All the progress over the last 30 years to let queer youth come out safely has made the continued existence of these programs only more outrageous and deserving of attention.
Sixty-eight percent of LGBT people in the US today still live in states that allow minors to be enrolled in “ex-gay” programs, which propagate the dangerous lie that any innate sexual desires that aren’t resolutely heterosexual can be either permanently suppressed or eradicated altogether. The preoccupation with the closet also presents a tricky narrative hurdle for filmmakers wishing to tell a coming out story: How can these films keep their protagonists’ central problem compelling when real life has made it feel so much more commonplace?īoth Boy Erased and The Miseducation of Cameron Post approach this problem by focusing on what remains perhaps the most pernicious barrier for queer youth struggling to accept their sexuality: gay conversion therapy. But as the country’s attitudes about LGBT people have shifted, representation of LGBT teens in feature films has remained stubbornly moored to this one aspect of the queer experience, at the expense of the fuller picture of queer lives. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it still can’t be enormously difficult for some LGBT kids today - especially trans and gender-nonconforming people - to accept themselves and leave the closet (if they have the option of being “in” the closet in the first place). Gay–straight alliances, meanwhile, have jumped enormously, from just over 10% of LGBT students reporting a GSA in their school in 2001 to nearly 60% in 2017. According to the 2017 National School Climate Survey by GLSEN, incidences of verbal and physical harassment and physical assault of LGBT students have all dropped significantly between 20. Today, the landscape for queer youth coming out has certainly become less hostile in the US. It’s what helped to poison the love between Ennis and Jack in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, for example, and what made Brandon Teena’s decision to live fully as a trans man feel so perilous in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry. For years, the default understanding - grounded in reality - was that coming out was an inherently dangerous act because the country was fundamentally hostile to LGBT people, and the underlying tension in these films drew from that perception. But in fixating on the closet, they also end up reinforcing the perception that a queer person’s story ends with their own self-acceptance - when really, that’s only the beginning.Ĭoming-out movies, in fairness, have been a central part of queer cinema pretty much since its inception, from 1982’s Making Love to 1998’s High Art to 2016’s Moonlight.
It makes sense that as filmmakers have made haphazard progress with telling queer stories, it has been tantalizingly easy to keep exploring how LGBT people - especially queer teens - grapple with how to come out.Īnd to be sure, all of the coming-out movies this year about queer teens treat the process with empathy and sensitivity, and each of them creates an emotionally affecting story.
There can be long, dark nights of the soul, tear-filled confrontations with loved ones, and moments of euphoric self-discovery and punishing self-doubt - which also happen to be fantastic material for a feature film. The very nature of it is often inherently dramatic. The experience of coming out is, of course, something every LGBT person faces in one way or another. And like those movies, Boy Erased and Bohemian Rhapsody are frustratingly stuck in the closet. They are also the latest in a small but significant wave of well-regarded films this year with lesbian, gay, and bi protagonists, including Love, Simon (which opened March 16), Alex Strangelove (which debuted on Netflix June 8), and The Miseducation of Cameron Post (which opened Aug. Last weekend, two high-profile movies opened in theaters that feature queer protagonists: Bohemian Rhapsody, starring Rami Malek as the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and Boy Erased, starring Lucas Hedges as a teenage boy who enters a gay conversion therapy program after he’s outed to his parents.īoth are based on true stories, and both arrive with awards buzz for their powerfully rendered performances.