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Snowflake Challenge Day 11
Jan. 11th, 2018 01:52 pmShare a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life.
Let's go with Victor/Victoria. There are two films that showed me there was more to media than the mainstream, if you could find it. Finding alternative media was a massively different thing in the early days of the internet than it is now. I used to walk a few miles to a video store every week after getting my allowance. Most of the time I picked either Victor/Victoria or Highlander to watch. Victor/Victoria was pretty much the only queer representation I saw for a long time. It wasn't some tortured book or heartbreaking family drama like the things I'd see later. Being gay was treated in a very casual way, at least by the film's heroes. Being gay was not terrible or a big deal, society being horrible and narrow-minded was the problem. The fault of the problems they faced were put squarely on the shoulders of mainstream society and small-mindedness.
It's been a while since I've seen it, so I can't do a complete analysis of the representation. But in general the film was about friendship and sticking things through. Most everything else I'd sene with any queer characters growing up focused on the tragedy of a kid not having the same traditional family as the parents. Oh, the rift ... the problems relating ... the parents feeling like they were facing the loss of virtual immortality by making carbon copies of themselves!
It was already an older film when I first picked it up. This made me permanently immune to the myth that being gay had been shunned in all of human history, uniformly and completely, until the 90s where tolerance was happening for the first time.
Another effect of finding both this film and Highlander was that there was more out there. If mainstream media was being crappy, find other things. Keep looking. Later on I'd spend literally years tracking down certain films. Finding alternative media, whether nerdy, queer or different in another way, was exciting.
Let's go with Victor/Victoria. There are two films that showed me there was more to media than the mainstream, if you could find it. Finding alternative media was a massively different thing in the early days of the internet than it is now. I used to walk a few miles to a video store every week after getting my allowance. Most of the time I picked either Victor/Victoria or Highlander to watch. Victor/Victoria was pretty much the only queer representation I saw for a long time. It wasn't some tortured book or heartbreaking family drama like the things I'd see later. Being gay was treated in a very casual way, at least by the film's heroes. Being gay was not terrible or a big deal, society being horrible and narrow-minded was the problem. The fault of the problems they faced were put squarely on the shoulders of mainstream society and small-mindedness.
It's been a while since I've seen it, so I can't do a complete analysis of the representation. But in general the film was about friendship and sticking things through. Most everything else I'd sene with any queer characters growing up focused on the tragedy of a kid not having the same traditional family as the parents. Oh, the rift ... the problems relating ... the parents feeling like they were facing the loss of virtual immortality by making carbon copies of themselves!
It was already an older film when I first picked it up. This made me permanently immune to the myth that being gay had been shunned in all of human history, uniformly and completely, until the 90s where tolerance was happening for the first time.
Another effect of finding both this film and Highlander was that there was more out there. If mainstream media was being crappy, find other things. Keep looking. Later on I'd spend literally years tracking down certain films. Finding alternative media, whether nerdy, queer or different in another way, was exciting.
