Is Gay Sex Still Taboo on The Screen?

 

                           

 Call Me by Your Name was criticized for shying away from including any gay sex scenes (Credit: Alamy)

 By Louis Staples

BBC Culture

It starts with a soft touch of the neck when museum curator Patrick Hazlewood (David Dawson) and policeman Tom Burgess (Harry Styles) are sitting together on a sofa, in a Brighton apartment, after drinking three large whiskeys. The sex scenes in Michael Grandage's My Policeman – a gay romance film about two men in the 1950s, when male homosexual sex was still a criminal offense – actually made headlines months before the film's release in select US and UK cinemas last Friday. An interview with Styles in Rolling Stone promoting the film, in which he bemoaned a lack of "tenderness" in gay sex scenes, sparked controversy. "So much of gay sex in the film is two guys going at it," Styles said, saying he and director Michael Grandage wanted to show instead that gay sex can be "loving and sensitive." The comments were rebuffed and even mocked by some. Styles was accused of feeding into the homophobic idea that homosexuality is acceptable as long as it is not too "in-your-face".  (After all, what is wrong with "two guys going at it"?). It was also suggested that Styles needed to brush up on his knowledge of cinema because sex scenes of any kind between men in mainstream films – let alone sexually frank ones –  are still pretty rare. While progress has been made when it comes to representation, showing "two guys going at it" is still somewhat of a cinematic taboo. 

Styles' remarks are slightly more understandable after watching My Policeman, however, which can also be streamed globally on Prime Video from 4 November. The film features several sex scenes that, as in the 2012 novel by Bethan Roberts it's adapted from, are distinctly tender – but that doesn't make them timid or censored, as it was suspected they would be following Styles' comments. Rather, the numerous sex scenes are long and feel genuinely intimate. Without being overly explicit, Grandage doesn't shy away from depicting the sexual acts performed by the characters, particularly during their first encounter. Indeed, sex is a key vehicle for the film's character development, not only illustrating both the euphoric early stages and subsequent simmering tensions in Tom and Patrick's relationship but also reflecting the awkwardness in Tom's lustless marriage to Marion (Emma Corrin).

 In depicting a passionate gay love affair in 1950s Britain, My Policeman is notable for the relative length and frankness of its sex scenes (Credit: Amazon Prime/Alamy)

When it came to the sex scenes between Patrick and Tom, Grandage suggested the actors watch the 1959 romance Hiroshima, Mon Amour, by French film director Alain Resnais, in preparation. Its famous opening scene, where hands are seen slowly moving over naked bodies, "hugely influenced" him as a young person. "I wanted to try and tell as much of the story as I could without dialogue, through visuals and touch," he tells BBC Culture. "The sensuality of touch needed to be as sculptural as possible. That was something thematic that I wanted to fold into the film." He also encouraged the actors to watch Nicolas Roeg's 1973 thriller Don't Look Now, which features a famous sex scene that was explicit and controversial for its time. In fact, it was considered so effective that there were scurrilous suggestions that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland actually did have sex on camera for real, a rumor they have always denied. The sex scenes in My Policeman are unlikely to spark such uproar and speculation, but there is a similar realism to them.

I wanted the intimacy to move the story forward, and you can't do that if you get too coy with it, or move the camera away from it – Michael Grandage

To make a more recent comparison, My Policeman's approach to same-sex intimacy, specifically, feels similar to Carol, Todd Haynes' 2015 romantic period drama starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. 

Carol was also set in the conservative 1950s and its passionate sex scenes portrayed two characters who were only able to fully express themselves behind closed doors, with their bodies entwined. "In My Policeman, we're dealing with a period in England where gay sex was illegal," Grandage tells BBC Culture. "I wanted to make sure that you were able to see these two men have total freedom during intimacy because they couldn't elsewhere." And as a viewer in 2022, there is still a sense of liberation to be felt in seeing that intimacy candidly expressed in a starry, relatively commercial movie like My Policeman.

