What’s your essential piece of queer pop culture?
To celebrate Pride Month, The A.V. Club staff is recommending our favorite queer projects
TV Features Queer
Clockwise from bottom left: Liza Minelli in Liza With A Z; Julien Baker album cover; Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das in Fire; Dan Levy and Noah Reid in Schitt’s Creek Photo: IMDB; Julien Baker; Getty Images; PopTV
Everyone has an early or favorite memory of experiencing a queer project that felt transformative. It’s the TV show, album, film, or book you can’t stop recommending to people because it continues to dazzle you today. So in honor of Pride Month, we’re asking a simple, evocative AVQ&A: What’s your essential piece of queer pop culture?
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https://images.app.goo.gl/Rk7xxqit3EX79dtf8
I’m at work. On a scale of fired to fired from a cannon, what happens if I click on that link?
If Kinja didn’t suck rancid dead-animal ass on mobile, the SFW gif would have loaded. Anyway, you won’t get fired, unless your boss is an insufferable idiot.
Here’s what I was trying to post that I couldn’t get to show up on my mobile browser:
Was thinking the volleyball scene from Top Gun.
They managed to make the football scene in Maverick somehow even more homoerotic.Yes, yes, even though there was a chick in it. But Phoenix definitely drank from the furry cup.
This scene was an extensive topic in a screenwriting course I took.
Was it called Holy Shit, That’s Gayer Than A Bag Of Cats: When Subtext May As Well Be Just Be Plain Text 101?
More like “what you think will look very macho will, in fact, look like the Village People performing Macho Man.”
Blue is the Warmest Color. Just a few scenes, though.
https://images.app.goo.gl/k7X43D4HXxoTMXre8
Okay, here is what I was trying to post:
The BirdcageIt was really hard to pick just one scene because there are so many good ones, and Lane kills it in all of them.And just about any of Scott Thompson’s Buddy Cole monologues.
The Kids in the Hall was pretty revolutionary TV in general for me, personally, when it came to both representation and addressing LGBT+ issues head on. I have two moms, and growing up having a show like KITH was a godsend.
I remember watching as a kid and finding something indefinably different about how the drag aspect was entirely incidental, and the female characters were fully developed beyond “Look, it’s a guy in a dress.”
I met Thompson last year at a show for his and Paul Bellini’s old punk band and thanked him because of how important Buddy Cole was to me as a queer kid in the 90s. A few months ago, he came around again doing an entire Buddy Cole set. I was really disappointed that he spent much of the evening making tired pronoun jokes and talking about how trans and non-binary people are confused and mentally ill. It was like he was auditioning for a job on Fox as the gay Candance Owens
Is Midnight Cowboy too old timey?
Gen Z has probably declared it cancelled
I love you Phillip Morris. A fascinating film, and based on a true story.
Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)I remember being about 10 or 11 in the late 1970s. I found a photographic novel of the movie at a department store. I read much of it before I was dragged home by my parents. I was fascinated by it.Forward to 1986, I had just turned 19 and I was a sophomore in college. I was with a couple of my high school buddies and one suggested we go to the midnight showing. I came mostly for the rice and toast throwing.I started watching it and I was enthralled by the music, the costumes, the live actions and the shout backs. Still being a reasonably good Catholic boy and recovered born-again Christian; I should have been appalled. I still did not know what to make of it; but it was all alright by me.I also wanted to be Frank.It was truly my first rendezvous with my queerness.
I really enjoyed talking about Drag Race here until you stopped recapping it.
It’s not subtle but it certainly helped this straight Catholic boy understand a little bit about the injustices other human beings were being put through.
How was Top Gun left off this list?Anyway, re Schitt’s Creek being prejudice free, I remember Dan Levy did an interview where he was asked about that and he said something like I’m creating a world here, why would I bring homophobes into my world? Which I thought was completely reasonable. That’s why as a Black person I enjoy Black media that is focused on Black joy. There’s enough Black struggle film and television out there. That gets traumatizing to watch after a while. We’re more than just our struggle.
I am not sure why lesbian romantic comedies are such an effective subgenre for me. Maybe because the conflict keeping the couples apart doesn’t have to be manufactured. Either But I’m a Cheerleader or Saving Face
I love But I’m a Cheerleader so much.
But I’m a Cheerleader is obviously a groundbreaking queer story, but also transcends that and is just a great movie & great romantic comedy
I liked Kissing Jessica Stein, but I seem to remember it as the main character deciding to “go back to being straight” at the end.I mean, if she’s truly bi, and just ended up falling in love with a guy instead of a girl, that’s one thing, but the movie didn’t leave me with that impression
i don’t care how many times i have to repeat it: saving face is the best lady rom-com ever, and alice wu deserves all the money for whatever project she wants to do. (the half of it was a great movie as well.)
