But as more and more queer creators are being empowered to tell their own stories, onscreen depictions of LGBTQ intimacy have grown richer. In conversation with Vulture this month, the filmmakers and showrunners behind these projects expressed in no small terms that the process of getting queer sex onscreen hasn’t gotten any easier.
We’re still grappling with the Bohemian Rhapsodies of the movie world, but movies like Cameron Post, Port Authority, and Wild Nights with Emily are ensuring genuine portraits of intimacy are breaking through in film, too.
Six years after the debut of Kechiche’s film, shows like Special, Pose, and Vida have made major strides in bringing authentic queer sensuality to TV. And I think you can feel that in the scenes! There’s an intimacy and a sweetness to them. “It was really beautiful, because not only was our director female, but our cinematographer was female. “There is no white male straight gaze in the film,” Moretz told Out. Akhavan told Vulture she asked the actresses to figure out the specifics of the scene on their own - in private. The camera focuses on the girls’ nervous, thrilled faces, rather than panning breathlessly down their bodies.
The sex is subtle and nuanced, the result of two young women clumsily figuring out how to please each other. Early on in the film, Cameron and Coley tentatively make love for the first time in the back seat of a car. Her film, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, tells the story of a teen girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) sent to gay conversion camp after she’s caught sleeping with her female best friend.
In 2018, Desiree Akhavan shot a very different lesbian sex scene. Kechiche’s desires than anything else.” Even Julie Maroh, the author of the novel the film was based on, weighed in, arguing that the scene was “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex.” She added, “This was what was missing on the set: lesbians.” The scene was immediately controversial, with critics like Manohla Dargis writing that “the movie feels far more about Mr. In it, the two leads, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, engage in an exhausting bout of scissoring, a lesbian sex act that primarily exists in the minds of men. Of course, not everyone on Twitter agreed.In 2013, Abdellatif Kechiche’s lesbian love story Blue Is the Warmest Color set Cannes aflame, in part thanks to an explicit, seven-minute sex scene. "I hope people don't abuse it and shove it in our face… to the point where it feels like an every day kind of thing," Crystal said. How to Get Away with Murder has featured provocative sex scenes involving the gay character, Connor Walsh (Jack Falahee), that left some viewers squeamish.
"Sometimes, it's just pushing it a little too far for my taste and I'm not going to reveal to you which ones they are," he said.Ĭrystal isn't the only person to raise this point. Nowadays, he says, he can be put off by some gay story lines on TV. I wanted to stop the taping and go, 'What is your problem?' " "I did it in front of a live audience and there were times when I would say to (a co-star), 'I love you,' and the audience would laugh nervously. It was tough."Ĭrystal told the audience his groundbreaking performance didn't sit well with some viewers back in the day. "Jodie was really the first recurring (gay) character on network television and it was a different time, it was 1977. "It was very difficult at the time," said Crystal.