Making Queer History has a vague title because it has a rather vague purpose. We are not alone in our aim to tell the queer community’s history. What defines us is our focus not only on the past, but toward the future.
All in Queer People in Media
With this final article in our series on queer representation in media, we will look at where we want to see queer media go in the next decade, wrapping up our queer media series. Researching this final leg of the series was difficult, as it's hard to research the future, but we did our best. We interviewed the main team of a project in production, and the Executive Director of Represent, all of whom gave us insight into the present state of queer media, and using our research into the patterns of our past we can get a glimpse of what the future holds.
Queen Christina, a film as historic as its titular character. Queen Christina was released in 1933, during a time called pre-code. The Hays Code was a set of guidelines written for Hollywood by a group of religious leaders, most notably William Hays, that dictated what could and could not be shown on screen. It was put into place just after the invention of “talkies” and banned numerous “immoral acts” from being shown on film. Among those “immoral acts” was any reference to or implication of homosexuality.
Different from the Others (Anders Als Die Andern) was the first film to portray queer people positively and explicitly and was released in 1919. Made by queer activists in Berlin, it remains an artifact of queer resistance.
