wow ok yeah do not watch To Wong Foo
all the content warnings about transphobia
not really the movie itself is problematic just it deals with Really Shitty Themes
IDK what to make of it cuz i thought all these actors were straight af
@vahnj Yeah they are. Yay, the 90's, when that was apparently a super-okay thing to do. >.<
@vahnj (And we were all so desperate for 'representative' media that we ate it up anyway. Uuuugh)
@indi i don't know how to feel about it
maybe it *was* ok to do, and it stands as an example of what *not* to do now
but i don't know
@vahnj That's how I look at it (and, e.g. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, same thing, years earlier, not to mention RHPS)
Like, you have to view all these things in context, and accept that they were helpful for folks at the time, but at the same time is has to be okay for them to be UNHELPFUL for folks now.
Context is everything. The more context the better.
Let There Be Lips
@indi @vahnj fuck, Rocky was EVERYTHING to some people back in the eighties. There was a whole subculture around it, whose edges blurred out into other parts of nerd and queer cultures. Friendships and romances started there. Kids from the middle of nowhere felt their first rumblings of being Not Straight as they watched the journey of Brad and Janet through the tattered goth excesses of the Transylvanians from the Transsexual Galaxy.
It was not MY everything. I only saw it a few times with some of my friends. None of us were deep in that scene. But it was, quite definitely, A Scene.
And yeah, it’s problematic as fuck now. Both the film and the body of responses built up around it, the litanies spoken to hundreds of screens across the nation by thousands and thousands of kids in tattered fishnets and finery. But it was a major light of Queerness and Weirdness. Maybe even a last lingering connection to the gay culture that AIDS destroyed, leaving a generation of queer kids to grow up with no queer elders to guide them.
Queer culture eats itself now. The modes and terms change constantly, and it feels like any expression of queerness older than five or so years is suspect, full of Bad Slurs that used to be our own words. We can never celebrate the old shared rituals like the Time Warp again. Do we gain something by losing these old, campy, theatrical rituals and becoming nearly indistinguishable from the straights?
I mean, I’m no Theatre Queer either. If we’ve lost something I’ve lost it along with everyone else except the old-school drag queens.
Let There Be Lips
@indi @vahnj @anthracite This is something I feel like I have to remind myself and others. RHPS was part of my introduction to queer culture. I saw it first when I was a teenager and it was not only enlightened but transgressive. I feel like we've lost the means to contextualize history. I never hear about how progressive things were then, only how problematic they are now. Only ideal praxis counts, and only until culture shifts.
Let There Be Lips
@vahnj @indi @anthracite Oh, heavens no, there's no _requirement_ on any of this. No content should be considered "gatekeeping" and nobody should be considered in or out based on their appreciation of any particular piece of media. I'm personally more focused about the "out" because I've seen too many people excluded for liking things others had declared anathema, but "in" is equally an issue for folks who've been pressured to enjoy things they found uncomfortable.
Let There Be Lips
@literorrery @anthracite @indi it's important to learn to enjoy content that is problematic but historical
but that does not also mean it's a requirement to be a part of the queer community
bottom life for me is sometimes it's good to tell people: it's ok to like problematic things