Monkey Uncaged: Are Gay Movies (and Gay Men) Obsessed with Adult/Teen Love?

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Send it to aftereltonflyingmonkey@yahoo.com! (Please include your city and state and/or country.)

A Note from the Flying Monkey: Of the many emails I receive every week for my column, some are so good that they simply can’t be answered in just a few words. So from time to time, the editors have decided to let me out of the “cage” of that regular column, in a feature we’re calling Monkey Uncaged!

Q: Why is For a Lost Soldier considered a “gay” film? The film is creepy in how it seeks to romanticize a 20 year-old Canadian soldier sent to liberate The Netherlands at the end of WWII, grooming and then sexually molesting a confused, lonely 12 year-old boy. I see this as sexual molestation, not a love story. Furthermore, why is sex with minors such a common theme in "gay" cinema? I've noticed it in Edge Of Seventeen, Hedwig And The Angry Inch, and Get Real. Likewise, I was also bothered by the whole toilet trolling thing in Get Real. The character was a teenager and he was shown regularly having sex with adult men and it was portrayed as common. I continue to wonder why this theme of sex with minors is such a recurring theme (and at a statistically higher percentage than the theme occurs in "heterosexual" cinema), and yet gay people (and those supportive of gay people) become angry when gays are portrayed as lusting after teen boys. If it's a false stereotype, why are these movies perpetuating it? Moreover, what's a twink, if it's not to be considered another manifestation of that sort of stereotype? -- Michael

A: You’ve asked a complicated question. Let’s see if we can unravel it, why don’t we?

For the record, I totally reject your premise that this is more of a reoccurring theme in gay movies than in straight ones: Taxi Driver, Lolita, American Beauty, Manhattan, From Dusk Till Dawn, Notes on a Scandal, Pretty Baby, and many other movies have all presented intergenerational heterosexual lust or love affairs in openly approving or at least non-judgmental ways. Let me add that these movies were all more widely seen and far more critically praised than the obscure Dutch movie For a Lost Soldier or any of the gay indie movies you mention that seem to involve older teenagers and men in their 20s, a theme that is, frankly, absolutely ubiquitous in heterosexual film. 

Then there’s the open sexualization of female teenagers, from Brooke Shields back in the 70s, to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson in the early 00s, to whore-chic teenage fashion now.

“Jail-bait,” a term which has long been used affectionately in many rock songs, is primarily a heterosexual term, not a gay one. Among heterosexual men, a young, innocent wife or girlfriend is almost always a sign of status, not a stigma.

My point? The sexualization of young women by heterosexual men is so much a part of our cultural landscape that no one even notices, much less objects.

But when some gay men do exactly the same thing that heterosexual men have always done, people scream, “Child abuse!”

I sometimes roll my eyes whenever anyone uses the term “heterosexual privilege,” but for the record, this is what they’re talking about. It’s a mind-boggling double standard.

Next Page! Why are some teenagers drawn to older men?