Queer cinema has come a long way since 1964 when Brock Peters played one of the first openly homosexual characters in the US film Pawn Broker. Back then, same-sex intimacy and nudity on screen would have seemed unthinkable. But today, whether it's the lusciousness of My Policeman, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams characters' voracious lovemaking in 2017 drama Disobedience, or the gay orgies in Andrew Ahn's Jane Austen-inspired gay rom-com Fire Island, queer sex scenes are gradually becoming more frequent and varied. Alongside My Policeman, another mainstream LGBTQ+ film that has been making waves in recent weeks is the studio gay rom-com Bros, which has been heralded by its comedian writer-star Billy Eichner as a historic moment for gay representation in film – although its supposed radicalness has been disputed by some critics. The film casually drops in several sex scenes, from disappointing hook-ups described as "weird sex with strangers that you don’t like", to group sex scenes that explore relationships beyond monogamy. Some of the sex offers comedic value, while other scenes are more sentimental as the protagonists fall in love.

The 'purpose' of sex scenes

If the simultaneous release of these two glossy, mainstream films with an upfront approach to gay male sexuality is heartening, the debate over Styles' comments has highlighted that gay sex on screen remains a contentious issue. Some feel that progress is being made, with more films depicting it with relative openness, but others remain frustrated that mainstream cinema still shies away from it too often. In some ways, this is an offshoot of a wider debate that has been going on more recently, about the purpose and validity of sex scenes in films full stop. For Grandage, the sex scenes in My Policeman were primarily about narrative. "I wanted the intimacy to move the story forward, and you can't do that if you get too coy with it, or move the camera away from it," he says. Clarisse Loughrey, the film critic at The Independent, agrees that intimate scenes should ideally further the story. "Sex scenes work best when they're rightfully serving the characters, the narrative, and the tone of the film," she says. 

Yet Richard Lawson, chief critic at Vanity Fair, also thinks we need to be careful not to become too prescriptive about sex scenes in films, or puritanical about their reason for being. "Right now we're in this period were sex scenes have to drive forward the narrative. But really, they can also be there because they're sexy," he says. "It's nice when they serve the narrative, but it's not always a problem if they don't."

 

New rom-com Bros casually includes a range of sex scenes, from one-on-one to group sex encounters (Credit: Alamy)

 

  

Queer sex scenes, specifically, might be used to tell the audience how a character feels about their sexuality or LGBTQ+ identity. This might be one reason why, as research shows that the number of sex scenes in mainstream cinema is decreasing overall, it feels like queer intimacy is defying that trend. But Lawson questions whether queer sex scenes even need to justify their existence in this way. He thinks Francis Lee's 2017 film God's Own Country – a romantic drama that follows a young sheep farmer in Yorkshire whose life is transformed when he falls in love with a Romanian migrant worker – is an example of a queer film where sex scenes have multiple purposes. "In God's Own Country, there are sex scenes which serve a clear narrative purpose, where sex is a form of communication between the two stoic, guarded characters," he explains. "Others don't necessarily need to be in the film, but they still work, I think. So I'm not sure if there's a 'better' kind of sex scene – it really depends on the film."

Whatever the conversation about sex scenes in general, the strong reaction to Styles' remarks does reflect that there is an additional set of anxieties when it comes to the presence and content of gay sex scenes. "There's definitely a different set of expectations and a burden on queer sex scenes compared to heterosexual ones," Loughrey says. "I suppose when something is lacking for such a long period of time, the rare examples of it then have to be everything to everyone, which is difficult." Part of this pressure comes from a suspicion among LGBTQ+ audiences that queer sex, particularly between men, is going to be erased or sanitized. These fears aren't exactly unfounded: in 2017, Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, was criticized for not featuring one sex scene between its two protagonists. (The film found time for an opposite-gender sex scene, plus a famously racy masturbation scene involving a peach, but skirted around sex between men). In 2018, Freddie Mercury's biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, starring Rami Malek, was similarly accused of erasing Mercury's sexual and romantic life with men too.

