Anthony Oliveira’s Pride Picks

Happy Pride everyone! And what a Pride 2023 will be.

For the last few months, we have seen anti-queer and particularly anti-trans vitriol and violence intensify. This lab-grown hate, carefully focus-grouped and hot-housed by various desperate “conservative” demagogues (in fact smash-and-grab vandals bent more ferociously on stripping society for saleable parts than “conserving” anything about it), has blown wide, and begun to take root in fields far remote from where it was sown. Now, even as state by state trans people, drag performers, queer families and readers and patients alike all watch their rights tumble and fall, advocacy groups are grimly warning: in the UK, US, and Canada alike, this will likely be the most unsafe Pride in two and a half decades.

At the heart of this rhetoric demonizing and dehumanizing queer people and clanging on about the dangers of “groomers” and “wokeness” is a common refrain. These shallowly opportunistic politicians and their willing social media partisans mewlingly insist: it is not their sudden and arbitrary intensity of hatred that is the novelty, but us. That we in the LGBTQ+ community are somehow upstarts, that we are an aberration and a danger, that we are some new thing under the sun.

I have no objection to innovation, of course, but as both a scholar and a film programmer there is an obligation to the archive to assert, very plainly, that that simply isn’t so.

And so, what I sought to assemble from out of Hollywood Suite’s catalogue was a small capsule summary of the last few decades of queer film. These films were made in the last fifty years, but many of them stretch back further still. Some, like Blake Edwards’s Victor/Victoria (1982) depict the frank genderqueer scene of pre-war Paris (the film is itself a later remake of 1933’s German film Victor & Victoria, which captured the breezy queerness of Berlin culture before the Nazis rose to power). Others, like Robert Altman’s imperfect but compelling Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), interrogate the false idyll of 1950s America for trans women. And reaching back further still, Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) adapts Virginia Woolf’s novel (a gift to her beloved Vita) to tell a story of queer identity that spans a gulf of centuries, plucking Tilda Swinton from the court and lap of Elizabeth I to meet our gaze with startling earnestness in our own time.

In the seventies, we will pop in on the acidly sardonic gay NYC dinner party of William Friedkin’s Boys in the Band (1970), then swan onto the divan of a cruel lesbian fashion designer’s German atelier in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lurid psychodrama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), and then join in the raucous queer punk socialist action of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1970), as Al Pacino stages a bank heist to fund his girlfriend’s gender affirming care.

Along with Victor/Victoria and Jimmy Dean looking backward, in the eighties we’ll also see Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987) casting its eye to the burgeoning vampire boom that would dominate the nineties. Schumacher uses vampirism (as so many queer storytellers did amid the height of the AIDS crisis) to not-so-subtly mask themes of melancholy rootlessness, fear of contagion, and the shelter of found family amid its undead California street hustlers (kids who, fangs aside, were much like Schumacher himself in his younger days).

After Potter’s Orlando, the nineties also deliver the most financially successful trans filmmakers of all time, as Lana and Lilly Wachowski launch their careers pre-Matrix with razor-sharp and claustrophobic lesbian neo-noir Bound (1996), about two women in passionate, dangerous lust (Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly) taking on the Chicago mob. With similar explosive chemistry, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) captures a gay couple’s tumultuous and turbulent love affair with poignancy and beauty, demanding attention be paid to a relationship as touching as it is destructive.

Old narratives are reconsidered in the 21^st century, as Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011) tells the story of a young Black woman’s coming of age as a butch lesbian, coming to recognize her family’s failure to offer acceptance may be irreconcilable. Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman (2017) follows a trans woman’s demand not just for dignity, but for joy following a sudden bereavement leaves her face-to-face with her deceased partner’s frosty family. And Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017) restages that very oldest of gay narratives – the pastoral, as old as Virgil’s Eclogues – as a love affair between a migrant hired hand and a frustrated farmer’s son who must learn to expand his horizons quickly or feel them shrink forever.

Terms have shifted and reconfigured. How loud and how proud we are allowed to be has ebbed and flowed (and perhaps now ebbs again). But for those with an eye to see, behind the camera and on the screen, it is clear: we have always been here.

ANTHONY’S PICKS

Click on titles below for more info and additional playtimes

Hollywood Suite 70s Movies

The Boys in The Band (1970)
June 22 at 9pm ET
Available on demand

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972)
June 22 at 11:05pm ET
Available on demand

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
June 23 at 1:15am ET
Available on demand

Hollywood Suite 80s Movies

Victor/Victoria (1982)
June 22 at 9pm ET
Available on demand

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
June 22 at 10:35pm ET

The Lost Boys (1987)
June 23 at 1:10am ET
Available on demand

Hollywood Suite 90s Movies

Orlando (1992)
June 22 at 9pm ET
Available on demand

Bound (1996)
June 22 at 11:15pm ET
Available on demand

Happy Together (1997)
June 23 at 12:25am ET
Available on demand

Hollywood Suite 00s Movies

Pariah (2011)
June 22 at 9pm ET
Available on demand

A Fantastic Woman (2017)
June 22 at 10:50pm ET
Available on demand

God’s Own Country (2017)
June 23 at 12:40am ET
Available on demand