Have Queer people sacrificed our rage for mainstream appeal?

TW: This work was done in pure, unadulterated, queer rage. It might prove offensive to the “Good gays”, Straights, Westeners, and most of all CAPITALISTS.

Inspired by Verilybitchie video on Bad Bi Representation.

The gays are in fashion, as more and more media producers chuck out films, tv shows and books for our consumption; a capitalist hellscape. If video killed the radio star, then Gaystream is aiming at New Queer Cinema.

Gaystream was first used circa 1990s, as a derogatory term for the gay community (Mulshine, 1994). In the early 2000s the term made a comeback as a critical descriptor of assimilationist politics in the LGBT+ community, and later it would be used by Logo (Production Company of the show Paul Raul’s Drag Race) as a compound word of gay and mainstream, which is how I’ll be using it on this article.

Gaystream is an insidious tactic used by different companies that works on the idea that you can market to both, straight and queer people, actually. But it isn’t that simple, see, lesbians are thought as undesirable consumers: the sapphic queens are seen as angry, rough, anti-materialists, ecofeminists. As Dalia Ali Rajah, producer of Cherry Bomb, said, “There’s nothing for somebody to sell us’ ‘.

Rural gays also suffer from exclusion as they are seen as not educated enough, not cultured enough to be able to understand the complexities of LGBT+ identities. Bisexuals (plus other m-spec) and transexuals are too liminal, too weird, too transgressive to even attempt to cater to them. What about asexuals and aromantics? Well you can’t have a ship with them, so why even try.

Just look at the most popular “Queer” centric shows and movies in the past decade: Love Simon, Young Royals, Hearstopper… all the main protagonists are men loving men. Nothing against you gentleman, I love these shows too (except Love Simon), take your delicious representation served on a cold corporate plate.

I can read the text (read: watch the series) without complaints. But what angers me every time is the interviews, where the purpose of those media is told to us very explicitly, apart from taking our money, they want to:

NORMALIZE, ASSIMILATE.

Although these films are LGBT+ in context they are not queer in structure. They tell people how “Gays are just like you” instead of celebrating the differences of the queer community. Because that is diversity & inclusion, actually; we are all equal because we are all identical in reality; love is love (we don’t see color). Please note the sarcasm.

What makes a film queer has been subsumed by aesthetics and narratives that display the straight gaze (E. Alex Jung, 2018). New LGBT+ films pander to the Hollywood illusion of the universal story, a.k.a. the most privileged one, just look at Love, Simon.

How did we get here? Two words: Gay Marriage.

First I want to say that I have nothing against same-sex marriage. I have stuff to say about Marriage, but if the queers want to do it, who am I to stop them? Go get gay and lesbian married, bisexual and transexual, even asexual if you are feeling daring.

However, the problem is when gay marriage is seen as th end-all for queer rights: it confuses equality with acceptance and discards liberation. In other words, it is concerned with accessing dominant structures and privileges (Eve Ng, 2013) rather than dismantling them.

On days like these, where our stories are asking straight audiences for forgiveness and permission to exist, I miss the radical queer films, the incandescent rage of New Queer Cinema. Born out of the AIDs crisis, it was less of a coordinated movement and more people who found each other screaming & creating at the same time.

“If LGBT+ films of today are frame by gay marriage […] The worlds of activism, art, experimental film and cheap New York rent collided to create an acerbic, witty, subversive and campy genre that had punch and swagger” (E. Alex Jung, 2018).

These films did not care about acceptance, instead they found liberation within their marginalization. They were queer in content and structure but most importantly in production and distribution. As an audience we have become more conservative; when you don’t have to hide from the cops to watch a shaky picture created in somebody’s basement, you start to demand films that are more respectable: full of squeaky clean “positive images”.

We often think of LGBT+ films in the past as nothing more than a cemetery of Bury Your Gays trope sprinkle with Deviant Queers but, New Queer Cinema found the Queer Joy modern stories like Heartstopper are so often praised for. They just did it in a more transgressive, sexy and twisted way.

Tongues Untied, The Watermelon Woman, Young Soul Rebels, The Living End and many more carved out queer joy without letting go of their rage. In fact they were angry as fuck. Do we still have that anger today? The balls and eggs to tell the world “Fuck You, I’m going to live my truth” and that is not just rainbows and glitter but graffiti and grime. Not comodifiable.

We are prazing Hollywood for offering us representation, when really, they are selling us back our experiences; they took queerness and made it marketable.

Although I recommend everyone to watch at least one of the movies of the 90’s New Queer eRA, living in the past too much doesn’t do anything good, and that is fine because the present also has some radical queer films for us.

Two queer in structure films I recommend that come from the West are: Appropriate Behavior and The Half of it, and two TV shows would be: The Bisexual, and Sort of. However, most of the Newest Queer Cinema is found on the other side of the U.S-Mexican border: The Global South.

Nudo Mixteco (2021), Rafiki (2018), Funny Boy (2020), The Angel (2018), I am Samuel (2020), Marylin (2018), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here (2021), José (2018), Luciérnagas (2018), Joyland (2022), Ajeeb Dastaans (2021)… For TV series I would recommend Not Me, The Eclipse and 3 Will Be Free but they were made with a very popular producer in Thailand (you can watch them on Youtube, though).

Unlike the Global North, third world countries don’t have the best reputation with queer acceptance, therefore filmmakers are more likely to feel the need to “[Go] that extra place to get their stories out there because they [feel] if they [don’t] they [will] never be able to,” as lesbian filmmaker veteran Christine Vachon once said.

Homonationalism, a facet of homonormativity, plays a huge role in this. A rather recent project made by countries in Europe, Canada & USA, Israel and the like, works by the promotion of these nation-states as “Gay friendly” unlike the savage homophobic monsters found in Africa, Asia and LATAM, without mentioning that the regressive anti lgbt+ policies are often backed up by these same global powers. One of the most egregious examples of this is the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Afghanistan.

The Gaystream therefore serves as tourist and political propaganda, look at Eurovision for example, within the context.

However, I will be wrong to dismiss the oppression that LGBT+ people around the north are facing (unlike white western queers who tend to forget that gays exist in Subsaharan Africa and China). Especially in the USA and England, there is a new purge going on.

In this day and age, many queer people are resonating with the response Gregory Araki, the director of The Living End (1992) gave when asked about the AIDS epidemic: “I’m literally being exterminated. I’ve been targeted for this genocide.”

Yes, “good” representation is important and we need to be allowed to tell our own stories. But why are we asking for good rep instead of authentic? Is asking for permission the way to go? Why are we asking in the first place?

Capitalism will not liberate us, championing companies who would rather use AI than pay their writers fair salaries won’t help us achieve rights. Gaystreaming regardless of the great art it has made, is another marketing tool.

We need to be radical, to be queer in the full sense of the word, to create art outside of capitalism because otherwise Hollywood and the likes will snuff all the anger out of us before we even get the chance to fight back.

As B. Ruby Rich, who coined the term New Queer Cinema, tells her students:

“Don’t go to New York, don’t go to L.A. Pick a spot on the map where there used to be a factory [or something] and where it’s now abandoned and derelict, and get all your friends and go there and buy the buildings and fix them up, and get a website and start your own online gallery, and make that the place that other people will want to come”.