My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Part 6): Gay Coming-of-Age Films

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Directed by Steven Frears

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke

Maurice (1987)

Directed by James Ivory

Starring James Wilby and Rupert Graves

Y tu Mamá También (2001)

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Starring Gael Garcia Bernal

Gay male coming out/coming of age movies have always drawn actors and directors beyond what you would expect of typical teen fare. Some of this may be a mix of gay directors and screenwriters portraying their life experience, but this not always so…a diverse mix of artists has tackled this genre. Why? Beyond the usual teen opportunities for angst, cute actors, nice bodies, and party scenes, there is an irresistible overlay here, in that one or more characters must hide who they are, from themselves, their family/friends, or both. Lesbian dramas do not seem to have as much of that, perhaps because of the historically greater tolerance for lesbians, as well as the paucity of opportunities for women directors and writers. So in the male coming-out film, there are all the elements present for high drama and challenging acting. I rewatched several of these films this week, and noticed both some common themes and interesting evolution as society has become more tolerant. How can you still make an angst-filled coming-out film in the era of gay marriage and more global acceptance?

The Two Progenitors

Two films from the height of the AIDS era, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Maurice (1987), remain outstanding, well made versions of this genre. Laundrette was the breakout film for Daniel Day-Lewis (above), playing the punk skinhead Johnny in Thatcherite England who falls in love with an old Pakistani school chum, Omar. The film sets a few genre ground rules, but remains exceptional even now. The challenge for Omar’s pairing off with Johnny are the social rules of their two clans: a big extended Pakistani family for Omar and racially/sexually intolerant punk culture for Johnny. The fun thing about this film is that it is a comedy (rare in this overheated genre) and that there is never any internal angst for either guy about their sexuality or love or lust…the only problem is doing the slalom course around family and friends. So this film is really more a film about the racial and class division of Thatcher England, with the gay awareness plot as the driver. It’s a charming film which depicts gay men teasing each other, playing around, and acting pretty normal. That makes it unusual for its era, when gay men were more often shown as circus freaks. Maurice is equally good, but is another beast entirely. Based on a suppressed novel by E.M. Forrester, it depicts three gay men of 1910-20 who interact in complex ways. This was another breakout role, this time for Hugh Grant, playing the repressed Cambridge student Clive who falls for Maurice (James Wilby, below). They romance each other that time honored British private school homosexual tradition that often seems more intellectual than physical (lots of translating of Greek texts in tutorial, skipping, as the tutor says, references to “the unspeakable vice of the Greeks”). But Maurice has real love/lust and, frustrated by Clive’s reluctance to commit, falls for the randy estate gamekeeper, fully experiences passionate sex, then never turns back. This is the main prototype film of the genre. There is lots of internal angst (except by the gamekeeper) and much societal rejection and repression of homosexuality in the era of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment. This film is all about angst and struggle and finding yourself, with the typical British overlay of class tensions, all portrayed by director Ivory amidst the typical gorgeous upper class country estates. When the film ends with swelling violins and the romantic reunion of Maurice with the gamekeeper, we are thrilled, if a bit skeptical, that Maurice has really given up his career, status, and societal standing for love of a common man. But it is an excellent tearjerker nonetheless. It turns out that these two films, well made, well-acted, and popular happy-ending tonics to AIDS devastation of the gay community, would remain atypical for years. Mostly, when gay men appeared in movies, they generally had to hide, die (Tom Hanks Philadelphia, 1993) or fade into the background as a colorful accessory to the featured straight romance.  It is only in the last decade that happy endings really reappeared in mainstream gay coming-out movies.

The Descendants

A big revival happened with the superb Y tu Mamá También (2001), the first big international hit of Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter, Gravity, Roma). This wildly creative film is basically a road movie of two “straight” horny teenagers (including the outstanding young Gael Garcia Bernal, below), whose trip to the beach with a voluptuous older woman ends up with a three-way group sex scene that mixes eroticism, innocence, awkwardness, and wonder in equal measures. This is just as a first-time sexual encounter should be shown, but rarely is. The film’s unpredictability, natural depiction of rowdy male teen behavior, and frequent changes in direction are fantastic. Here we are left with a fascinatingly neutral ending. After their sex together, the two friends, embarrassed, just drift apart from one another, a daring way to end a movie, eschewing the upbeat resolution of Laundrette or Maurice. The drifting apart is in mostly due to the implied machismo of Mexican culture, which makes the two friends’ sexual act impossible for them to process, not to mention embrace. See this movie if you have not.

I wondered how this genre had fared in an era of increasing international tolerance of homosexuality. What would happen to all that dramatic struggle, repression and angst? Well, it is still there, and still driving film plot lines, just differently. In the Icelandic Heartstone (2016), a very young adolescent falls in love with a prepubertal straight guy friend in a backdrop of an intrusive, conservative rural community, acting out the traditional angst scenario on a backdrop of spectacular Icelandic landscape. In the Swiss Mario (2018) it’s the same deal, but now the repressive background is male sports, one of the final bastions of homophobia. Two professional soccer players fall in love, one more confidently than the other (another common pattern in both movies and life), and they end up drifting apart because one does not want to jeopardize his professional career. Neither of these films ends up with false upbeat resolution…the guys pretty much do realistic things. That tends to characterize European movies generally. Realism trumps fantasy and tragedy.

The opposite occurs in the most lauded “gay film” from the US in recent years. Brokeback Mountain (2005) has all the familiar coming-out angst and societal repression (this time the mores of the conservative rural West), but is in fact quite retrograde, in that the gay guy who actually acts out his sexuality gets killed as a result. But we finally get a really modern gay coming out film from an American director with the Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016), a strange, somber, complex film of coming-out in an unsympathetic black underclass. It feels like the characters are in their own socially-isolated island, much like the upper-crust characters of Maurice. But the film ends daringly (for a US film) with neither a gay death nor a romantic reconciliation of the separated lovers (separated here by incarceration). I applaud the Academy for awarding a film with such a nebulous, realistic ending.

The Millenials and GenZers, of course, are far more tolerant of all things GLBTQ, and are mostly bored with traditional gay issues, having moved on to transgender as their “thing”. So it is not surprising that the most recent teen gay male films treat the subject more matter-of-factly. Best of these are the Brazilian The Way He Looks (2014), where two adorable teens (above), one blind, that fall in love, face some minimal classmate resistance and teasing, then walk off hand-in-hand. The film ingeniously imagines how a blind young teen would imagine his lover, and how he substitutes smell and touch as his erotic pathways. Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015) and The Falls (2012) are lesser efforts, but rev up the old societal repression angle by having gay love blossom in the evangelical Protestant and Mormon cultures, respectively. And, returning to the happy ending-with-violins tradition of Maurice, Love, Simon (2018) ends with kissing on a Ferris wheel, replete with fireworks and the cheers of classmates (below). But most of the movie is strikingly angst-free, except for the angst of not knowing the identity of your secret lover-pen pal. So its mostly a formulaic teen film, just with gay characters…quite a revolution in its own way. So, all in all, gay coming-out movies reflect the changes of society, but have still not become extinct with greater societal acceptance. So far, it seems like the old formulas still work, and still make a good movie.