Last year, the runaway success of Love, Simon felt monumental. Hollywood’s first major studio-funded comedy to focus on a gay teen romance, and it outperformed box office expectations? The film stood as proof that audiences were ravenous for queer stories on the silver screen.
But as a movie built around the idea that a high school student’s world would implode if his sexuality ever got out, it’s unsurprsing that some criticized it for feeling a bit outdated. After all, these days, “coming out” is far from the kind of essential queer experience it once was, and younger generations are far more likely to identity as queer and sexually fluid than their forebears. That means that old paradigms surrounding the closet are quickly evaporating, and a film like Love, Simon might look dated more rapidly than you’d expect. But on the independent circuit, a number of films are taking a more clued-in approach to what queer sexuality actually looks and feels like in 2019, and they’re telling more interesting stories about their protagonists as a result.
Take This Is Not Berlin, which premiered last month at the Tribeca Film Festival and follows Carlos and Gera, two teenage best friends (and, as far as we know from the film’s outset, ostensibly straight men) as they “find themselves” at a mysterious club called The Aztec. (Not a gay bar, but “an everything bar.”) After their first visit, the boys quickly sink into the counterculture of the queer-friendly underground punk space; before long, we find them posing naked in the name of art (“The only art that matters is the art that’s violent and disgusting,” a character says at one point) and taking to the streets covered in blood to protest the fact that the government doesn’t seem to care about the fact that “all our friends are dying” from AIDS.
The regulars that frequent The Aztec deliberately eschew labels — they’re just free people who like to “do things” with other free people — and throughout the majority of the film, neither Carlos nor Gera comment on what it means for them, as straight men, to fall deeper into this world. Director Hari Sama seems to posit that it doesn’t matter either way. When Gera sees Carlos making out with another guy late in the film, he doesn’t call him out; Gera just proceeds to find a guy to hook up with himself. In the closing scene, Carlos admits that he wasn’t even into his hookup, which Gera finds funny, since his own experience helped him realize that he actually was gay. Notably, this moment isn’t played for sentimentality, since the movie was never about who was “gay” and who was “straight” anyway. Instead, it’s just played as a shared realization about identity between two lifelong friends. At The Aztec, it won’t matter in the first place.
House of Hummingbird takes a similar approach. Set in Seoul in 1994, the debut feature from Korean filmmaker Bora Kim focuses on 14-year-old Eunhee, an eighth-grader who struggles in school while quietly facing abuse from an older sibling at home. When the film begins, Eunhee has a boyfriend, and the two seem quite happy together walking home hand-in-hand. In fact, Eunhee doesn’t even meet her female love interest, Yuri, until the second half of the film. But the moment that she does, during a chance encounter on the street, feels remarkably inconsequential. The fact that Yuri is a woman is never addressed as something that would be anything less than normal; she simply meets Eunhee, falls for her, and then tries to woo her with a rose. When Yuri finally summons the courage to tell Eunhee that she like-likes her, Eunhee accepts it with very little fanfare, and quickly seals the deal with an age-appropriate kiss.
In the world Bora Kim has created, there is no “default” sexuality; gender just becomes another human attribute, like eye color, height, or hair texture. Which makes it all the more humorous when Yuri inexplicably dumps Eunhee in the film’s final act, offering no excuse other than the fact that Eunhee was her crush for the previous school term, not the current one. By Hummingbird’s end, Eunhee has reunited with the boy she started with and nothing seems off-balance.
Then there’s first-time filmmakers Emily Cohn and Lara Gallagher, who have both found ways to tell queer coming-of-age stories that play with familiar genres while updating them. For Cohn, it’s the classic buddy group comedy, where several young people all ban together to accomplish a common goal, like American Pie’s virginity loss mission. In CRSHD, about three best college girlfriends, the goal is to get laid before the end of the semester. But unlike last year’s (brilliant) Blockers — which covered similar ground and was praised for its inclusion of a queer storyline — the queer member of the group in CRSHD isn’t preoccupied with the larger implications of her queerness. Instead, she’s already out and proud when we meet her. She’s confident and assured, even more so than her straight friends. Given the film’s obsession with the minutiae of present-day dating habits, her dialogue is sprinkled with constant mentions of “sliding in the DMs” of her crush. Her mission to get laid by someone of the same sex isn’t treated any differently than her friends’ attempts to do the same with men.
Gallagher, meanwhile, brings us a dark breakup tale that gradually morphs into an even darker neo-noir mystery. In Clementine, Karen breaks into her ex-girlfriend’s lakehouse (for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent) and meets Lana, a younger aspiring actress. The two quickly take to each other, and we find them playing in the lake, tanning in the sun, smoking weed. Though Karen’s sexuality is laid clear from the outset, Lana’s is kept deliberately murky. It’s clear that she has a flirty relationship with a male groundskeeper, Beau, but her interactions with Karen are drenched in sexual tension. (She doesn’t seem tethered to any labels other than actress.) When the two finally act on it, it doesn’t last long, with Lana nervously pulling away after initially being the one to initiate — but not because of any gendered anxiety. Without the trappings of the proverbial closet, Lana’s precocious experimentation is treated like any other pivotal early sexual experience. She knows what she wants and when she wants it; it just wasn’t then. As she asks Karen at one point, “What makes you think I’m so innocent?”
But perhaps the best example of this phenomenon comes in Andrew Ahn’s Driveways, a film whose eight-year-old protagonist, Cody, isn’t thinking about his sexuality with particular depth either way, given his age. Ahn makes it immediately clear that Cody is “not like the other boys” — he’s a shy mommy’s boy, and when forced to spend time with two stereotypically rowdy boys his age, he projectile vomits while watching wrestling. But Driveways isn’t a Moonlight, where he becomes a victim of violent bullying, either. Rather, Ahn communicates Cody’s coming-of-age with sensitive, nonjudgmental strokes as the young boy begins to define his own identity. When two even-mannered kids from down the block share some of their Japanese manga comics with him, he reads one and his eyes perk up after stumbling across one of the more overtly sexualized queer pairings on the page. Cody doesn’t say anything when he finds out that his elderly veteran neighbor has a lesbian daughter that he loves, but it’s clear that seeing that it was possible was eye-opening. As Andrew Ahn mentions in a press release about his film, “Cody is a sensitive soul and there is something about his future that is open.”
By decentering “coming out” as an integral part of the queer experience and just letting the sexuality of their characters exist, these films are able to tell stories that feel more inventive as a result. Which isn’t to say that Love, Simon or other movies of its ilk are hackneyed, but when “coming out” becomes a film’s entire narrative, we sometimes disenfranchise ourselves by limiting the types of stories we can tell. Fortunately, these new efforts prove that there are alternate ways to tell stories about queer protagonists. At this point, it’s up to Hollywood to realize that stories that update tropes about what it means to “come of age” as a queer person are the new normal. With any hope, the filmmakers who have already realized as much will soon be mainstream Hollywood’s new normal, too.
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