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I’ve been trying to think of a good term for the “weepy movies about tragic queer people aimed at straight audiences” subgenre, and I think I’ve got it:
dead gays for the straight gaze
eh? eh??
queers die for the straight eye
SO YOOOO who wants to learn why this is a thing because the history is actually really fascinating and ties into some of my favorite shit ever?
Okay, so like, back in the mid-twentieth century, when being queer was still totally a crime everywhere in the United States, queer writers started working in pulp fiction–starting with Vin Packer (she is awesome)–and writing pulps to tell our stories.
So one day over lunch, her editor asks her, “Hey, Vin, what’s the story you most want to write?”
And she goes, “Well, I’d like to write a love story about lesbians because I’m, you know, gay.”
He says, “Hey, that’s awesome, I will publish it. One thing, though, the homosexuality has to end badly and the main character has to realize she was never gay in the first place. We can’t seem to support homosexuality. I don’t actually think that’s cool, but the government will literally seize our book shipments and destroy them on the basis of the books being ‘obscene’ if you don’t, so if we want this story actually out there, and not burning in a bonfire somewhere, it’s what you gotta do.”
So Vin goes home and writes Spring Fire, the book that launched the entire lesbian pulp genre. And while one character ends up in an insane asylum and the other ends up realizing she never loved her at all, it’s massively successful, and queer women everywhere snap it up and celebrate quietly in their closets across the nation because HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BOOK ABOUT ME? I’M NOT ALONE and it starts a huge new genre.
But: every publisher is subject to those same government censorship rules, so every story has to end unhappily for the queer characters, or else the book will never see the light of day. So, even though lesbian pulp helps solidify the queer civil rights movement, it’s having to do so subversively or else it’ll end up on the chopping block.
So blah blah blah, this goes on for about twentyyears, until finally in the seventies the censorship laws get relaxed, and people can actually start queer publishing houses! Yay! But the lesbian pulps, in the form they’d been known previously, basically start dying out.
MEANWHILE, OVER IN JAPAN! Yuri, or the “girls love” genre in manga, starts to emerge in the 1970s, and even starts dealing with trans characters in the stories. But, because of the same social mores that helped limit American lesbian pulp, the stories in Japan similarly must end in tragedy or else bad shit will go down for the authors and their books. Once more: tragic ends are the only way to see these stories published rather than destroyed.
The very first really successful yuri story has a younger, naive girl falling into a relationship with an older, more sophisticated girl, but the older girl ends up dying in the end, and subsequent artists/writers repeated the formula until it started getting subverted in the 1990s–again, twenty years later.
And to begin with cinema followed basically the same path as both lesbian pulps and yuri: when homosexuality is completely unacceptable in society, characters die or their stories otherwise end in tragedy, just to get the movies made, and a few come along to subvert that as things evolve.
But unlike the books and manga before them, even though queer people have become sightly more openly accepted, movies are stuck in a loop. See, pulps and yuri are considered pretty disposable, so they were allowed to evolve basically unfettered by concerns of being artistic or important enough to justify their existence, but film is considered art, and especially in snooty film critic circles, tragedy=art.
Since we, in the Western world, put films given Oscar nods on a pedestal, and Oscar nods go to critical darlings rather than boisterous blockbusters (the film equivalent of pulps, basically), and critics loooove their tragedy porn, filmmakers create queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ that win awards that then inspire more queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ until the market is oversaturated with this bullshit.
The Crying Game? Critical darling, tragic trans character.
Brokeback Mountain? Critical darling, tragic queer (? not totally sure if they’d consider themselves gay or bi, tbh?) characters.
And so on and so on VOILA, we now have a whole genre of tragedy porn for straight people, that started out as validation for us and sometimes even manages to slip some more through the cracks occasionally, but got co-opted by pretentious ~literary~ types. While tragic ends made these stories more acceptable to begin with, and in the mid-to-late nineties that started getting subverted a little bit (Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader), eventually that became the point, as more straight audiences started consuming these narratives and got all attached to the feels they got from the ~beauty of our pain~.
Queer history is crucial
I actually have a copy of Spring Fire. I read a lot of lesbian pulp when I was a teenager, and I loved the drama of it but hated the tragedy. Then I found neo-pulp, modern stories in the pulp style where queers got happy endings! Check out Monica Nolan and Mabel Maney. They were hugely influential on me and were very inspirational when I was working on I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space in particular.
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.
That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.
