Photo fair use by Paxabay. Photo illustration by Katie Grace Upchurch.
June is LGBTQ+ pride month, get ready celebrate it with these four movies and shows, all available on Netflix.
“Paris is Burning”
“Paris is Burning” is a classic 1990 documentary about the New York City ballroom scene. Directed by Jennie Livingston, the documentary stitches one-on-one interviews together with shots from the floor of drag balls. Although the documentary has faced some controversy, it still serves as a time capsule for modern audiences.
“Paris is Burning” features iconic drag queens like Dorian Corey as well as house mothers such as Pepper LaBeija and Willi Ninja alongside and other members of the drag ball community.
Interviews with subjects like Octavia St. Laurent, a transgender woman and AIDS educator, and Venus Xtravaganza, another trans woman and member of the House of Xtravaganza, demonstrate the colorful but very harsh realities of the lives of the people in the drag ball scene.
Through its combination of intimate interviews and dynamic drag ball footage, “Paris is Burning” gives the audience a very accurately diverse view of queer culture — one that almost no media of the time (and still most today) had. The documentary represents groups often left behind when queer culture meets straight media, making it ahead of its time and a very important piece of representation.
“Sex Education”
“Sex Education,” released on Jan. 11, is a Netflix original show centered around a teenage boy named Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) who, with the help of the school’s token rebellious girl, opens up an underground sex therapy clinic for his peers.
Token rebellious girl, aka Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey), suggests this based on Otis’ somewhat strange experiences growing up with his mother, a sex therapist played by Gillian Anderson. Otis, she finds, has an almost uncanny ability to work his peers through their emotional and sexual problems, bringing them to better relationships.
Through these different students, the show tackles a variety of intersectional issues including abortion, mental health, LGBTQ+ identity and queer relationships. One of the show’s main characters is Otis’s best friend Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa), a gay teenager exploring queer identity at the intersection of religion and race.
What “Sex Education” does well is avoid the tragically cliche, but still pervasive, gay best friend stereotype. Eric is his own person, outside of what he adds to Otis’ life. He doesn’t make Otis “fabulous,” or magically solve his girl problems for him.
In one of the show’s best (but also worst) moments, the audience sees the friends’ birthday celebration for Eric in which they go see Hedwig and the Angry Inch together, both dressing up as the titular character — a sweet and heartwarming tradition.
“Milk”
“Milk” is a 2012 biopic about famous San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians elected to public office in the United States. Directed by Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting) and starring Sean Penn as the titular character, the movie follows Milk’s move to San Francisco, his rise to fame in the Castro and eventual election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
“Milk” provides the audience with a direct view into the gay rights movement of the 1970s and it does so by balancing the political and personal sides of the story — emphasizing Milk’s openness as a queer candidate. One moment from the film that stands out is a scene in which Milk emphasizes his philosophy about the closet and the act of coming out, saying “Everyone has to come out. (…) We have to let these people out there know that they know one of us. And if somebody doesn’t want to step out of the closet, we open the door for them.” This insistence stemming from the fact that non-queer people become friendlier and tend to vote positively for gay rights legislation if they know even a single gay person.
“Milk” takes a dive into queer history, and is an important watch for those who have yet to learn about the history and the roots of more modern gay rights movements. 229
“Special”
“Special” is a new Netflix original, released April 12, that tells the story of a gay man with cerebral palsy living in Los Angeles. The show is semi-autobiographical and based on a memoir by the show’s writer and lead actor Ryan O’Connell. Over the course of the eight-episode show, O’Connell’s character, also named Ryan, gets an internship at a horribly hipster online publication called Egg Woke, makes new friends, loses old ones, moves out of his mom’s house for the first time and more.
Each episode comes in at around 15 minutes, which means that the entire season is only the length of a movie in total. But, because of its format, it feels more like a web series than a traditional TV show, without the need to rush through character arcs or dramatic plotlines giving it a realistic and fresh pacing.
The show also — almost miraculously, considering its short run-time — features some very well-developed female characters including Ryan’s friend Kim (Punam Patel) and mom (Jessica Hecht), with his mom getting her own plotline throughout the entire show.
Overall, “Special” is a view into the lives of those not very often represented on TV, and the definition of a step in the right direction.
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