This document provides an overview of key concepts in queer film and television representation. It discusses how the Hays Code from the 1930s restricted LGBTQ representation in films. It also summarizes depictions of queer characters in films before and after the Code, as well as important court cases and genres like underground films, New Queer Cinema, and examples of influential films that furthered LGBTQ representation like Paris Is Burning and Disclosure. The document also defines concepts like homonormativity, bi-erasure, and cis-washing that relate to issues of diversity and inclusion in LGBTQ media representation.

1. Notes on
Week 9
Queer Film & Television

2. Representation:
• Representation structures reality and
creates realities.
• Representation is important for
marginalized groups, but applying labels to
individuals and content raises ethical
issues. With the aim of advocacy and
comprehensibility, this chapter makes
provisional use of categories such as “gay”
and “trans” while remaining sensitive to
historical contexts. Elsewhere, “queer”
operates as a catch-all for non-normative
sexual identities, behaviors, and
aesthetics. (Armory Ch. 11)

3. The Hays Code
• In the 1930s, the Motion Picture Production Code, often called the Hays Code, established
“moral guidelines” to which films produced for public consumption must adhere. These
guidelines prohibited or restricted the depiction of subject matter such as profanity, drug
trafficking, religious effrontery, and childbirth scenes; a motion picture was not to “lowe[r] the
moral standards of those who see it” (qtd. in Leff & Simmons, 2001, p. 270). But before the
Code, films featured more homosexual content than one might expect, e.g. Harry
Beaumont’s The Broadway Melody (1929) and Cecil B. DeMille’s the Sign of the Cross (1932).
• Pre-Code depictions of gay and lesbian characters were often caricatured and insulting: mincing,
dissolute men and unflatteringly mannish women. These stereotyped conceptions of
homosexuality reflect the era’s prevailing notions of “inversion”—the idea that queerness
equated to femininity in a male body or vice versa: in sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s
words, “the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom” (1906, p. 399). Though these
stereotypes persist today and have been explored in such venues as David Thorpe’s Do I Sound
Gay? (2014), queer and feminist theory have helped dispel the assumption that biological sex
(male/female) is inherently connected to gender (masculine/feminine), or indeed that there are
only two of either. (Armory CH. 11).
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

4. Some definitions:
Form: refers to the way a story is told, while content refers to the events,
plotline, and characters of which it consists (Armory Ch. 11).
Content: might be thought of as the what of a text, and form as how it’s
depicted. Making a film or a TV episode entails many decisions beyond plot
and dialogue, ranging from camera angles to casting to wardrobe to sound
mixing, and they all produce certain effects. The language of film form offers
a means for examining these decisions and their effects Armory Ch. 11)..

5. Trope:
• is a “common or overused theme or device” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). When overused,
it becomes a cliché; tropes are discussed further later in the chapter. The frequent
dramatic death trope in LGBTQ+ film, commonly called “Bury Your Gays,” includes
suicide (William Wyler’s 1961 The Children’s Hour, Lea Pool’s 2001 Lost and
Delirious, Atom Egoyan’s 2009 Chloe), homicide (Anthony Minghella’s 1999 The
Talented Mr. Ripley, Kimberley Peirce’s 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, Ang Lee’s
2005 Brokeback Mountain, Patty Jenks’s 2003 Monster), and HIV/AIDS (Jonathan
Demme’s 1993 Philadelphia, Ryan Murphy’s 2014 The Normal Heart, Bryan Singer’s
2018 Bohemian Rhapsody). These tragic plotlines are so ubiquitous that B. Ruby Rich
(2013, p. xxv) wryly noted that in 1999, film’s “only lesbian happy ending involve[d] a
portal into John Malkovich’s brain.” (Armory 11)

6. 1958: One, Inc. v.
Olsen
• The first United States Supreme Court case to
address homosexuality in terms of free speech
was One, Inc. v. Olesen in 1958. In it, the Court
ruled that neutral or positive homosexual
content was not inherently obscene. The case
had major implications for the media industry, as
productions with LGBTQ content or themes
could not be instantly labeled as pornography
even if they flouted the constrictions of the
Comstock laws or other “moral” strictures that
had historically mandated negative depictions
(Armory Ch. 11).

