Trigger Warning: mentions of paedophilia, abusive relationships, mentions of sexual assault, mentions of conversion therapy
Gay representation in movies is hard to come by, and healthy gay representation is even harder to come by. Call Me By Your Name is a 2017 movie starring Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer, directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on the book by André Aciman. In the movie, Chalamet plays 17 year old Elio living in northern Italy who falls in love with his father's 24 year old research assistant. It was met with critical acclaim, however a large part of the LGBTQ+ community spoke out against it. The movie shows a relationship between the older adult and the still high-school aged teenager, with the adult clearly knowing what he’s doing is wrong but pursuing the sexual relationship anyway, with the story ending with Oliver (the 24 year old) married to a woman while Elio is still heavily affected by their relationship nearly 15 years later.
The problems start to arise when you look into the author. André Aciman is a cishet white man in his 60s, and his story plays into the prejudiced idea that queer people are inherently predatory, or that straight men’s own tendency to prey on inexperienced and vulnerable teenagers is a rife problem and they see nothing wrong with that. In an interview, Aciman said that “you do need a relationship in which one has all the experience with life, and the other is just beginning to discover what life is”, playing into dangerous archetypes of power imbalances in relationships being a good thing. The people involved in the film didn’t see any issues with the narrative either, although again the two leads were cishet white men. Armie Hammer (who played Oliver) said that “nothing about the relationship was predatory” and Chalamet went on to work in a Woody Allen movie, a man with accusations of pedophilia and child abuse that have dogged him since before Chalamet was born.
Karamo Brown, one of the stars of Netflix’s “Queer Eye” and a licensed psychotherapist and social worker, believes the film to be “problematic as fuck” as he has worked with many survivors of sexual assault, especially in the LGBTQ community and the minute he saw the movie he thought “Here we are glorifying this sort of relationship”. He said “if that was an older man, or a perceived college student who looked that much older with a 16 or 17 year old girl we would have all had a hissy fit” (despite playing a 24 year old, Armie Hammer was 30 at the start of filming), and he went on to say that because it was two men it was written off as “exploration” which made it ok.
Defenders of the movie point out that at the time the movie was set in 1983, the age of consent in Italy was 14. However, age-of-consent laws in general seems like an odd way to defend and assess a fictional relationship.
But why are we still talking about Call Me By Your Name when other queer movies exist and, in my opinion, are much much better? The 2016 movie “Moonlight” directed by Barry Jenkins and starring Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris was met with massive critical acclaim, and yet is hardly ever talked about in comparison to how “film twitter” collectively circle jerks over Call Me By Your Name every chance it can get, maybe that’s due to Chalamet in the lead role, an actor who quite frankly seems very boring and never really engages me in any role he is in. Moonlight told a beautiful coming of age story that was based in truth, not the fetishising of a same-sex relationship written by a cishet man that was CMBYN. There is also the argument to be made that because Moonlight was a predominantly black cast when compared to CMBYN’s predominantly white cast, that subtle bias and prejudices from White Gay Men™ who don’t seem to hype anything up except the latest Ariana Grande song.
If Moonlight’s occasional heavy content puts you off (there are scenes of drug use and violence), why not try the 2018 movie “Love, Simon” directed by Greg Berlanti (a gay man), starring Nick Robinson, Jennifer Garner and Keiynan Lonsdale (who came out as queer following the release of the movie) and based on the novel “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda” by Becky Albertalli. In the film, Simon (played by Robinson) is a closeted gay man in high school who, via a series of emails, falls in love with “Blue”. He must navigate high school and also coming to terms with his own sexuality. For young queer people looking to mainstream media for acceptance, and also at times a vaguely cheesy movie trope that has been told many times with straight couples, Love, Simon is one of the more accessible movies, and one of the movies more likely to be relatable with a teenager navigating high school in a modern setting, not living in Italy surrounded by luxury in 1983.
For movies that aren’t about an mlm relationship, there are movies such as the 2018 “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” directed by Desiree Akhavan, starring Chloe Grace Moretz and Quinn Shephard and based on the book of the same name by Emily M. Danforth. The film deals with themes of homophobia and religion as a teenage girl is sent to a gay conversion therapy centre by her conservative guardians. The movie was met with critical acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018.
Or perhaps the 2015 movie “Carol” directed by Todd Haynes and starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara is more your type of film. The movie depicts a relationship between an aspiring photographer (played by Mara) and an older married woman (Blanchett) in 1950s New York. Again it was met with critical acclaim, being nominated for 6 Oscars.
For a movie with a trans storyline and a trans actress in the lead role, the 2014 movie “Boy Meets Girl” written and directed by Eric Schaeffer and starring Michelle Hendley and Michael Welch about not letting fear stand in the way of going after your dreams.
Overall, while CMBYN was a step forward in queer representation in mainstream media, what has become evident more recently is that perhaps it was not the right kind of queer representation, and that the damaging and problematic relationship at the heart of the story is not the message we should be sending queer people of any age who may just be figuring out who they are as people.
By Jake Livingstone
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