Tag: lgbtq+

A few weeks ago I watched the film Kajillionaire, which came out in 2020 and was directed by Miranda July. It stars Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez as the main characters. The film is about a couple and their daughter who work as con artists in Los Angeles, and how, when they meet a friendly stranger on an airplane named Melanie, have their entire lives turned upside down. When I first saw the trailer, honestly the first thing that attracted me to it was the pink suds.

And then I saw the actual film and it was nothing like I expected. Actually I didn’t really know what it was about other than watching the trailer.

The film touches on a lot of key themes, one of which is love and trust. Old Dolio, who is the daughter of Robert and Theresa Dyne, has spent her whole life living in a manipulative relationship with her parents, and they tell her constantly that it’s a cruel world and everyone is out to scam them or trick them, so they need to fend for themselves as a family. The movie opens up with a bus stop and as the bus pulls away the only people who don’t get on it are Old Dolio and her parents, and so that people don’t see Old Dolio going into the mail office to take something from the safety deposit boxes there, her parents scout around and look around them as people pass by so she can go in at the right time. These many years of not being able to trust people has made it hard for Old Dolio to trust even the people with the most benign intentions. When she goes to an older Black couple’s home dressed as a Catholic student, the couple thinks she and their daughter, Jenny, went to school together and they give her a gift certificate for a massage because Jenny is a masseuse. When Old Dolio comes over, she is anxious about staying too long because she knows her parents will come over and rush her out of there since they came to pawn Jenny’s stuff for money, not let their daughter get an hour-long massage. Jenny is fine with Old Dolio asking for a shorter massage, but Old Dolio tenses up when Jenny puts her hands on her back, and so finally Jenny hovers her hands over Old Dolio to make her more comfortable. Under the headrest we can see Old Dolio quietly crying because she is emotionally overwhelmed by Jenny’s touch, which has a gentleness that Old Dolio’s parents never gave her.

This theme plays a huge part in the family’s bond with Melanie, a young woman who they meet on a plane headed to New York City. Melanie is agreeable and thinks that what Old Dolio and her family do is like Ocean’s 11 or other heist movies. But when she actually sees how Robert and Theresa carry out their plans, which is really to take people’s checkbooks and write checks for themselves, and moreover, how they treat Old Dolio, she realizes that the situation is less glamorous than what she thought. Also, when we see heist movies the people tend to get a lot of money from the heist schemes and we see them celebrating these wins in humorous ways. But in reality, the family is barely paying the rent and is always being hounded by their landlord who works at the adjacent soap suds factory from which pink suds always leak through the walls of their home. Melanie falls in love with Old Dolio from the beginning, but it takes a really long time until Old Dolio can finally trust Melanie. Earlier in the film, when the family’s landlord is hounding them over their inability to pay the rent, a pregnant young woman named Kelly calls them over and has Old Dolio sit in her childrearing class for $20. Old Dolio at first is reluctant because Kelly told her she could get her yellow slip at the beginning to show she attended and wouldn’t have to actually sit in the class, but the ladies at the sign-in desk tell her she needs to sit in the class and can get her slip at the end of it. Old Dolio comes in wanting to leave, but then she watches a video demonstrating a technique called the breast crawl, and in the video a newborn rests on its mother’s breast and approaches it gently. Old Dolio keeps coming back to the class because she sees in the video the kind of love and attachment that she never received as a child. She sees her parents getting along with Melanie and Theresa even calls Melanie “hon”, a term of endearment that she never called her daughter in her 26 years of existence. When Old Dolio finally gets a check in the mail for the rent, she isn’t ecstatic but rather sad because she realizes that she needs more than anything love and affection for her survival as a human being, not just money. She says to Theresa that she will give her the money if she will just call her “hon” like she called Melanie “hon”, but for Theresa this is uncomfortable because Old Dolio is there to do a job for them, so she mocks Old Dolio’s need for affection, joking that she’s sorry that she can’t do nice things for Old Dolio like make her pancakes, give her birthday presents, dance with her, and other things.