Saving Face is brilliant and a delight
Transgender Dysmorphia Blues is one of my all-time favorite albums because it’s both entirely fresh but deeply relatable for me. I’m a ciswoman but the complex experience of gender and femininity is are real in this album and perfect for anyone who has ever yearned to feel safe and at home in their body, and truly loved for who they are, or to punch everyone in the face because they were assholes about it all.
Same here. There’s something intoxicating about its unrepentant female rage, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard.
Exactly that!
The title calls it Transgender Dysmorphia Blues but the article correctly calls it Transgender Dysphoria Blues. These are not the same thing and that’s the sort of thing editors, which AV Club ditched long ago, would catch.
It’s Dysphoria – but the article got it wrong too for whatever reason. Dysmorphia means something else (a distorted sense of your body); the symptom trans people often have is dysphoria.
Had some friends introduce me to Project Runway…Aside from learning all sorts of minutiae about fashion, witnessing amazing creativity, reading generally wonderful recaps on the AVClub, etc., I was able to see exchanges like this: Tim: I just think it draws your eye to the crotch.
Josh: Yeah.
Hannibal TV series.
The best part is how the network wouldn’t let them do explicit queer stuff in the first two seasons, to which they seemed to deliberately make the innuendos as dumb as possible to draw attention to what people should be hearing.
Queen not on the list? Priscilla Queen of the Desert?Kinky Boots?
Let’s throw in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (the original on Bravo from the early ‘00s, b/c I still haven’t seen the Netflix version) because even though it basically reinforced every gay male stereotype, it was fun and was one of the better “reality makeover shows” at the time.
The Magicians (SyFy TV series) was very LGBTQIA-friendly to begin with, but the episode “A Life in the Day” was maybe one of my best (top 10?) episodes of television in the last couple of decades and one of the best queer episodes I’ve seen in quite a while…
It was such a shame they backtracked on that story so hard. They had Elliot break through the mind control to tell Quinton he loved him. The quest to save Elliot becomes explicitly about Quinton getting back the guy he loves. But then the writers go, LOL psych! Quinton gets back with Alice and never sees Elliot again. We had seasons worth of episodes showing us how bad Quinton and Alice were together, it was Olympic level queer baiting.
Ab Fab‘Priscilla- Queen of the Desert’‘Boys In The Band’ (Good on it’s own terms, also invaluable as a time capsule)Men On…‘The Birdcage’‘Girls Will Be Girls’
Is it too soon to say Baby Reindeer? What’s the ruling on Some Like it Hot?I’ll default to Legend of Korra, I guess.
Nobody’s perfect.
Some Like It Hot really hit me as the amazing queer movie in adulthood. Somehow as a queer teen I’d thought of it just as a Marilyn Monroe movie with incidental queer stuff that was accidental and totally for laughs, in support of MM’s vavavoom-ness. As an adult, after not having seen it for years, the courtship of Osgood Fielding and Daphne hit me like a ton of bricks – omg, it was right there in front of me and I couldn’t see it. Osgood knew what he was looking at from the jump! The elevator! He pinched him in the elevator and felt his elevation and said “that’s the woman for me”! They ENDED UP TOGETHER at the end of the movie!!! And they’ll probably be very happy together!
Jodie from Soap is very imperfect representation, with the writing pulling in all kinds of trans stuff that the show was in no way equipped to handle properly, but his actual scene of forcing his brother to accept that he really is gay after several episodes of thinking he’s joking is incredible.
In the context of the era, that storyline was awesome.
But I’m a Cheerleader gets left off of SO MANY of these lists HedwigPortrait of a Lady on Fire
Two very recent favorites, but as a bi/pan (I’m comfortable identifying as both) trauma survivor disaster myself, I related pretty hard to both Zagreus from HADES and Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3. To know that you can be a complete mess, to not know what you want romantically other than “someone who genuinely cares for me and won’t hurt me,” and still be loved in return is important.
Axton from Borderlands 2 also sticks out in my mind— even if he was only retroactively made into a bi man because of a glitch that made him flirt with everyone regardless of gender, it was still a big deal for me at the time.
For me it’s The Kids in the Hall. No other show helped me embrace my queerness in all its absurd glory.
Just gonna leave this here:
I gotta go with Billy on the Street