Then when a film like My Policeman comes out, that doesn't shy away from sex, these scenes  – and even how the actors talk about them in interviews – face extra attention, especially from the LGBTQ+ community itself. Lawson feels conflicted about this. "We [queer people] are obviously nervous that the representation won't be good, or it'll be harmful or regressive in some way," he tells BBC Culture. "I think analyzing what we're watching is a good impulse, but sometimes that can be self-sabotaging too because we forget that things that are imperfect are still worthy of praise in some ways."

I don't believe anyone has ever filmed a lesbian sex scene that didn't get attacked, whether it’s by a male director, a straight female director, or a lesbian director – B Ruby Rich

Grandage agrees that forthright depictions of the gay male sex in the film have been too rare. "Sometimes I think it is handled rather well, but sometimes it fades out before anything's really happened," he says. "And you're left wondering, is that because of the audience? Or the filmmaker?" What he alludes to here is that same-sex intimacy can be the victim of larger film industry pressures. Bohemian Rhapsody, for example, was accused of selling a "moralistic, sanitized version" of Mercury that was "respectable for mainstream audiences," presumably including parts of the world where homosexuality is illegal. And not only that, but there have been homophobic smear campaigns against films featuring gay content – like Bros, which has suffered from mass review-bombing, or Marvel's Eternals, featuring gay superhero Phaistos, which was also trashed online days before its 2021 release. So as much as there are high expectations from LGBTQ+ audiences, who are eager to see more sex scenes, there is still opposition to telling queer stories in the mainstream.

Gender differences

When it comes to the debate about how cinema treats gay or queer sex, another complication is the difference in how the same-sex intimacy between men and women has been displayed in films historically. Lesbian academic B Ruby Rich, the editor of Film Quarterly, tells BBC Culture that there was initially a rejection of lesbian sex in film from the feminist movement because as she explains "lesbian sex was such a feature of pornography, going back to the 70s". However, that slowly changed. With the rise of lesbian representation, Rich says there was eventually more of a "call to incorporate sex between women in a much more specific way".

 

Call Me by Your Name was criticized for shying away from including any gay sex scenes (Credit: Alamy)

One of the first lesbian sex scenes in mainstream, English-language cinema came in the very straight, very male Tony Scott's 1983 vampire film The Hunger, with its erotic episode between Catherine Deneuve's bloodsucker and Susan Sarandon's human innocent. But the next decade saw several lesbian sex scenes in films made by lesbian filmmakers. Rich highlights Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts (1985) and Barbara Hammer's Nitrate Kisses (1992) as films featuring ground-breaking lesbian sex scenes that were brought to the screen by queer women and actors. In 1994, Go Fish – a romance film written and directed by lesbian filmmakers Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche – featured a famous intimate scene where nail-clipping was used as foreplay. (At the premiere, nail clippers were handed out to confused journalists). And in 1996, The Watermelon Woman, a romantic comedy-drama written and directed by US lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, became a landmark moment in New Queer Cinema – a term first coined by Rich, which describes a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s. The film's lesbian sex scene became famous for its explicitness at the time, including nipples on display. The scene, which has been praised for portraying "realistic" lesbian sex that did not objectify the women involved, led to the film being criticized by Republican Party politicians in Congress.

Rich tells BBC Culture that the fear of lesbian sex being exploited for male pleasure meant there was a "reluctance" to let men into cinemas to view these films. "Before the internet, there was this fantasy that you could control the audience and prevent these scenes from being seen by men, who were assumed to purely have a pornographic interest," she explains. "So there were women-only screenings of a lot of these films."