Melanie sees how stressful this is for Old Dolio and takes the money so they can cash it, and they leave Old Dolio’s parents behind. When they cash the money, Old Dolio just wants to cash it and go, but Melanie actually writes a list of the activities Theresa never did with Old Dolio when she was a kid, and she actually makes Old Dolio pancakes and treats her like the daughter she wanted to be treated as growing up. Old Dolio, through her deepening bond with Melanie, awakens to her sexuality as well and realizes that she and Melanie are deeply in love. Melanie opens up a whole new world for Dolio, and it’s interesting because we’d think that the closest relationship in Old Dolio’s life is with her parents but it’s actually with someone outside of the family.

And it’s sad that Old Dolio spent her whole life having her parents take advantage of her and manipulate her, but of course these kinds of relationships happen in real life and so Old Dolio’s story is not just something that happens in a movie. I understand people live through these experiences and end up making it out alive, but as someone who can’t really relate to what Old Dolio went through, it was pretty sad but also I’m glad Melanie came into Old Dolio’s life because she taught her what genuine love means. I also really loved the film score and the cinematography. It kind of made me want to visit Los Angeles again.

March 25, 2019

The Imitation Game is a period drama film based on the real life of Alan Turing, British mathematician who cracked the code of the Enigma, a machine that was so unbreakable that no one during World War II could solve it. German forces made the Enigma so difficult to solve, but that didn’t stop Alan Turing from working long hours to solve it.

At first, Alan doesn’t want to work with his teammates, and they find it hard to work with him because he is closed off from them. He fires most of the people on the team, but then recruits new people by putting out a difficult crossword puzzle in the local newspaper (sort of like fliers for talent show auditions) to recruit anyone to join the Enigma-cracking team. Joan Clarke, played brilliantly by Keira Knightley, is the only woman in a room full of men, taking the test for recruitment. When she first walks in, a gentleman at the door tells her she should join the other women in another room (women at the time were secretaries) and that she shouldn’t be here. But then Alan tells her to stay so that he can go on with the test without interruptions. At first, Joan looks at the test while everyone has their heads down and is lost, but then she works hard at it and finishes under the six minute mark. She is the first to turn in her test, and the only woman to make the team.

When I first saw Joan, I was like “Yesss! Women are killing it in tech!” But then, soon after, Alan goes to Joan’s house, where she lives with her parents and doesn’t have a husband, and she tells him she doesn’t think she can be around so many men when she is the only woman on the team. However, he tells her that he doesn’t care if she is breaking social norms. What he cares about is that she helps him Enigma code because he is short of team members. Joan’s role as one of the code breakers really showed me how important it is to have women on a team, and moreover, how important it is to encourage women to pursue tech. Before watching the film, I was skeptical about whether I would ever pursue JavaScript again, but then I just decided to resume my Codecademy learning and just pace myself. I found that not being hard on myself and not giving up was what got me through the first lesson of JavaScript, because before that I said I would continue coding, but then thought about how it seemed everyone was more qualified than me. In a later scene, Alan gets frustrated because he is being spied on and pursued (homophobia was prevalent at the time, and Alan Turing, as a gay man, faced serious discrimination and married Joan just so they could continue working on the team together and so that her parents wouldn’t make her come back home to them and quit the project.) He comes out to Joan and tells her that she doesn’t have to be on the team anymore because in his mind, he’s thinking she doesn’t want to work with him because he’s gay. She then slaps him and tells him that it is preposterous he would try to get her off the team, telling him that she worked incredibly hard with him and the rest of the team to break the Enigma code, and that she was not ever going to leave the team.

While of course Joan’s story isn’t the same as Katherine Johnson’s story in Hidden Figures, her determination reminded me of when Katherine has to run back and forth between classes because the science buildings at NASA are separated by gender. Even when dealing with the worst kind of sexism and racism, Katherine and her fellow Black female programmers never gave up on themselves and continued to persevere, paving the way for so many young women of color in tech. Of course, sexism and racism are still a reality in the tech world, and women and people of color in these programming industries still endure a lot of prejudice and often feel like they don’t belong. But that’s why we need movies such as Hidden Figures and The Imitation Game to remind us of how women’s involvement in computer programming shaped the course of history. In several scenes of The Imitation Game we see women in naval computer offices punching out code like it’s nobody’s business; seeing this was so cool 🙂 It reminded me of the incredible legacy of Grace Hopper and her service to the Navy as well as her service to computers. Joan’s legacy isn’t often talked about much but I wish our history teachers in school included her in the textbooks (this brief but fascinating bio gives some background about her role as an Enigma code-breaker.)

