It’s been more than 20 years since “Brokeback Mountain,” after a charmed precursor season, lost the best picture trophy to “Crash,” and though there have been breakthroughs since then — “Moonlight,” to name the most famous of them — there still hasn’t been an out gay best actor winner. That could well change this year, though. Among the many narratives coalescing around the coming Academy Awards, it’s gone somewhat underdiscussed that this promises to be a season more deeply rooted in the gay experience than any in memory.
These films exist in a post-”Heated Rivalry” moment during which audiences seem newly open to queer stories. And just as that TV series used a provocative premise to explore the tricky emotional terrain of intimacy and the closet, so do these films launch into surprising directions, showing many different sides of the gay experience. Take director Simon Stone’s “Elsinore,” set during the AIDS crisis.
Scott plays the real-life actor Ian Charleson, who’d courted fame with appearances in “Chariots of Fire” and “Gandhi” and who remains in the closet so as to preserve his career prospects. At one point, he gets in an argument with an early collaborator, the director Derek Jarman (David Dawson), who insists that it’s Charleson’s responsibility to live an open life — so that homosexuality, and AIDS, might be something more than an abstraction for the straight world. It’s a knotty, complicated argument, and one waged between gay guys who fight like gay guys: Savage wit and deep wells of sympathy in the midst of rancor braid together as they lash at one another.
They know precisely how to hurt one another, because they’ve absorbed those same hurts themselves, too. We’re only 12 years removed from “Dallas Buyers Club,” which situated a flawed but ultimately virtuous straight man — with a trans woman existing in supportive counterpoint — at the center of its AIDS narrative. Now, the story is specifically and defiantly gay, and Scott is allowed not merely to suffer (though he does mightily) but to experience lust and joy, too.
Well before Charleson takes the stage as Hamlet — the performance, delivered in the actor’s final days of life, that gives the movie its title — we understand his juicy love of repartee and his capacity for intimacy and his depth of feeling as traits on their own terms, and as fundamentally tied to his sexuality. Firstman’s “Club Kid” similarly allows its leading man to delve into a character who is not solely defined by his sexuality but for whom being gay is intrisic — a core fact about who he is. Firstman’s character Peter must mature quickly when he discovers he has a young child (played by Reggie Absolom) whom he now must raise; doing so means leaving behind both the queer nightlife scene of which he’s a part and a carefully, subtly drawn self-loathing.
With admirable specificity, the movie depicts Peter’s experience of queer nightlife without ever condescending to a straight audience or doing too much work to explain. That parenthood is something Peter had grown up seeing himself necessarily ineligible for is itself a peak millennial-gay experience, and we watch him reframe his expectations of what adulthood might look like. The quest resonates with two other plot threads, including a narrative about the tender, glancing relationship between two soldiers on opposing sides of the Spanish Civil War (Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau).
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