Leila Rupp: Of course, The Group is a novel and doesn’t pretend to capture a transformative historical event in the way Stonewall does.
It looked like a place where rich white women hung out with European aristocrats. Think about what it meant that The Group was my window into the lesbian world. Popular culture representations can leave a powerful impression of the past that lingers in people’s minds. While it’s great that there is more exposure to queer history, it’s really important that the portrayals be accurate. We have to think about what audiences take away from a film like this. They were among those outraged about the film. Leila Rupp: By putting him front and center, the film sidelines the real street kids and trans people of color and lesbians who were in the bar and fought back. Danny is a white, straight-looking, gay kid from Indiana who runs away from home and ends up throwing the first brick when the police raid the Stonewall Inn. While calling attention to the significance of the iconic 1969 event that has come to stand for the beginnings of a militant phase of queer activism, the film sought to appeal to a broad, read heterosexual, audience by inventing a central character, Danny. Leila Rupp: Take, for example, the mainstream film Stonewall, released in 2015 to a chorus of outrage from queer scholars, activists and participants in the uprising. They don’t often have the tools to evaluate the messages that popular culture imparts about people with non-normative sexual and gender identities in the past or in the present. On the other hand, students still learn little in school about queer history and queer lives. Pose is a pretty amazing recent addition.
#GAY MEN KISSING AND MAKING LOVE TO GAY MEN FULL#
On the one hand, students today confront images of gay, lesbian, bisexual and even transgender people in a way that is unprecedented, even if the full range of racial, ethnic and class diversity is not generally on display. Leila Rupp: One of the things that has changed dramatically over the last half-century is the representation of queer people in popular culture, especially in television and film. She was the first lesbian I had encountered. I remember thinking how exotic and exciting she was. One of the characters, Lakey, is a rich lesbian who returns from Europe on the eve of World War II with the Baroness as her lover. I read it in high school, sometime around 1966. It made the New York Times Best Seller list in 1963, and stayed there for two years. I finally came up with Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a novel about a group of friends who graduated from Vassar in 1933. Leila Rupp: Do you remember the first time you encountered a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender person somewhere in popular culture? I’ve been thinking about this lately. Field, Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present Author, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States.Author, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities.Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Kansas.Co-editor with Kathleen Kennedy, Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past.Author, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America.Best Practices for Serving LGBTQ Students, Section III: Instruction.Best Practices for Serving LGBTQ Students, Appendix A: Books and Films.