This film is also important when we think about the legacy of LGBTQIA+ individuals in the field of technology. This film is unique from other films about men in tech because Alan, while he was a white male, was gay. Hollywood movies about men in tech often feature straight white men who treated women like props and spent all day doing computer and video games. Alan’s sexuality plays a huge role in the film because LGBTQIA+ people faced severe discrimination during the 20th century and often faced severe punishment at the hands of homophobic government officials. We flash back to Alan’s childhood, him being severely bullied by his straight male classmates, and Alan making friends with a guy who rescues him from being trapped under the floorboard. Alan falls in love with the guy, but he is called to the principal’s office and told that his lover died of a serious illness (bovine tuberculosis.) We then flash forward, and Alan’s fellow team member, John Cairncross, threatens to tell everyone Alan is gay if he tells everyone that Cairncross was a spy for the USSR. He also tells Alan that he can’t come out to Joan because it is illegal for him to be openly gay. When Alan comes out, the government forces him to shut down the project and gave him two equally brutal options: time in prison or chemical castration. At just 41 years old, Alan committed suicide after enduring an entire tortuous year of government-mandated hormonal therapy. The movie also reveals that from 1885 to 1967, gay men were convicted of “gross indecency” under British law. I literally had to stop the film and just sit and cry for five minutes. p 215

Even though Silicon Valley is known for perpetuating a straight white male “bro” culture that often excludes LGBTQIA+ people, there are several resources and programs for individuals in tech who identify as LGBTQIA+, such as Lesbians Who Tech, and several prominent LGBTQIA+ people working in tech, such as Apple’s Tim Cook. The chairman of Linux Professional Institute, Jon “maddog” Hall, for instance, came out as gay in 2012 in honor of what would have been Alan Turing’s 100th birthday, saying that

“most of the people in my world of electronics and computers were like the mathematicians of Alan Turing’s time, highly educated and not really caring whether their compatriots were homosexual or not, or at least looking beyond the sexuality and seeing the rest of the person.” (“The 23 most powerful LGBTQ+ people in tech”, Business Insider)

Indeed, in the film, Alan’s fellow coders remain with him until the end of his life even when he faced anti-gay discrimination because he showed them how hard work and perseverance really pay off in the end and helped them crack the Enigma code and thus save many lives during the war. Overall, this film taught me about perseverance and to find creative ways to express myself when working in tech, such as finding ways to incorporate my tech learning with my musical learning.

Overall, incredible film that I highly recommend seeing.

The Imitation Game. 2014. 1 hr 54 mins. Rated PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking.

March 14, 2019

I just got done watching the 2017 film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and I must say, it gave me ALL the feels. It is a biopic about William (“Bill”) Moulton Marston, a Boston-based psychology professor who teaches his mostly-female class about DISC theory, which means that every social situation, every interaction between individual, could be broken down into four categories of emotion: dominance, inducement, submission and compliance. He catches the eye of Olive, one of his students who appears to be a quite innocent girl, and falls for her. But his wife, Elizabeth, is jealous of Olive and dismisses her at first. However, after taking a lie detector test, the two women find out they love both each other and Bill, and the three have a polyamorous relationship with each other. However the university that Bill and Elizabeth teach at finds out they were in a relationship and fire them, forcing Bill and Elizabeth into unemployment. Then, when all three are at a burlesque store in Greenwich Village, Olive tries on a Wonder Woman costume, sparking the inspiration for Bill’s comic book character, Suprema the Wonder Woman. At first, when Bill takes his manuscript to get published, Mr. Gaines, the publisher, tells him female superheroes failed too many times before, but after convincing him Gaines finally publishes it and the comic book takes off, selling millions of copies. However, the Wonder Woman comic books receive backlash for their explicit depictions of submission and bondage; however, Bill calls for the publishers to fight back against the backlash by publishing more explicit scenes in the comic. Unfortunately, when a neighbor finds out about Bill, Olive and Elizabeth’s relationship, it takes a deep and nasty toll on not just the success of Wonder Woman but the beautiful relationship that has unfolded for all this time between the three people.

