It’s happening in cinema, too—though the films hardly feel like celebrations of liberation. In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, I wrote about the proliferation of gay teens in recent, widely seen movies: the hit rom-com Love, Simon, the buzzy conversion-therapy dramas Boy Erased and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and the Best Picture nominee Call Me by Your Name and winner Moonlight. In content and style, these works vary widely, but they share a somewhat reserved, cautious tone as they portray kids coming to understand their homosexuality. The rambunctious experience of puberty so familiar in film history—from Grease to Sixteen Candles to Lady Bird—has so far not been central to Hollywood’s vision of the queer coming of age. [...]
The appeal of the lightweight Love, Simon, though, was in imagining that a gay kid might fall comfortably into a familiar coming-of-age groove: occasionally mortifying, but never actually traumatic. The intolerance around Simon is light and incidental; mostly, he gets to look for love at the same house parties and county fairs as all his friends do. Shortly after that film’s release came the Netflix original Alex Strangelove, a livelier, raunchier, and more insightful attempt to retrofit the high-school comedy for a coming-out story. In both cases, letting the gay hero thrive relies on an idealized—even parodic—progressive utopia. “Everywhere you look someone’s omnisexual or transitioning,” says a sassy—straight—sidekick in Alex Strangelove.
Other films focus on the pursuit of happy endings outside of the high-school jungle, in the adult world. A sense of seclusion and early maturity helps enable Elio’s explorations in the great Call Me by Your Name. France’s intense 2013 epic Blue Is the Warmest Color saw a girl leave behind her gossipy peers as she entered into an affair with a grad student. The 1999 camp comedy But I’m a Cheerleader hit many of the same story beats as Miseducation and Boy Erased as it portrayed a young woman sent to conversion therapy, but this churchgoing hero got to also visit a gay bar and meet a stable same-sex couple. In the charming 1996 U.K. film Beautiful Thing, two bullied, working-class boys furtively explore not only their mutual attraction but also the queer scene of London. When they finally step out of the closet, it’s with the support and shielding of one of the boys’ mother.
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