Two sex symbols & a gay author brought this explosively controversial story to the big screen
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” As we approach the end of June, we continue our special Pride series in which we cover a movie highlighting a different letter of the LGBTQ+ acronym all month long.
This week, we dive into the all-important “T” with 1970’s Myra Breckinridge, a controversial adaptation of a controversial novel that may not be the best example of positive representation for a community that has been starved of it for so long.Week by week in this column we step back in time and look at various forms of queer representation throughout Hollywood history.
And it’s very apparent that, while the entire queer umbrella has been consistently deprived of meaningful portrayals in media, the trans community has by far gotten the least, both in terms of quantity and in quality.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.Although it’s not until relatively recently that there’s been consistent and accurate terminology developed around trans issues, trans characters have been present in mainstream film for a long time.
It’s just that the way they’ve been historically depicted and talked about was filled with harmful stereotypes, wrong and dated assumptions, and dangerous correlations of behavior.This week we’ll be discussing the 1970 film Myra Breckindrige, based on the novel of the same name by famed gay writer Gore Vidal.
