The special shelf: not in front of straight people – Out & About Nashville

Writing about the film is an absolute joy. There are so many possibilities to watch, experiment and share, and what I want to talk about today is a sub-genre of cinema that I like to call the films Not In Front Of The Straight People. These are films that deal with complex problems within our community. They deal with documents that we all have better things to do than explain, in all their facets, to well-intentioned, curious or (most often) bad-faith homophobes looking for something to handle against us.

It’s not a new kind of movieThe boys in the groupset the tone, messing and chopping things up by LGBTQIA + characters in an environment where straight people are absent or are quietly observing guests. For a long time, adaptations of rooms on a low budget (thinkTorch Song Trilogy,Love! Value! Compassion!, orJeffrey, to get all 90s), that’s where you would most often see this kind of movie. But recently, it’s a genre film that intensifies and addresses some of the most problematic issues that arise.

Years 2019Midnight kiss(now streaming on Hulu) is part of the monthly series Blumhouse Productions Into The Dark, which comes out with a new holiday-related horror film of sorts. This one, made by Carter Smith (delusional madness of killer plantsThe ruins, and the horror and too relatableBugcrush) and written by Erlingur Thoroddsen (who wrote and directedCrevasse, which is an Icelandic film that manages to tell a queer suspense tale without any cliché), has an almost completely queer cast, including Lukas Gage fromEuphoria, Augustus Prew fromAbout a boyas our protagonist, and Scott Evans.

His New Year’s Eve and a group of gay friends (and their only longtime associate) head to a vacation home in Palm Springs. They have been doing this for years and tension is starting to show. It seems that everyone is out with everyone, and there is a commitment on deck, and no one wants the same thing as anyone else. Oh, and there’s a murderer on the loose. He wears a puppy mask and he has this big old horror tropesecrets of the pastin common with apparently everyone in the distribution.

ThereforeMidnight kissis a very classic slasher film of the 1980s in its structure and story, but it is explicitly focused on issues such as openness of relationships and guilt, and ultimately addresses the abject cruelty with which we treat our own. I’m not saying that the murderer was right, or anything close to that. But if you can keep up your table tennis moral skills, this movie asks a lot of really interesting questions about queer life and what it means when we (for the moment) have gay marriage but also the annoying death spiral of the planet under the Trump Administration. This is exactly the kind of slasher movie that a young gay 80s viewer would have wanted to see, with exactly the same shady attitude towards semi-rewarding nudity.

If you really want to see a movie that will scare even your warmest straight friends, may I direct you to Jim HansensYou kill me, as of 2015 (currently on Amazon Prime and Hulu). It’s not scary, per se, but it’s the most ruthless comedy you’ve seen this decade, and it’s utterly horrible for anyone who wants to believe that queer people are not as venal, violent and destructive than straight people.

What happens when one of your friends starts taking their new boyfriend, who is so sexy that you could die? That’s the thing about Joe, however. It is clear enough to be a serial killer. But everyone who talks to him just thinks he has a morbid and emotionless sense of humor because he’s so hot, thinks Antoni Porowski hot, where the eyes tell secrets.

Even when people start to die, no one can accept Joes’ sincere sincerity about who he is and what he does. And honestly, if someone wants to make a film about how abs and a pretty face can keep so many dickmatists, I’m glad their homosexuals are talented.You kill meto Drew Droege, and Jeffrey Self, and Sam Pancake, and Edi Patterson from The right gemstones, and it is a superb film which will provoke deep discussions. Like some of the best examples of queer cinema, show it to your straight friends at your own risk.

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