A
striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in
parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female
from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57
percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar,
according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of
ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period,
and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The
same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages
fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage
points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse
was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for
instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when
male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.
This is the stark reality. The pay gap exists not because of women’s “inability” but because they are viewed as inherently less valuable human beings.
For 17
years, Nick Makris never uttered a word in public. The autistic teenager
from Levenshulme in Manchester has been a selective mute since birth,
unable to speak due to severe social anxiety.
In September he began taking part in a cooking class at the Grange
Special School, which has 137 pupils on the autistic spectrum. The class
was established a year ago by a teacher, Serene Phillips, with food
supplied entirely by the food waste charity FareShare, which the Telegraph is backing in its Christmas appeal.
Every
Wednesday, Nick and his class spend the morning preparing a lunch and
then take it to a nearby day centre where they serve up to 30 elderly
people (many of whom have their own health issues including dementia).
In recent months, because of the social bonds formed over the
lunches, Nick has finally started to speak. With a broad smile on his
face he slowly tells me what he enjoys most about the cooking classes:
“making old people happy”.
Part charity solicitation, but an entirely heartwarming and uplifting story.
Once the children were asleep, Sajjad headed out on an urgent shopping mission. “We are Muslims and we’d never had a Christmas tree in our home. But these children were Christian and we wanted them to feel connected to their culture.”
The couple worked until the early hours putting the tree up and wrapping presents. The first thing the children saw the next morning was the tree.
“I had never seen that kind of extra happiness and excitement on a child’s face.“ The children were meant to stay for two weeks – seven years later two of the three siblings are still living with them.
this is a beautiful article and i just want to include a few other highlights from the above family as well as another profiled:
…she focuses on the positives – in particular how fostering has given her and Sajjad an insight into a world that had been so unfamiliar. “We have learned so much about English culture and religion,” Sajjad says. Riffat would read Bible stories to the children at night and took the girls to church on Sundays. “When I read about Christianity, I don’t think there is much difference,” she says. “It all comes from God.”
The girls, 15 and 12, have also introduced Riffat and Sajjad to the world of after-school ballet, theatre classes and going to pop concerts. “I wouldn’t see many Asian parents at those places,” she says. “But I now tell my extended family you should involve your children in these activities because it is good for their confidence.” Having the girls in her life has also made Riffat reflect on her own childhood. “I had never spent even an hour outside my home without my siblings or parents until my wedding day,” she says.
Just as Riffat and Sajjad have learned about Christianity, the girls have come to look forward to Eid and the traditions of henna. “I’ve taught them how to make potato curry, pakoras and samosas,” Riffat says. “But their spice levels are not quite the same as ours yet.” The girls can also sing Bollywood songs and speak Urdu.
“I now look forward to going home. I have two girls and my wife waiting,” says Sajjad. “It’s been such a blessing for me,” adds Riffat. “It fulfilled the maternal gap.”
[…]
Shareen’s longest foster placement arrived three years ago: a boy from Syria. “He was 14 and had hidden inside a lorry all the way from Syria,” she says. The boy was deeply traumatised. They had to communicate via Google Translate; Shareen later learned Arabic and he picked up English within six months. She read up on Syria and the political situation there to get an insight into the conditions he had left.
“It took ages to gain his trust,” she says. “I got a picture dictionary that showed English and Arabic words and I remember one time when I pronounced an Arabic word wrong and he burst out laughing and told me I was saying it wrong – that was the breakthrough.”
The boy would run home from school and whenever they went shopping in town, he kept asking Shareen when they were going back home. She found out why: “He told me that one day he left his house in Syria and when he had come back, there was no house.” Now he’s 18, speaks English fluently and is applying for apprenticeships. He could move out of Shareen’s home, but has decided to stay. “He is a very different person to the boy who first came here,” she says, “and my relationship with him is that of a mother to her son.”
cashier: sorry for your wait. we’re short-staffed today
millennial: oh that’s ok no worries 🙂
baby boomer:
But listen that’s the thing.
We are short staffed almost 97% of the time at my retail job. Because corporate has figured out you can overwork 4 people at minimum wage instead of paying for the 8 people you should probably have to be on the clock.
Baby boomers grew up with stores that were adequately staffed, with workers who most likely had weeks of training for their jobs as opposed to the 1-2 shadow shift training we get now. Also those workers most likely were able to be full time if they wanted. Now retail, except for management positions, is mostly made up of part time workers, because you don’t have to give them benefits. So you have a workforce of perpetually underpaid, overwhelmed, undertrained people trying to do their best all while dealing with an entire generation of people who refuse to acknowledge that the system has changed and the average retail worker has NO control over that change and is being taken advantage of.
