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Representation is a Minefield — The Queer Safety Aesthetic
Fictional Violence, Aesthetic Genre, and the Illusion of Safety
Being queer is scary, and 2020 is a particularly scary time to be queer. When I was still deeply in the closet in 2005, a friend and I went to see “the new Wachowski film,” by which we meant the Lilly and Lana Wachowski-produced, James McTeague directed Alan Moore adaptation V for Vendetta, and the film crystallized many of the fears I had around queerness from the hostility of my rural Wisconsin high school teachers, the attitudes of my peers, and above all the comments of recently re-elected President George W. Bush about “family values.”
The film opens with a blistering rant by Lewis Prothero, the talk show host pictured above, whose rhetoric today would seem at most mildly unusual on FOX and not at all unusual in a tweet from the current President of the United States. He talks about how his government carried out the extermination of “terrorists, Muslims, and homosexuals,” who had to go. BRITAIN PREVAILS! Later, we see the life and death of a lesbian actress named Valerie, who is interned and killed in government-engineered pandemic experiments, and hopes only that someone will remember her and bring back the hope she once felt when she first was able to come out and be herself.
