When is Queer Graduation?
Joe Nickols
With the imminent return of Heartstopper (2022 - Present) and the final series of Sex Education (2019 – Present) in the Autumn, there will be an influx of queer representation on television. In some ways this is a great thing, facilitating visibility. Yet both shows further a trope that has dominated queer representation during the 21st century; keeping queers locked in schools. Mainstream queer films and TV shows, that are either explicitly queer or have acquired the status of a queer classic, have a tendency to keep their queer characters in the hallways of high schools and higher education. From Booksmart (2019) to Love, Simon (2018), Mean Girls (2004) to Jennifer’s Body (2009), popular queer representation is overwhelmingly contained to schooling. Even films and TV shows that follow queer adult lives regularly return their queers to some form of educational institution, exemplified in the ruthless ballet barre of Black Swan (2010). Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis battle in a world that is unknown to most, yet made familiar to the audience through the structure of school and the educational hierarchy it maintains. Uncle Frank (2020), a film that follows the queer life of the title character (played by Paul Bettany), eschews the convention somewhat, with Frank being a university professor, rather than a student.
Megan Fox and Amanda
Seyfriend in Jennifer’s Body.
Though cultural this trope may seem innocent, it curtails the impact that representing queerness might have. It contains queerness in a location that defines limits, both physically and temporally. Within the physical limits of school, the school system’s rules and authority supersede those of wider society. Reality is somewhat suspended, and school rules permit behaviours and actions that are not permissible in adulthood. Similarly, school has a temporal limit, wherein its own rules are prioritised – staving off the reality of adulthood. This means that any actions of scholastic queer defiance are simply momentary lapses of social expectations, permitted through the school’s distance from society – they’re incapable of affecting the framework of society at large.
In 2021, the British charity Just Like Us conducted a survey of young people in the UK aged between 11 - 18 and discovered that LGBTQIA+ pupils were over twice as likely to contemplate suicide. The survey saw a third of the LGBTQIA+ youth opening up about self-harm, compared to just 9% of non-LGBTQIA+ identifying students. Considering the extent of the mental anguish these young people are experiencing, it seems odd to continually contain representations of queerness in spaces that often oppress and isolate queer people. Moreover, this trope does not fit comfortably with the current trend of “visibility”, as it ignores the visceral truth that many queer youths face. Though there may be more queer representation on the screen, the containment of queerness within schools minimises subversion and often portrays an unsustainable promise of acceptance. These imagined lives of happy and supported queer students does not align with the stark reality that homophobia is alive and managing to push people towards self-harm. Though the need for queer positive programming is very necessary, why are we producing content that seemingly ignores the strife that queer youths still go through at school? This visual promise of youthful queer joy, overlooking the parameters of reality, may create more frustration than actual good.
Queer viewers who have graduated may experience a certain suffering watching the saccharine happiness of fictional queer characters in the same halls that were, in reality, torturous. They will never experience the boundless possibility and limitless support that is visualised on the screen. And nor will anyone, as it is unreal. And for those about to enter high school, it offers hope of love and acceptance that may not be there, thus furthering the confusion and frustration that actual young queer students may have to wade through. Though many have proposed that queer cinema is created for its cast/crew to represent their own desires of their queer youth that never was, this desire does not seem to explain the pervasiveness of this queer schooling trend.
So why does this trope exist, if not to correct the wrongs done to the queer community? The answer lies in the concept of acceptable experimentation. Before graduating and entering the workforce, there is a common understanding that people are allowed to try things out before falling into line as an adult. Before work everyone is permitted this edifying time to playfully contest norms. Conventional norms of fashion, hair colour, music taste, drinking, drugs, and, above all, sex are all allowed (and encouraged) to be challenged during this rite of passage. This challenging of norms is permitted because there is an assumption that upon graduation, conventionality will consume these fresh adults. They will not just ‘grow out of it’ but graduate out of it. Pink hair returns to brown, ripped jeans give way to business attire, and experimental sex is no longer acceptable. Sexual experimentation in college is another well-known cinematic trope of the educational experience. There is, even, a more permissible attitude towards straight people temporarily fulfilling their queer sexualities. And it is here, in these scholastic places of permissible experimentation, that queer representation has been able to cultivate an appearance of acceptability for straight and queer audiences.
By keeping the characters receiving report cards in perpetuity, these forever-student queers are allowed to exist openly in the media, as they threaten nothing. The status quo can continue to flow freely. As they never graduate, they cannot have deep impact in society because they never become adults. Schools in film have become a signified setting of wild possibility, becoming detached from reality and representing a space of complete fantasy. From the musical madness of Grease (1978) to the extravagant exploits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), schools possess a liminal quality, their pupils able to defy everyday pressures and responsibilities. This quality weakens any potential queer disruption further, as the setting is a shorthand for the unreal; anything that happens in a school is detached from our world, and its ramifications neutralised. Ultimately, the framework of schooling is defined by a heteronormative structure maintained by its staff. The headteacher, the signifier of the framework, will be able to undo any subversion and return the institution to a normative state, further minimising the threat of visible queerness.
The containment of queerness in liminal spaces is not uncommon in other cinematic romps. Successful queer cinema is almost universally set in liminal spaces. This allows the audience to revel in a sexuality that might be fetishised, desired, reviled, or objectified, as sexuality often is, without worrying about the impact on their own identity or lifestyle. Even the recent release of Fire Island (2022), a queer film that was critically acclaimed, perpetuated this containment. Though the characters are all out of school and living in metropolitan cities, the film displaces them from conventional life and places them in a space not dissimilar to a school. The film begins with a rag-tag group of queer friends being picked up on a boat (like a school bus) and taken away from the mainland. The characters then enact Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice through a queer lens. Though the film is beautifully shot and there are brilliant performances throughout, the detachment from reality hits home in the final few scenes , in which “Darcy” and “Elizabeth” must separate and return to their respective cities, leaving the audience wondering if their love can ever survive outside the liminal space it began in. This is not dissimilar to queer relationships set in schools, which leave the audience to consider the fate of early queer love and its survival beyond graduation. The threat of early queer love is weakened by this interrogation of its survival, which magnifies its potential demise.