Honestly, this movie made me cry not just because of its incredible score (thank you to Tom Howe) but because it is a story that is missing from a lot of standard Hollywood period films. Many of the period films I have seen (except for Carol and a few other films) have depicted monogamous relationships between a man and a woman, but this film takes it up a notch because it features a love triangle that actually is fully developed throughout the film. Bill, Olive and Elizabeth raise kids who grow up really chill about having two moms and a dad. But like any LGBTQ+ relationship depicted in movies, some homophobic, transphobic, or biphobic person finds out and then the supposedly innocent young woman (or man) involved in the relationship has to leave or deal with the older person getting married to someone of the opposite sex. I only say this because during the film I thought about Call Me By your Name, and how Elio had to deal with Oliver getting married and settling into a heterosexual marriage. Today, of course, things have gotten slightly better in terms of accepting kids who grew up with various expressions of parenthood: two moms, two dads, two moms and a dad, two dads and a mom, and so on. I would be surprised if anyone in 2019 still batted an eyelash if they saw a perfectly normal family of two moms and a dad playing with their kids in the park like every other American family.

I also really like how the director, Angela Robinson, wrestles with Bill’s motivation for publishing Wonder Woman. In the special feature after the movie, Robinson says that while extensively researching the film and directing it (it took her eight long years to get this project off the ground) she wanted to wrestle with the question of whether Bill created Wonder Woman to satisfy his own sexual pleasure or whether he created it because he actually was a feminist who supported the suffrage movement. Indeed, when I first saw the trailer I sort of rolled my eyes (little did I know how amazing the film was) and thought “Why is this film centered around a dude and his flings with women? Sounds pretty sexist to me.” However, after seeing the film I understood that Bill’s life was complicated and that no one can really give a one-or-the-other answer to this question. Honestly, I think it was both. In a comparative literature course I once took, we read about the concept of the male gaze and how it impacted people’s perceptions of women, as well as women’s perceptions of themselves. It seems that during the film, Bill was trying to manipulate both Olive and Elizabeth, even though it turns out that the two actually did genuinely love each other. While watching Olive and Elizabeth kiss, Bill is turned on and just watches for the longest time. When he proceeds to have Olive get in a submissive position in the burlesque shop, Elizabeth asks him when he is ever going to stop using science as an excuse for satisfying his own sexual whims; she also tells him earlier in the film that the three of them can’t be together because it’s a mere fantasy and they have to understand that their lives are essentially in danger if they openly express their polyamorous relationship with each other. Robinson doesn’t aim for us to deify Marston but rather think about the role that this man, one of many individuals, played in discussions about feminism and female sexuality.

When I first heard of polyamory, it was in college. I wasn’t sure who I loved yet, and some classmates of mine and I ended up talking about different expressions of love, and one of these expressions happened to be polyamorous love. I haven’t seen many movies or much media about polyamorous relationships; I have seen bisexuality depicted of course, but not so much polyamorous relationships. The media that depict polyamory often make a joke out of it, such as The Lonely Island’s “Three Way (The Golden Rule)” song. At first, I laughed at this sketch but watching Professor Marston and the Wonder Women gave a different, more mature perspective on polyamorous relationships.

As Professor Marston depicts, polyamorous love can be sweet and beautiful as long as the people in the relationship are consenting adults. Robinson explores the theme of consent in the film because I thought at first that Bill and Elizabeth both tricked Olive into falling for both of them, but as I saw later in the film, I realized that Olive genuinely loves Bill and Elizabeth and doesn’t mind falling in love with them. Olive isn’t all that happy about being married to her husband and so she calls off the marriage between them because she actually does love Bill and Elizabeth more than she does her husband. It reminded me of the film Carol, when Therese and Carol both fall in love but then the men in their lives find out and they feel constrained by these heterosexual marriages they are in.

