Culture Slut: Film Recommendations to Encourage You to Be Gay, Do Crime
Words: Misha MN
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Pride month is here again – but is it really? Trans rights are facing some of the biggest push backs we’ve ever seen, Reform UK and MAGA are vowing to do away with Pride altogether, and there’s been a highly noticeable lack of Pride endorsements from public-facing companies.
Now, I’m not saying I miss the rainbow versions of corporate logos littering my instagram feed like confetti after a parade, but it is very apparent. Liverpool Pride has been cancelled completely due to funding issues, and Brighton Pride is facing major shakeups from city councilors, so how can we celebrate our queerness in a world that seems less and less welcoming as the far right gains political traction?
To be honest, if you needed a thumbs up from Tesco and a float sponsored by Barclay’s to make you feel validated in your sexuality, then now is the time to start boning up on the history of queer radicalism. Liberation, Not Assimilation has long been the battle cry of the culture makers – people like Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, John Waters, every queer artist who has been labelled a deviant or an undesirable, anyone who has suffered under the Lavender Scare. Celebrating Pride should not be about “inclusive woke liberalism” that waxes and wanes with the popularity of identity politics, it should be about acts of public defiance, of solidarity, of radical queer joy. “Pride is a Protest” is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot, almost so much that it becomes an abstract (what exactly do Clapham gays who work in finance think they are protesting? Homophobia in the stock exchange?), but in a world where even protesting is starting to face harsher punishment, it becomes relevant once again.
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“Be Gay Do Crime” is a staple saying in modern anarchist thought. It started with memes in the 2010s, and has since been spraypainted on buildings during protests, picket signs, and even written on bodies, but its sentiment has been around for as long as sodomy was criminalised.
“To be honest, if you needed a thumbs up from Tesco and a float sponsored by Barclay’s to make you feel validated in your sexuality, then now is the time to start boning up on the history of queer radicalism.”
Quentin Crisp’s famous 1940s court case proves that his mere existence as a self-professed effeminate homosexual was considered criminal. Not his actions, his solicitations, his practices – just his very being. There’s also Jean Genet, the French novelist, playwright and political activist, who started his life as a petty criminal, vagabond and prostitute, writing about his experiences in and out of prisons. Genet befriended Jean Cocteau, one of the greatest creative intellectuals of the 20th century, who helped in publishing Genet’s cult novel Our Lady of The Flowers, and rallied other great men like Sartre and Picasso to action when Genet faced further court prosecutions. Genet never stopped opposing the state, joining the Black Panthers in America in the 70s, working with Foucault to protest the French police brutality against Algerians, and speaking out against the atrocities committed in Palestine in the 80s.
The idea of homosexuality being linked with criminality was weaponised by governments who opposed sodomy and what they identified as an attack on Christian Family Values and the state itself. This is why we see so many villains in Hollywood portrayed as queer-coded, from the 1930s (with the tail end of the popular Pansy Craze being erased by the puritanical Hays Code), through to the morality tales of the 50s (the homosexual Hitchcock villains, the bad girls who die in spontaneous car crashes, the boys who were just “a little different”), all the way up to at least the 90s (and that’s just Disney films: think of Ursula from The Little Mermaid, Jafar from Aladdin, Scar from The Lion King). But throughout cinematic history, we see films made by and about queer people that treat them as fully-fledged characters, but also don’t shy away from the degeneracy and criminal violence that so terrified the heteros.
These kinds of stories, sometimes hidden in the guise of camp melodrama (Sunset Boulevard, Suddenly Last Summer, Mommie Dearest), always become cult hits for the gay community. They become the Sacred Texts, the guide from which we learn how to live our lives and weaponise our own power to frighten those who want to destroy us.
Think of Divine reciting her politics in Pink Flamingos (“Kill everyone now!”), or Pasolini’s fascist libertines marrying captive sex workers and celebrating with a wedding banquet made of shit in Salo, or Jarman’s anarchist girl gang in Jubilee having sex with men and then killing them as soon as they orgasm. Homophobes used to fear us, and it’s time they did again. So for Pride month this year, I’m giving you three film recommendations with the theme BE GAY, DO CRIME. Enjoy.
Querelle
Released in 1982, this is the last film made by ground breaking queer director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, famous catalyst of New German Cinema with his mix of Hollywood melodrama, social critique and avant gard film techniques. Based on the 1947 novel Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet, we focus on a sailor named Querelle who shags hot guys, is locked in an eternal duel with his brother, and steals and kills any chance he gets.