Like we got our customer surveys back, and almost every single one mentioned that they couldn’t find someone to help them or we needed more people on register because it was TOO SLOW, but what did management tell us instead of scheduling more people? We need to be quicker on register and call for backup if necessary. Which makes no sense because we can’t call for backup THAT ISN’T THERE.
Y’all my parents haven’t worked retail since the 70s and they absolutely never believe me about the things that happen at work. I explain the schedule for next week gets hung up on the Friday before and they scoff and go “well when i worked at X they had it a month up your manager is just lazy.” No mom, its company policy to only do “two weeks” in advance. They won’t give you a full month’s scheduling in advance cause it let’s you plan for a world outside of work.
Or about the hours, workload or anything. They just assume its an individual’s failing instead of corporate mandate. Or, if they do believe me (that its company policy) they call it ridiculous and point out some survey that argues its Good Business to do (insert decent thing here).As if they think the higher ups don’t know this and are simply ignorant of Good Business Practices. They don’t understand that retail has completely shifted from caring about its employees to squeezing out every penny now instead of investing it for later.
Cause that isn’t how it was when they worked and they just can’t seem to see otherwise.
I think there should be a ‘bring-your-parent-to-work-day’ instead of ‘bring-your-kid-to-work-day’, it would shock so many parents and would probably make them finally realize how much retail indeed has changed in the US.
when i first got hired as a cashier, my manager who had been doing that since she was like 17 in 1975 told me that back in The Days, when you were hired as a cashier in a grocery store it was a) a well paid job & you could get full time work easily b) a respected career choice c) the store closed at 6pm and was closed on Sundays so the hours were a lot more pleasant d) they made you go to cashier school for 2 weeks, which was basically a fake grocery store and you just learned the trade completely before even meeting a customer now its like : you get like 20 hours a week, bullshit shifts like 3:45 to 10:15, a 20 minutes training before being thrown to the wolves, customers tell you you deserve your shitty lowlife job as soon as you don’t thoroughly kiss their ass
The millennial experience is tied to growing income inequality and the indentured servitude of student loan debt
very relevant. even my retail job, which is light on customer service/cashier and heavy on labor and projects, is hit by the company severely cutting back wages because we consistently cannot hit our planned sales goals. and its not just in one job, its eeeverywheeeere so why some people dont understand this by now is silly. you get this p much everywhere
how can some people look at the fact that insulin is cheap to produce, yet extremely costly and not think corporations have pricing power especially on inelastic goods such as insulin lmao.
they talk all day and all night about how “supply meets demand” and then casually forget that inelastic goods are a thing that corporations can gut people with.
believing supply meets demand at some fantastic idealist equilibrium in real life is so childish and ignores the realities of the lives we live. supply does not and has not met demand at your magic equilibrium since the dawn of capitalism. it’s just not a real thing.
and on top of this, they genuinely want people to die because they believe a corporation has a right to kill people by withholding cheap goods to make another couple billion? that’s inhuman.
and don’t give me this bullshit that it’s the governments fault because regulations or whatever else garbage you want to spew.
you truly honestly believe if there were less regulations corporations would ignore an opportunity to screw people over when they know they can?
you truly think corporations out of the goodness of their cold dead hearts would throw away an opportunity to make a lot more money than they should just because people are desperate and will die without the goods they hoard?
and you truly think that there would be enough insulin making competition to stop this from happening? that’s honestly fucking wild. you call communism wild but to think this is genuinely … the most absurd thing i’ve ever heard.
you really don’t think these corporations would oligopolize to beat out everyone else? you don’t think their endgame would be to make the most money possible?
and you say I don’t know anything about economics …
Okay this is an actual Thing I Feel Strongly About, so…
Rich people and corporate execs don’t understand how generous low income people are. They don’t get that
Anyway, as I was saying before I accidentally posted, they don’t get that people supporting other people on Patreon isn’t a case of really well off people who can afford those fee hikes. It’s other artists who aren’t well off, but they’ve got a little and they remember what it’s like to be a starving artist. Rich people give to big showy charities. The rest of us give to one another.
BuzzFeed News can exclusively reveal that Marvel Television is working on Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors, an upcoming feature-length animated film about a new generation of diverse superheroes. (x)
Steel Phoenix Studios 