Escape the doom & gloom with a peek at a thriving queer community in 1960s Japan
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column—to find comfort in these dark times—we’re escaping to a different time and place with 1969’s Funeral Parade Of Roses.This has been a rough week.
With devastating election results and a regressive era of American politics looming in the very near future, we should focus on taking care of ourselves, turning to our communities and chosen families, and getting ready to fight back.
But, at least for now, we all deserve a little escape.So, for this week’s cinematic retrospective, let’s tack a trip to Japan in the 1960s to dive into an escapist experimental fantasia of queer community, go-go music, and oedipal complexes.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.As we’ve discussed many times in the past, queer representation in the first two thirds of the last century was often coded, reprimanded, or non-existent in mainstream entertainment.
It hasn’t been until relatively recently that we’ve gotten authentic, three-dimensional portrayals of what it means to live and exist as part of our community.
