Spend Labor Day weekend skinny-dipping with one of the first mainstream movies about gay love
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we revisit 1974’s A Very Natural Thing, considered to be one of the first films about gay relationships to receive a commercial release.Throughout film history, queer cinema has always been considered “radical” in some way or another.
Particularly in the early years—when visibility and representation was not just inexistent, but forbidden—LGBTQ+ characters had to be sidelined, punished, or erased.
Films by and about our community had to exist outside the mainstream filmmaking norms and processes.Because of the real-life separation between us and the rest of society, films tended to portray us and our lives as something alternative, separate, or othered.
It wasn’t always in an antagonistic way (though rare, many portrayals could be quite sympathetic), but there was not an integration between an “us” and a “them” until quite recently.
