What better way to celebrate the U.S. holiday weekend than with Glenn Close as a lesbian military office?
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” Happy Fourth of July weekend! As the fireworks continue booming off in the distance, what better time to examine how the United States and its institutions have stood for and—much more commonly—against the rights of its gay citizens, no?To do so, let’s open up a little time capsule from 1995, the height of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell era, when two of our all-time-great actresses starred in a film that attempted to show us how to carve a path forward.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.For years, the DADT policy within the U.S.
military stated that LGBTQ+ people could only serve so long as they didn’t openly disclose their sexual orientation. It was implemented under the Clinton administration in the early ’90s and repealed by Obama in 2011.
While we won’t quite get into all the intricacies and socio-political ramifications of the practice, it was, without a doubt, one of the most highly controversial topics regarding the gay rights movement, and a big step towards our assimilation in historically heterosexual spaces.Movies that center military life tend to reflect the mostly straight male demographic of the institution.
Most of them revolve around the bond that is formed between soldiers, the horrors and hardships of war, and tend to either criticize or elevate the somewhat mindless nationalism at its core.
