” (words which aren’t recognized even by my spellchecker, but I encourage you to Google them), and I’ll answer to both.

What you probably do know is I watch lots of superhero movies and read fewer but still lots of comic books. That doesn’t really set me apart. And I’d like to see more awesome action movies with characters that reflect my POV/orientation just a little bit. Which . . . also doesn’t set me apart, because I think everyone wants that. Who *wouldn’t* want to be a superhero, at least in a power fantasy kind of way? However, when you’re not a straight, white dude between the ages of 18 and 35, it’s a little trickier to split the difference.

I’m here to talk about Bucky Barnes.

( “Read )

Since I did a similar thing last year for Pride Month *just* before running out of time, I'm counting down my Top Whatever Queer-Friendly Movies/TV Shows.

Also like last year, I'm narrowing this down a touch to reflect the sort of things I actually watch. Matter of fact, when I started thinking about this I actually had to scale it back some. I'm choosing to see that as a good sign. Here are my parameters:

A) Visual media with canonically LGBT+ characters, as opposed to that awful, pandery bullshit known as queerbaiting. So no Supernatural, BBC Sherlock or Hannibal*. This tends to happen a lot with geek-centric shows trying to catch fans of SFF and Horror.

B) Completely fictional stories, as opposed to ones based on real-life events, which disqualifies Milk, The Normal Heart and The Imitation Game. (Although I highly recommend all three.)

C) Things I've actually watched and enjoyed, which disqualifies Lost Girl, The Legend of Korra and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but they are all on my list.

*I do enjoy Hannibal, but the only canon gay character we've seen so far is Margot, and she wound up in a hetero sex scene. So no, I'm not including it for *this* Top Whatever list.

First, an honorable mention:

The Dreamers
This is one of only two NC-17 movies I've watched multiple times (the other is the original Evil Dead, obviously), and one of VERY few romances I've actually enjoyed. It reminds me a lot of Before Sunrise--it has the same casual pacing and naturalist dialogue, only with lots more nudity. I got the impression very quickly that Michael Pitt's character, Matthew, is bisexual, but I've seen arguments made that Matthew is only romantically involved with Eva Green's character, Isabelle. You could read it that way, since all the "romance" between Matthew and Theo is implied, never shown, but I disagree. The book this was based on had a polyamorous triad as the central relationship, and was very much present in the original script. That said, it's ambiguous enough that you could go either way here.

(20th Century Fox)

I just realized two of my choices here include Eva Green. Interesting.

( Moar! )

That'll have to do for this year. At least it's still June. Happy Pride Month, everyone!

*throws rainbow confetti*