7. Camp
• Camp is an aesthetic that privileges “poor taste,” shock value, and
irony, intentionally challenging the traditional attributes of high art. It is
often characterized by showiness, extreme artifice, and tackiness—
e.g. the popular pink flamingo lawn ornaments from which John
Waters’ iconic film takes its name. While largely ironic, camp can also
devolve from earnestness gone awry, as in attempts at profundity that
fall absurdly short of their targets; Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995)
and Steven Antin’s Burlesque (2010) exemplify the latter. In “Notes on
Camp,” cultural critic Susan Sontag observes that camp “sees
everything in quotation marks,” and that “nothing in nature can be
campy. . . to perceive camp in objects is to understand Being-as-
Playing-a-Role” (1990, p. 275). This notion reflects the same logic that
would later structure many key tenets of queer theory, particularly the
idea that all gender is performance, consciously or otherwise, and that
sex, gender, and sexuality and the relationships there among are
products of artifice rather than nature. (Armory Ch. 11)
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

8. Underground Films
• 1964: Warhol’s Blowjob
• 1947 Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks
• 1973 Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics

9. New Queer Cinema
• Cheryl Dunye’s mockumentary The Watermelon
Woman (1996) calls out the erasure of Black
lesbians in Hollywood and the persistence of racist
film tropes over the years. The film follows Dunye’s
character as she stages interviews with both
fictitious and real-life lesbian activists including
Sarah Schulman and Camille Paglia
• Findings from GLAAD

10. Paris is Burning (1990)
• Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990)
documents New York City ball culture,
foregrounding Black and Latinx lives and
communities involved in the vogue scene. Iconic
as it has become, scholars including bell hooks
and Judith Butler have questioned its racial
politics—Livingston is white and from a
privileged background, profiting through a
marginalized community—and unambivalent
celebration of drag as a means of subversion
and liberation.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

11. Disclosure (2020)
• DISCLOSURE is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at transgender
depictions in film and television, revealing how Hollywood simultaneously
reflects and manufactures our deepest anxieties about gender. Leading trans
thinkers and creatives, including Laverne Cox, Lilly Wachowski, Yance Ford,
Mj Rodriguez, Jamie Clayton, and Chaz Bono, share their reactions and
resistance to some of Hollywood’s most beloved moments. Grappling with
films like A Florida Enchantment (1914), Dog Day Afternoon, The Crying
Game, and Boys Don’t Cry, and with shows like The Jeffersons, The L-Word,
and Pose, they trace a history that is at once dehumanizing, yet also evolving,
complex, and sometimes humorous. What emerges is a fascinating story of
dynamic interplay between trans representation on screen, society’s beliefs,
and the reality of trans lives. Reframing familiar scenes and iconic characters
in a new light, director Sam Feder invites viewers to confront unexamined
assumptions, and shows how what once captured the American imagination
now elicit new feelings. DISCLOSURE provokes a startling revolution in how
we see and understand trans people.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

12. Homonormativity
(Ch. 11)
Homonormativity, defined in Chapter X, establishes the bounds of
“acceptable” queerness and that which deviates from it, often replicating
other dominant social norms with regard to race, sex, class, and ability. For
example, ABC’s popular Modern Family (2009-) presents gay men (a
married couple played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet)
positively, but they are rendered “respectable” through other aspects of their
identity: white, wealthy, monogamous, and constituents of a more or less
traditionally structured nuclear family. The show’s message about
queerness may therefore be read as, “Look, we’re just like heterosexuals,”
overriding rather than embracing difference.
Debates over homonormativity in film and television abound. For example,
Glee provides numerous queer characters and storylines. Yet as Frederik
Dhaenens (2013) notes, they ultimately serve to “consolidate the
heterosexual matrix” by portraying queer characters who are routinely
victimized yet nonetheless overarchingly happy and conformist, as though
simply rolling with the punches eventually yields contentment. Moreover,
LGBTQ people of color are still dramatically underrepresented. Gloria
Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce’s web series One Day at a Time (2017-)
follows a Latinx family and presents much-needed diversity in terms of both
characters and tropes.

