Let's talk gay movies
Like everything else in gay culture, it's an art form that moves at lightning speed.
Two movies that I re-watched recently and for whatever reason feel compelled to write about are Weekend (2011, UK) and Paris 05:59 - Theo & Hugo (2016, France). Weekend was certainly the more known and widely-viewed of the two.1 Paris 05:59 is frankly waaayy too x-rated to get a lot of attention from a broad audience.2 But they both did a fantastic job of capturing a certain moment in the evolution of gay culture. They’re both incredibly specific to their own time. And here just a few years later, they feel kinda dated — almost like you’re looking back in a time capsule. “Here’s what it was like being gay during the Obama years, kids. Pretty wild.”
Weekend tells the story of two British guys who meet one night at a club and go home together. Then it turns out that one of the guys is leaving the country, moving all the way to America in like 3 days. So they have this one weekend where they kinda hang out, and maybe they develop feelings for each other, but they’re not sure, and they’re both a little hesitant, but clearly there’s a real attraction there, just maybe not enough to sustain it beyond 72 hours, unless..? You get the idea. It’s beautiful and sweet, and if watching cute, vulnerable 20/30-somethings in mumbly movies is your jam3 (and it is mine!), this is great.
I think the real thrust of the movie (cinematic thrust, not .. you know) is that the two characters represent different ideas of what it means to be gay. They’re both out, mind you. This isn’t some closet drama from the mid-aughts (god, there were so many of those and they were so bad). But one of the characters (Glen) represents a sort of no-strings-attached, I-go-out-and-do-the-sex-and-the-party-and-that’s-all-there-is sort of gay, while the other main guy (Russell) seems to want maybe something more than that, but he isn’t sure what the “more” is. To Glen, this just means Russell more or less wants to live like a straight person, which is gross and boring and sad (we’re not like them — we don’t have to play by those rules!). Russell in turn sees a certain sadness and emptiness to Glen’s way of life, also. But this is the tension in the movie — back and forth between “Do gays want to be normalized?” and “Maybe gays won’t really be gay anymore if they do that.”
Paris 05:59 is also a movie about two white twenty-something Europey gays who meet randomly and might (but might not) want something more, but there are key differences. For one, the movie happens in real time. The movie is 1hr 40 min long, and it chronicles exactly that amount of time in the characters’ lives. Theo & Hugo meet at a sex club sometime after 4:00 in the morning. After having a great deal of fun at the club, they go out into the Paris night and life sort of takes over from there.
Paris 05:59 is a gorgeous movie, if only because it contains a significant number of scenes where the two guys just ride bikes around Paris at night. It made me want to pack a bag and run off to go do exactly that. It was amazing. But beyond that, the movie is really about what happens when (and I’ll do my best not to put any explicit spoilers out here) one character is extraordinarily naive about how to conduct himself in an era before PrEP and before U = U and without any general understanding of the risks of HIV, while the other character is left to try and figure out whether it’s really worth investing time with this person who he honestly just met and doesn’t even know. The movie deals with really important themes, but in a way that’s very specific to like, 2005 to 2017. That’s not to say that HIV isn’t an important concern in 2022 — it absolutely is. But watching this movie where PrEP isn’t even mentioned makes it feel necessarily out of date.
In their own way, both movies seem pretty dated, watching them now in 2022. Firstly, these movies are very much about white gays and White Gay Problems. Nothing wrong with that per se, but there is no real effort to represent anyone else, or to frame issues in terms of what the youths today would call queerness, or gender spectrum or identity, or anything like that. These aren’t movies from the 2020s. These are just very straight out of central casting, capital G, Gays. But more than that, these movies both sort of assume that the problems of these very down-the-line “regular” gays are unique to gay culture. As if straight people don’t have one-night stands that might (or might not) go somewhere after that, or as if the risks of HIV are only borne by the Regular Typical Gays who look like everyone else.
For all of the hand-wringing by the characters in Weekend, it never occurs to them that anyone other than gay men like them might have these exact same problems. Rather, they see it specifically as their gayness that lies at the heart of their frustration with life and their place in the world. To be gay is to wrestle with how much sex you want to have with whom and to what end. As gay men of the early 2010s, they see themselves automatically as outsiders, and thus they are left alone in the world, figuring out how to fit romance into the rest of their lives as their future unfolds. In 2022, I don’t think that experience is so confined — it seems quite a bit more universal. The idea of being alone and maybe a bit afraid in your late 20s/early 30s is not limited to (and does not define) the gay community. The gays in Paris 05:59 embody that same tension, though with them it’s the very dated way in which they respond to a physical health crisis that really drives their their anxiety.
Anyway. I love both of these movies. But probably more for their nostalgia value than anything else. The era they describe is really gone. Or at least, it has morphed. And we’ve all gotten older.
At least as I’m checking now, it looks like Weekend can be streamed on Amazon or YouTube as a rental for $3 or $4.
Seriously, do not watch this movie with anyone who you’re not comfortable watching gay porn with. It’s a great dramatic movie. But it’s like.. kinda something else for about the first 20 minutes. Last I checked, it was available to stream on Mubi (if you have Mubi. Does anyone have Mubi?) or some service called Tubi that I’ve never even heard of but apparently lets you just stream movies for free without sign ups or anything.
One of these days I might also write a post about the epically mumbly, gorgeously heart wrenching End of the Century (2019, Spain). It’s a movie that really needs its own post, tho.