Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - Dean Bouziotis

    

 I thoroughly enjoyed The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for so many reasons. I had never seen the movie before and I wasn't expecting it to have so much depth to it. I was assuming it was going to just be a campy, fun and slightly shallow movie that was just going to be a celebration and warm feel good film about queer identities. It was actually a movie with a lot of character and a lot of heart in it. It was especially refreshing to see a queer story on screen without having to analyze any characters to decipher whether or not they were queer. My only upset with the film was that they failed to cast actual queer people in the main roles.

    The plot of the movie was deeply rooted in the fact that the three main characters were clearly queer identifying, although they all had their own unique relationships with gender identity and sexual orientation, which the assigned reading dived deeply into. Bernadette was a trans woman in life and always presented female throughout the film, even though she worked as a drag queen on stage. Tick struggled with his identity because as much as he loved being a drag queen and was a gay man, he struggled to accept himself through the lens of being a husband and father, even though his wife and son never questioned him on anything about his life and loved and accepted him for who he was. Adam was the most tragic character to me in the film as he was a gay man working as a drag queen, but still subjected himself to a lot of internalized hatred and bought into the heteronormative idea of a male versus female social hierarchy. 

    I felt sad for Adam throughout the whole movie because he ostracized himself from those who had the capacity to love and accept him because he was unable to love and accept himself. His constant judgment of Bernadette and bullying through deadnaming her was a projection of his own inability to love himself fully and still feeling the need to be the "tough guy" of the group. Tick coming out about having a wife and a son also felt like a threat to Adam's masculinity and position in the group, so he reacted harshly to that revelation as well.

    Back to what I thought was upsetting about the movie, was finding out that the main characters were all played by three cisgendered heterosexual men. In making a film in the 1990's about queer people and giving them depth and life, I don't think it would have been hard to find queer actors to play those roles. It was an amazing movie with amazing performances but I think it could have been just as good and definitely better if this story was told by queer people. ESPECIALLY when it comes to the portrayal of trans characters. Jen Richards spoke on this in Netflix's documentary Disclosure and said, "Cis men playing trans women in my mind is a direct link to the violence against trans women." This is so true because people will see trans women on screen and then their cis male actors at awards shows later and make the assumption that at the end of the day a trans woman is just a man in makeup, and this is a threat to their masculinity. I think it is super important that in the case of trans roles, trans actors should be playing those characters so that it isn't seen as just a gendered performance, but it is the true representation of these characters and their lives. 

    All in all I thought Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was a phenomenal movie with a beautiful setting and story but I wish queer people would be allowed to tell their own stories more often.