As more people get vaccinated against COVID-19 and we slowly get “back to normal,” one of the things that I am most happy to again partake in is heading back to the movies.
I have been in love with the film industry for as long as I can remember. I had a subscription to Entertainment Weekly since I was a teen, I have spent entire weekends at the cinema seeing as many as six movies in one day and I even worked in a movie theater in Plant City, Florida, during my high school years.
Most recently I went to the Epic Theater down the street from me to see the latest Marvel film from Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao. Not the best in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe but not the worst either. What it did feature though was the MCU’s first acknowledged openly gay superhero, as well as the series’ first same-sex kiss.
Disney and Marvel have teased same-sex relationships and LGBTQ superheroes before but it was always a minor character (“The Avengers: Endgame” featured a scene of a gay man in Captain America’s support group) or the hero’s sexual orientation was ambiguous (Valkyrie, Loki and Ayo, to name a few). But “The Eternals’” Phastos is a bonified superhero on a team of superheroes in a big superhero movie from Disney and Marvel.
The scene was touching and beautiful, and while it in no way makes up for all the LGBTQ teasing Marvel and Disney have done over the years, it is a pretty good start.
One thing that touched me more than the actual emotion of the scene was how no one in the theater seemed bothered by seeing two men kiss on the big screen. Now there may have been some pearl-clutching conservative or testosterone-fueled bro in the audience who wasn’t happy to see it, but no one recoiled in disgust, no one shouted homophobic slurs at the screen and no one got up and walked out. While that might seem uneventful to some, as reacting that way to a touching scene of two men kissing seems juvenile, it wasn’t too long ago that those were commonplace responses to seeing anything LGBTQ on the big screen.
In 2006, when I went to see “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” with some friends while I was stationed in South Korea, I had to sit and listen to grown men yell “fags!” at the screen when it is revealed in the film that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Jean Girard is gay and married to a man named Gregory.
In 2005, when me, my boyfriend and my sister wanted to go see “Brokeback Mountain,” we had to call around to several theaters before we could find one that was playing “that gay cowboy movie.”
And in 1997, the year I graduated high school and while still working at the Cinemark Theater in Plant City, I saw firsthand how mean and ignorant people can be when we played the Kevin Kline comedy “In & Out.” In the film, Kline plays a high school teacher who is engaged to a woman and gets is outed by an actor, and former student, while accepting his Oscar. Hilarity ensues as a gay journalist comes to town to write a story about it.
In a scene about 40 minutes into the film, there is a gay kiss. Being a comedy, the scene is played for laughs so the kiss is, as expected, over-the-top. But what wasn’t expected, at least from my manager at the time, was how angry people in the theater would get. People screamed homophobic slurs, they threw popcorn and they stormed out to yell at the first person they could find wearing a Cinemark red vest calling us perverts and pedophiles for showing such pornographic smut.
People wanted refunds and said they would never come back to this theater again, which was funny to us because at the time we were the only theater in Plant City, and may still be, so the likelihood that they would drive out of town to see a movie seemed unlikely to us.
The film played for only a short time in our theater and showed me that even if I was ready to come out at that time that Plant City was not the place to do it.
Some things have changed for the good in the 20+ years since that film, and unfortunately some things have not changed, but to see the differences in response between the two kisses, I felt like the work LGBTQ activists put in to changing hearts and minds might just be working.