When I first saw the film Wonder Woman with Gal Gadot, I was incredibly thrilled, especially because Wonder Woman was raised on an island where all these strong women raise each other and support one another (a friend of mine wondered what the film would be like if they just depicted all the women warriors just living their average lives on Themyscira. It would be cool if they did that.) And I think it is important to know the history of Wonder Woman in order to appreciate her creation. Again, I’m not hailing William Marston as the sole saint behind the creation of Wonder Woman (in fact, Elizabeth is actually the one who suggested he create a female superhero.) Robinson’s purpose for this biopic was to show the role that Elizabeth and Olive, two incredibly brilliant women, played in Marston’s life. After Marston’s death, editors took out the sexually explicit scenes of bondage in the Wonder Woman comics in order to make it more accessible to kids (in one depressing scene we see a bunch of kids throwing Wonder Woman comics in a fire and cheering while Bill just watches them burn the comics in silence.) However, feminist Gloria Steinem, in 1972, put Wonder Woman on the cover of Ms. Magazine’s first issue and thus Wonder Woman’s superpowers made it back to the comics. Before seeing this movie I literally had no idea that Bill published Wonder Woman as a way to integrate his psychological research into an accessible form of entertainment. And I also had no prior knowledge of the comic’s sexual history. This is why I needed to see this film, though, because I didn’t know much about the history of Wonder Woman. I guess there is a reason that it is called Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (plural) and not Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman (singular.)

In the scene where Josette Frank, a child development expert, questions Bill’s motives for including sexual imagery in Wonder Woman, he explains that he wants boys to see these images so that they learn to respect women and embrace their power. When he said this I thought about two ads, an Ad Council commercial titled “Wrong Way Around” and a Gillette commercial called “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be.” In the former, a few boys walk up to men and ask if they can teach them how to treat women since these men haven’t taught their sons how to treat women. The commercial, at its core, tells adult men to teach their sons that violence against women is wrong and they should speak out when they witness it rather than be passive bystanders. The Gillette commercial, which came out just a couple of months ago, features a bunch of boys enacting traditionally masculine behaviors such as fighting each other and saying things such as “You play like a girl” to other boys, but then depicts scenes of men challenging these behaviors by correcting their male friends when they do those things, such as telling them to stop catcalling women who walk by, as well as news footage of Terry Crews calling for men to hold themselves accountable and news reporters talking about the #metoo movement. After seeing Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, I think it would be a good film to discuss in the wake of the #metoo movement because then viewers can discuss the ways in which the images of Wonder Woman in the film may be both empowering and disempowering in their depictions of women.

Also, side note, I was literally just waiting for a movie to use Nina Simone’s song “Feeling Good,” and I can now say I finally chanced upon a film that uses this song. While Olive, Bill and Elizabeth get it on, Nina’s song plays to give the scene its steamy character. In this scene it’s a song celebrating Bill, Olive and Elizabeth’s freedom at that moment to love each other without judgment (I think it’s pretty cool that the openly gay actor Luke Evans, who plays William Marston, got a chance to star in this LGBTQ+ film.) Also, I love the acting of Rebecca Hall (Elizabeth) and Bella Heathcote (Olive); Hall’s simmering gaze, with her dark eyes, wraps you in and never lets you go. Bella Heathcote, in the special feature after the film, said that at first she was apprehensive about starring in the movie because of its sexuality and the emotional heaviness of Olive’s relationship with Bill and Elizabeth, but she said she is glad to have played Olive because she really felt deeply for her.

Overall, I think this film is a must-see.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. 1 hr 48 minutes. Rated R for strong sexual content including brief graphic images, and language.

I kept a lot of my old blog posts and was wondering what to do with them, so I decided to publish them now. I originally wrote this post back in January 26, 2019:

Although there are hundreds of well-known movies featuring characters identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer +, these characters don’t often play major roles. Here are some major films I have seen that have LGBTQ+ people as the main characters. Have a box of Kleenexes handy next to that bowl of popcorn.

