Misperceptions and the Media

Keeping It Queer
By Erica Chu

Misperceptions and the Media

How often are there big-name actors playing gay roles in movies you can see at any major theater franchise in the country? Well, there was Philadelphia (1993), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Milk (2008)—all receiving incredible box office success and at least two Oscars each. And movies about gay women? Well, there are fewer to choose from, and even fewer portraying the lives of transgendered or queer people (notable among these are Boys Don’t Cry and Transamerica).

Into this relative void of sympathetic representations of lesbian life comes Lisa Cholodenko’s new film The Kids Are All Right, which has been getting a lot of attention in part because the lead actors are incredibly famous and talented. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a partnered couple who have two teenage children.

This past week, my partner and I decided to go check out this movie even though up to that point we’d heard nothing about it. I was prepared to like the film, and as I settled into the characters, story, and plot, I became more and more disappointed. (Spoiler Alert—in what follows I will mention some of the important plot elements). The disappointments I just can’t get over are:

1 – Despite their acting talent, the version of intimacy this film produces looks very much like two strangers putting their arms around each other in desperate attempts to convince the audience they could have lived in the same house for twenty years.
2 – The couple’s son asks if they thought he was gay. They both reply “Of course not!” as if being gay were a completely unnatural thing that no good mother would ever suspect their child of.
3 – When Moore’s character makes the unfortunate choice to cheat on her partner with a man, she looks at his penis like she’s been pining away her whole life in distressing need of what only a male’s genitals can offer.
4 – There are three characters in the film who aren’t white. Each one is a canned stereotype (lazy manual laboring Latino, exotic and sensuous racially mixed woman, and nerdy and passive Asian American male), and each is casually used and abruptly dismissed by one of the white main characters.

What bothers me so much is not that these things happened in a film that I was watching but that they happened in a film that everyone is raving about. Yes, I was thoroughly impressed with quite a few aspects of the film. Yet as the lights turned on and all the upper middle-class white heterosexual couples started jabbering about how this was such a powerful film and how Moore and Bening should both win Oscars, I started to feel a little queasy. All these people were fooled into believing this film depicts life as lived by lesbians—even a pair of very messed up ones. And it seemed to me that the audience was congratulating themselves on having such progressive views. Of course they don’t mean lesbians and racial minorities any harm, but limited and skewed assumptions do harm against individuals and communities every day.

As a queer woman of color, it’s disturbing that their view of our lives could be so inaccurate and even offensive. It makes me angry. It hurts. It gives others leeway to render me invisible.

It would be easy to just throw up my hands, spit complaints of fire, and go on, but this whole situation also makes me a little terrified about my own views. What do I quietly congratulate myself for? How do I know that my thoughts about particular kinds of people aren’t canned images thrown at me so frequently that I accept them as reality?

Confronting our cultural views with suspicion is one of the most difficult things we can do, but it’s necessary if we are going to see the world for what it really is and if we’re going to work toward any kind of justice. I hope movies, television, and the media at large make us angry sometimes, but let’s not lose sight of where that momentum can take us. We who’ve been misperceived also have may be guilty of similar crimes.


Erica Chu is a student at Loyola University Chicago and is seeking a PhD in English with a concentration in Women Studies and Gender Studies. She manages the blog keepingitqueer.blogspot.com and can be reached at ericachu@msn.com.