When it comes to sex, queer men haven't had as much sexual representation as lesbians have had, but that means we've had less bad representation – Richard Lawson

In the 21st Century, from Mulholland Drive to Carol and Atomic Blonde, lesbian sex has been depicted with increasing frequency in mainstream films, but anxiety over who lesbian sex scenes are aimed at is still felt: "I don't believe anyone has ever filmed a lesbian sex scene that didn't get attacked – whether it's by a male director, or a straight female director, or a lesbian director," Rich says. "Because people are very quick to announce: 'that's not lesbian sex!'" One film featuring lesbian sex scenes that there were particularly loud objections to was the 2013 French romance film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, with queer audiences deeming the scenes inauthentic and the fantasy of a straight man, director Abdellatif Kechiche, misrepresenting the type of sex many lesbians actually have; indeed Julie Maroh, the author of the very comic book on which it was based, derided the scenes as "a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and [made] I feel very ill at ease". 

However Rich believes that the outcry over the film exemplified a type of "hyper-sensitivity" over the finer details that is particularly intense when it comes to sex between women. By contrast, queer men, she theorizes, have been so relatively deprived of sex scenes over the years that they have been more likely to accept any sexual representation, however imperfect. "For gay men, it's the opposite," she says. "Generally, there is more of a willingness to overlook the details." Still, the reaction to Styles' remarks suggests that might be changing, with gay men becoming more critical of how they are depicted sexually.

Who are queer sex scenes really for?

Certainly, whether the characters are gay, lesbian or otherwise, there can be a fear among LGBTQ+ audiences that queer representation in mainstream film and TV might not actually be made with LGBTQ+ viewers in mind. And the question of "who is this film really for?" goes hand-in-hand with judgments about the portrayal of queer sexuality. Films about LGBTQ+ people that don’t feature any sex, particularly those involving gay male characters, are often presumed to be made for heterosexual audiences. The decision to make gay men sexless – as when occupying Hollywood's favorite 'gay best friend stereotype – often feels cynical, as if it has been designed to avoid offending fragile heterosexual sensibilities. "For the longest time, gay men [on screen] were loud and silly and queenie and lesbians were 'hot' and had sex on screen – that was the rubric," Lawson says. "So when it comes to sex, we [queer men] haven't had as much [sexual] representation as lesbians have had, but that means we've had less bad representation."

Now that sex scenes between male characters are becoming more common, though, they are facing more scrutiny. This ties into a wider skepticism about the nature of depictions of gay life within mainstream film. Lawson, for example, thinks that there is too much focus on "coming out" narratives and first experiences of gay sex (the latter of which is something that My Policeman depicts). It's still rare to watch a film like Bros, where both leads are openly gay from the outset. Coming-out stories might appeal to heterosexual viewers in particular because it's an easy way to introduce queer sex and relationships to people who might not have much knowledge about them. "It feels like a device we see all the time in the film: if there's a movie about the FBI, there's often a new recruit, because we need to have someone to follow into that experience," Lawson says. "Queer movies that aren't about coming out are really hard to find. And I understand that coming out can be a huge part of a person's narrative, but it’s not the only part."

 

There were many objections to Blue is the Warmest Colour from those who saw its lesbian sex scenes as a fantasy of its male director.

However, the reason sex scenes in films like My Policeman, Carol, and God's Own Country work so well, whatever their differing narratives, is that in all of them the sex feels both frank and deeply artistically considered. Intimacy is used as a way of exploring the relationships between different characters at different points in their lives. And rather than sex appearing in just one highly-scrutinized and hotly-anticipated scene, it features in several.

As My Policeman hits theatres, Grandage hopes we're moving towards a time where the cameras "stick around and watch" gay sex unfold, rather than coyly cutting away from it. And it feels like, slowly, that is happening: we are now seeing more queer intimacy scenes, particularly between men, than ever before. What's more, as the taboo surrounding gay sex scenes in the mainstream film truly starts to fade, there will likely be less intense pressure for them – and the actors who star in them – to articulate a queer sexual experience that everyone relates to or agrees with. Because beyond Styles' binaries of "two guys going at it" and "loving and sensitive" sex, there are so many other different types of queer sex that we are yet to see in the film as well.

My Policeman is out now in selected US and UK cinemas and released on Amazon Prime Video internationally on 4 November