The queer relationship represented in Sex Education is particularly intriguing, as within the show itself it is visualised in unreal ways. Key moments between Eric and Adam have consistently taken place in locations beyond the reaches of conventionality. The declaration of love between Eric and Adam occurs during the end-of-year musical, interrupting the main show. This preposterous act is gloriously choreographed and the whole school is supportive of the interruption. Reality is suspended. This contrasts with the love stories of the other – predominantly straight – relationships, which are grounded more directly in reality. Though this sort of exaggerated love declaration may be heralded as the kind of love that queer people want and need to see, this view does not acknowledge that those needs or wants arose simply because real love is kept away from queer people in the real world. Queer people are made to believe that love, care, support, intimacy, and possibility is closed to them, and achievable only in fantasy. It takes advantage of emotional longing. Straight people can enjoy these representations because they are unthreatening and allow for acceptable consumption of queerness, so unreal it cannot question straightness; queer people enjoy them because they fulfil fantasy. The fact that these queer fantasies persevere in cinema demonstrates that the emotional possibility for queer people in the present day is not changing as much as we would like to believe. The assumed outcome of young love in high school films is that it cannot survive, an assumption that is magnified for queer love. Even if Eric and Adam ride off into the sunset at the end of this final season, we assume that the romantic getaway car will breakdown and both passengers will end up trapped in queer lives of frustrated love.
Interestingly, it is only in the post-AIDS/HIV world that this trope of caging queers in scholastic liminality has come to prominence. Filmmaking of the post-war period saw the development of vague queer acceptability, despite studios trying to limit queer representation under the Hays Code. This prohibitive code was repealed in 1968, and films like John Walters’ Pink Flamingos (1972) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) ensued. Even the earlier British film Victim (1961) was an outcry against homophobia. Sal Mineo played the first gay teenager on screen in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), a film that follows the lives of teenagers outside their schooling. Though school appears in the film, the emotional crux lies outside the classroom. Perhaps the fear of AIDS/HIV has required the relegation of queers to liminal spaces of untouchability. If queer people cannot enter into the realm of the real, their lives can be seen, but not fully engaged with. This explains why we can also accept historical representations of queers. Whether it is views of queer lives in the 1890s or the 1980s, those people and those experiences are removed from the viewer by time. The subversive potential of those characters and what they represented are held at a (temporal) distance, able to educate us about the past but not impact our direct, lived present.
Sal Mineo and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
The box office bombing of 2022’s LGBT rom-com Bros has been heavily dissected over the past year in queer media, with commentators questioning what went wrong. Was the film’s incoherent marketing to blame? Did the appallingly designed accompanying imagery send people running? Or has the world has simply outgrown the rom-com format? The way it presents itself as a film about Gay Dating feels somewhat dated in an age where queerness has brought nuance and complexity to mainstream sexuality. The characters felt trapped in decade-old tropes that no longer resonate. This may not have been the fault of the writers, actors, or anyone involved in the production. As it is the first LGBT rom-com produced by a major studio, Universal Pictures, there may have been many compromises to play it safe. Whatever the reason Bros didn’t financially succeed, it did succeed in one unconventional element that should be celebrated: allowing its queers to graduate. Both of the main characters are allowed to work in New York City. One is a successful podcast host and curator, whilst the other is encouraged to pursue the niche dream of becoming a chocolatier. This is a rarity. The commercial outcome of this film suggests that graduated queers are not mainstream material.
Though the success of Drag based representation suggests otherwise, the bombing of Bros has sadly signalled that representation of real queer adult lives may not be commercially viable yet. The mainstream representation of Drag predominantly focuses on Drag Queens, rather than the overall disruption of gender play itself, largely ignoring Drag Kings and other forms of Gender Non-conforming representation. Significantly, a big part of popular Drag cinema shows what is “under the drag” and therefore the assumed truth of the person (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), and RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009 - Present). This diminishes the power of the transformation, undermining the social disruption of the performance. It’s like watching a magic trick and knowing how it happens. Even the emphasis on comedy in all these productions diffuses the emotional obstacles these figures have to overcome. It takes the sting out of their gender subversion. Like representations of queers in school, acceptable televised Drag allows for a moment of queer disruption on stage before the wigs come off and we, the audience, leave to return to our lives knowing that the subversion was momentary. Intriguingly, many Drag Race challenges often return to the trope of high school too.
The acceptable and popular representation of queers in school ignores the stark reality of bullying and suffering of the LGBTQIA+ youth. There are few cinematic offerings that provide queer people with a hopeful existence beyond graduation. Though there are more queers on our screens than ever before, are they actually undermining the remaining struggle that queer people face? A deeper question emerges too: can queer lives ever truly be represented in cinema? We have lived through an age of visibility politics, but it remains to be seen if this has achieved positive outcomes. The Canadian philosopher Professor Charles Taylor wrote that “Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition"(1992)). Perhaps the repeated misrecognition of the queer experience on screen has caused more harm than good. We have wised up to not bury the queers anymore, so why can’t we let them graduate and live fully?
Joe Nickols is an art historian, curator, writer, presenter, and designer.