13. Homonormativity
• “A politics that does not contest dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but
upholds and sustains them, while promising the
possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a
privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in
domesticity and consumption" (Duggan 2003)

14. Bi-Erasure
• Maria San Filippo and others have critiqued bisexual erasure and/or invisibility
within LGBTQ+ cinema. Even when bisexual themes, characters, and
storylines are present in film, San Filippo (2013) observes, they are typically
referred to as gay, queer, or lesbian, terms that fail to acknowledge bisexuality
as its own entity. Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997), Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu
mamá también (2001), David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), Charles Herman-
Wurmfeld’s Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), Ang Lee’s Brokeback
Mountain (2005), and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) all
unambiguously depict both same-sex and different-sex relationships, yet they
are seldom framed in terms of bisexual identity or desire.

15. Cis-washing
• Trans people are often excluded from mainstream (and independent) media, even from
narratives specifically about trans lives. Among the films focused on trans individuals that
have found commercial and critical success, many feature cisgender actors exclusively:
Hilary Swank in Kimberley Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Felicity Huffman in Duncan
Tucker’s Transamerica (2005), Jared Leto in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers
Club (2013), and Eddie Redmayne in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015).
• Horak (2017) observes, too, that much writing on trans media focuses on representations
of trans individuals rather than on trans authorship. Because being “out” in Hollywood has
always posed professional and personal risks—from pigeonholing and blacklisting to
physical violence—it’s impossible to the full extent of sexual and gender diversity that has
existed among filmmakers, performers, writers, et al.

16. The Wachowskis
• The Wachowskis made history in announcing their
respective transitions—Lana in 2012 and Lilly in 2016.
Lana is widely considered the first major trans film
director. Though most famous for their futuristic action
franchise that began with The Matrix, the Wachowskis
have made significant contributions in terms of queer
content. Crime thriller Bound (1996) features two
women who conspire in a romantic affair-cum-heist.
Wishing to avoid the cliché, pornographized, or
insultingly diluted depictions of lesbian sex in film, the
Wachowskis hired sex educator/activist Susie Bright as
a consultant for the sex scenes. Beyond critical success
and Emmy nominations, the Wachowskis’ Netflix sci-fi
series Sense8 (2015-2018) was a milestone in trans
media. Created primarily by trans filmmakers and
featuring a trans character played by actress Jamie
Clayton, who is trans, Sense8 offers a nuanced
representation of trans lives and issues.

17. The Vito Russo Test
• Taking inspiration from the Bechdel Test, which examines the way women
characters are portrayed and situated within a narrative, GLAAD developed its
own set of criteria to analyze how LGBTQ characters are included within a
film. The Vito Russo Test takes its name from celebrated film historian and
GLAAD co-founder Vito Russo, whose book The Celluloid Closet remains a
foundational analysis of early LGBTQ portrayals in Hollywood film. These
criteria can help guide filmmakers to create more multidimensional characters
while also providing a barometer for representation on a wide scale. This test
represents a minimum standard GLAAD expects a greater number of
mainstream Hollywood films to reach in the future.

18. The Vito Russo
Test
To pass the Vito Russo Test, the following must be true:
The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and/or queer.
That character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their
sexual orientation or gender identity (i.e. they are comprised of the
same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate
straight/non-transgender characters from one another).
The LGBTQ character must be tied into the plot in such a way that
their removal would have a significant effect, meaning they are not
there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity,
or (perhaps most commonly) set up a punchline. The character must
matter.

19. STATS from GLAAD 2019
• Thirteen of the 20 (65%) LGBTQ-inclusive major studio films passed the Vito Russo
Test this year. This is both the highest number and the highest percentage of films to
pass in a single year, and this is up from the previous year when only nine of 14 (64%)
inclusive films released in 2017 passed. In 2016, nine of 23 (39%) inclusive films
passed and 2015 set a record low percentage at only eight of 22 (36%) inclusive films
passing the Vito Russo Test. This is compared to 11 of 20 (55%) inclusive films
released in 2014, seven of 17 (41%) in 2013, and six out of 14 (43%) inclusive films
released in 2012. This year’s finding is a positive change, but there is still work to be
done and we hope to see this trend continue to grow in the future.
• Note in 2017 Gay men dominated the screen in a 2:1 Ratio to Lesbians. 2017 also
notes lack of racial diversity, bi-erasure, and lack of trans-representation.