The first Mexican film to feature a gay couple is this sensual and bittersweet dramedy from 1985
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we revisit 1985’s Doña Herlinda And Her Son, the first Mexican film to center an openly LGBTQ+ couple.It hasn’t been that long since the depiction of gay relationships in the media has started shifting from doomed tragedies to painless slices of life.
For so long, gay characters were destined to love from afar, or to love and be punished from it with disease, societal rejection, or death.
And we still struggle with the pervasiveness of these depictions today; it’s still too common for queer relationships to be portrayed as secret, dangerous, or bound to end tragically.Which is why it’s so refreshing when a film comes along that depicts a loving couple as part of a larger narrative, or when the focus of the relationship is not its inevitable end, but the ups and downs that come with every other human dynamic.It’s even more refreshing when said film comes from a period of time when gay movies were few and far in between, and even more so when they come from a country outside the mainstream Hollywood machinery.Doña Herlinda And Her Son is a 1985 Mexican romantic comedy that was groundbreaking for its depictions of a loving gay couple at its center.
Not only was it the first movie in Mexican cinema history to feature an openly queer couple, but it did so in a way that mostly de-stigmatized them and framed them around a universal story: dealing with an overbearing in-law.
