Sensual and mature, this early queer love triangle drama was ahead of its time
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we revisit1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, a surprisingly open-minded film about a queer love triangle.One of the goals of this column is highlighting the ways in which the LGBTQ+ community has been underserved and underrepresented in cinema over the years.
By revisiting little-seen films that put us and our stories at the center, or discussing more mainstream projects that sidelined or subtly hinted at us, we can track how our community’s portrayal in media has grown, changed, and—in some cases—first started to appear.The vast majority of examples we are able to focus on concern the L, the G, and (to a more complex degree) the T letters of our alphabet family.
The B seems to be a bit more evasive. It’s rare to find well-delineated bisexual characters throughout early Hollywood history; people whose bisexuality goes beyond mere portrayals of promiscuity, standing in as symbols of debauchery, loose morals, or even plain villainy.
Take for example a film we discussed not too long ago, Something For Everyone: Michael York, as deliciously Machiavellian as he was, still used his bisexuality to trick and deceive people for his own personal greed.Within that context, the 1971 British drama Sunday Bloody Sunday is nothing less than groundbreaking—not just for centering an openly bisexual character at the literal center of a plot at a time where the opposite was the norm.
