Welcome to Screen Gems, our weekend dive into queer and queer-adjacent titles of the past that deserve a watch or a re-watch.In general, real-life terrors tend to scare us a lot more than fictional demons and curses.
Today’s Screen Gems selection demonstrates as much.Operation Hyacinth, the new Polish film streaming on Netflix in the US, takes inspiration from the real-life Polish government initiative of the same name.
During the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis, the Polish government decided to crack down on homosexual activity in the name of public health.
In reality, the officers in charge of the operation used it as a means to gather information on the nation’s queer population, and use it for blackmail purposes.This fictional.