Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
Grey’s Anatomy brought me to tears last night. Not just watery eyes or single tear or two but a full on waterfall. Last night’s episode “The Becoming” had an amazing side storyline. Essentially it involved two gay soldiers, one which was going in for brain surgery. The storyline dealt with hidden love, the father of the soldier with the brain tumor walks in on the two kissing. On his way into the very risky surgery the soldier refuses to see his boyfriend in fear of disappointing his father. He doesn’t make it through the surgery. Right after the doctors informed the family the boyfriend confronts the father and demands to be a part of things and know how he is doing, he then finds out he just died. The scene ends with the boyfriend saying goodbye to the dead soldier.
Now (if you’re straight) imagine living a life where you barely saw any movie or TV show where the male and female lead fell in love, and you’re entire life all you saw were gay characters and nothing that really applied to you, other than the perceived stereotypes. You would be pretty ecstatic about seeing this. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy movies gay or straight, but it is rare for me to feel like I can identify with a movie or TV show.
The Gay Cinema is pretty pathetic, most of the movies are poorly written, campy, and for the most part reinforce the gay stereotypes. Well, instead of complaining about it and doing nothing I have decided to take action. I have started writing a screenplay that is driven by gay characters and specifically written for a gay audience.
I have written about 15 pages so far, with this particular story I am aiming for anything between 90 and 120 pages. Thanks to my training in college I am pretty adept at filming, directing, and editing that I can pretty much produce an entire film for practically nothing. My goal is to have something I could hit the festival circuit within the next couple of years.
There have been a lot of things that have been happening in my life lately that all pointed me towards this and last night’s episode just sealed the deal.
So wish me luck. I am sure I will need it.
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I missed that but you are so right about stereotyping in much of the queer cinema. I thought Ang Lee would set a pattern, but now I can see I was too optimistic. He had something to teach, but apparently only for porn industry. Perhaps because its story was not contemporary.
Thank you! I agree. I think we need to have a queer cinema revolution! Well ive started wrtiting, and hopefully everything will pan out!
Thanks for visiting my blog. I hope you have great success. Gosh, there was a time in my life when the word “queer” was an insult. Time goes fast.
Good luck on the writing of your screenplay! I think you are entirely correct in your views on gay cinema. The question is whether or not movie viewers would be ready for a gay movie that doesn’t fit cultrual sterotypes?