Morality is always strange in Genet stories, and to the uninitiated it can be hard to get a grip on. It essentially turns traditional values on its head, Love is good, but it can be intensified by betrayal. Murder is a form of love. Prison is awful, but it is also heaven. In the film, Querelle has sex with a fellow sailor and then quickly murders him in an erotic frenzy. Later, he finds a man wanted for murder that he seems to fall in love with, but can’t help himself from betraying. It's a fascinating look into how a person can live so far out of the confines of the conservative state and create an individual code of ethics that are truly unique.
The film has a recurring musical theme, sung by Jeanne Moreau who plays a sexually voracious chanteuse in the local brothel-cum-bar (and is exquisitely beautiful, a kind of dive bar disco Dietrich); “Each man kills the thing he loves.” This is a line taken from the seminal poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, written by queer icon and example of homosexual criminality Oscar Wilde whilst he was incarcerated for gross indecency, and it perfectly enmeshes with Genet’s nihilistic anarchism. The film manages to be both beautiful and sexy, with some of the best lighting and production design you’ve ever seen, whilst also intellectually stimulating, making what sometimes can be quite hard texts to fully understand accessible to a new audience. One of my favourite films. Five stars.
Female Trouble
This 1974 John Waters epic is truly a sight to behold. My personal favourite of the Divine/Waters collaborations, Divine plays Dawn Davenport, a juvenile delinquent who runs away from home, has a child and leads a life of crime, eventually becoming this monstrous star with an acid-burned face and a murderous bent. The film ends with Dawn being imprisoned and eventually executed for her crimes, giving a parody of an awards speech from the electric chair, and it’s just a perfect piece of media.
Divine (whose name is actually taken from a queen in Genet’s Lady of The Flowers) as a film star is at her best in this anarchist odyssey, from performing her own outrageous stunts to getting more and more beautifully grotesque as the film goes on. Even her initial scenes of destroying her family home at Christmas is instantly iconic. She is best summed up in her own words when she says “Davenport! Dawn Davenport! I’m a thief and a shitkicker, and I’d like to be famous!”
Waters’ exploration of crime as beauty within the narrative is very Genet-esque – Genet’s own work often subverted ideas of traditional morality. Waters' decision to dedicate the film to Charles Tex Watson is an interesting footnote. Watson was a member of the Manson Family, a central figure in the Charles Manson cult and a ringleader of the Sharon Tate murders – Waters would visit him in prison. “Crime as beauty” as a concept was inspired by Waters' conversations with Watson, and he even includes a wooden toy helicopter made by Watson in the film’s opening credits.
O Fantasma
Joao Pedro Rodrigues' directorial debut back in 2000 is definitely the least known of my recommendations, but I have not been able to stop thinking about it since I first saw it. We focus on Sergio, who works as a bin collector in Lisbon, and his nighttime exploits. He forms an almost sexual relationship with a female coworker, but he also pursues sex with men in public toilets and other cruising areas. Soon, he becomes obsessed with a hot straight biker boy, and starts stalking him. Towards the climax, he eventually attacks the guy in his home and has to go on the run. He wears heavy S&M gear that transforms him into a black latex shadow, a human void, and he completely devolves into a primordial animal, a disgusting creature bent on satisfaction and mere existence.
The music is great, and the visuals are astonishing, particularly the final act where Sergio is on the run. For someone who starts the film as this handsome, sexy, young guy, seeing his transformation is very impactful. We see him constantly picking up trash, loading the trucks and travelling with them around the city, and later, during his escape, he hitches a ride on a truck and ends up at the tip itself. On mounds of rubbish, we see this little latex freak scrabbling around, running through hills and valleys, eating rotten fruit, defecating, sleeping beneath the compressor, becoming part of this hideous landscape. Sergio has both given in to his deepest darkest desires, and also been alienated by a society that deems him and people like him as disposable.
All three of these films reclaim criminality as a form of empowerment for its queer protagonists, whether that’s Querelle’s murderous quest for love, Dawn Davenport’s delinquent beauty, or Sergio’s lawless self actualisation. If the conservative state would like to throw away queer people like yesterday’s trash, then let's show them how degenerate we can truly be. This year, with so many fair-weather friends turning their backs on us, with their bathroom policies and refusal to support our siblings in their hour of need, it’s finally time to put the DEMON back in priDE MONth.
Be Gay, Do Crime!