1. A Fantastic Woman (2017): A beautiful drama set in Chile about a trans woman named Marina who navigates the death of her partner, gender discrimination at the hands of his family, and her dream of becoming a famous singer. In real life, the actress who plays Marina, Daniela Vega, changed Oscars history by becoming the first transgender person to present at the awards ceremony. In Spanish with English subtitles.
2. Moonlight (2016): I don’t have many movies in my Amazon collection, but this movie is one of the few that made it in there. Truly compelling narrative about a young Black man growing up in Miami and coming to terms with his sexuality. It tackles subjects such as abuse, race, poverty, and masculinity in nuanced ways that we don’t always see in mainstream movies with Black male protagonists. There isn’t a lot of dialogue or flashy camera-work, and that is what makes the film so beautiful. I have seen it twice and still cry every time I see it. It deserved its Oscar (and also won for the Best Kiss Scene at the MTV Movie Awards) 🙂
3. Milk (2008): Riveting biopic about the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, this takes place during the beginnings of Harvey Milk’s campaign and progresses until his assassination in 1978. Now, of course, since it’s a biopic and not a documentary, there’s probably at least one historian who would say there were facts about Milk’s life that the film could have done a better job of portraying. However, if you have never studied or heard of Harvey Milk, watching this film will at least give you a brief glimpse of his political campaign and his life. The movie has had an especially big impact on LGBTQ+ activists because it came out the same year as Proposition 8, an anti-gay amendment that would have outlawed same-sex marriage. If you Google “Milk movie and prop 8,” you’ll find countless articles about the topic.
4. Rent (2005): I watched this movie for the first time during a Gay-Straight Alliance meeting in high school and still to this day remember most, if not all, of the musical’s numbers by heart. Jonathan Larsen, who directed the original Broadway, died at a young age shortly after its production, but he goes down in history as a playwright who addressed real-life issues, such as poverty, sexuality, and AIDS, in his productions. While I am sad I will never get to see the actual show (it’s no longer on Broadway), I always know I can watch the movie on a rainy day.
5. Call Me By Your Name (2017): Directed by Luca Guadagnino, this adaptation of the novel by Andre Aciman (I haven’t yet read it but want to) tells the story of a teenager named Elio who meets a 20-something graduate student who living with his parents in ’80s Italy. At first their personalities clash; Elio is an introvert, and Oliver, a graduate student, is more outgoing. However, the two soon fall in love with one another, and both men find themselves conflicted about their relationship. I have heard many criticisms of the film, mainly about the ethics of Elio and Oliver’s age-gap relationship. (Slate has a great piece about it here) However, while watching the film, I found their relationship to be more complex than just an older man dating a younger man. Overall, the film was beautiful and made me fall in love with Timothee Chalamet.
6. The Misadventures of Cameron Post (2018): Excellently directed film about a lesbian teen (played by Chloe Grace Moretz) whose aunt forces her to attend a gay conversion therapy program in an attempt to force her to become straight. During her time at the program, she meets a host of characters who, like her, are just trying to make it through the program and its haunting leader, played by Jennifer Ehle. I haven’t read the book yet, but I now really want to after seeing the film. It’s also the first LGBTQ+ film I have seen that features a queer-identifying Native American character. It’s a really good movie, and I can’t wait to read the book it’s based on.
7. Pariah (2011): A young Black lesbian named Alike alternates between her social life, where she is free to be her cool queer self with her close friends, and her everyday life at home and at school, where she is forced to conform to everyone’s ideas about how she should dress and behave. When she meets the daughter of her mom’s friend, everything changes and Alike begins to come into her identity as a young queer Black woman.
8. The Kids Are All Right (2010): A moving comedy-drama about a lesbian couple, played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, who meet the father of their teenage children. It was my second LGBTQ+ film after Rent and I absolutely wouldn’t mind seeing it again.
9. Love, Simon (2018): A sweet coming-of-age film about a teen named Simon who has a great life and great parents but is secretly in love with another boy at school. One of his classmates, Martin, threatens to publicly announce that Simon is gay if he doesn’t get his friend, Abbie, to go out with Martin. It is overall a beautiful film and the novel by Becky Albertalli was also beautifully written.
10. Carol (2015): A 1950s love story about a married older woman, played by Cate Blanchett, who falls in love with a younger woman who works as a sales clerk, played by Rooney Mara. Their relationship is a secret, but the two find themselves conflicted as they try to make time to see each other without letting their male partners know. Powerful complex film, especially if you love historical movies.

I am obviously leaving out a lot of films with LGBTQ+ protagonists, so this list is not at all comprehensive. But these ten recommendations are a good start to watching more LGBTQ+ themed cinema.

Got any rainbow-friendly movies to recommend? Let me know!