What is Freedom to Those That Aren’t Free?

Throughout history many people have been criminalised for who they are, the criminality of someone’s personhood has historically been drawn across lines of class, race, gender and sexuality. The LGBTQ+ community itself has a long history of criminalisation. Be it the laws that prohibited people from being seen as dressing in a fashion not belonging to their sex/gender, anti-sodomy laws, and so on. Great Freedom depicts one of these acts of criminalisation, one that is often forgotten in the wider history of human cruelty.

After the liberation of concentration camps at the end of WW2, many were handed back their freedom, but gay men were moved from the camps and straight into prisons to serve out the rest of their sentences. Great Freedom follows Hans Hoffman, one such man, through the years as he finds himself imprisoned again and again for the crime of loving and having sex with other men. 

We follow Hans through three sentences in prison, while not chronological as the story is framed and centred around his stay from 1968-69, we’re also given insights into his stays in 1945 and 1957. The focus of the narrative is the relationship between Hans and his first cellmate Viktor. We watch as their relationship develops from hostility and into open affection and possibly love.

In their first meeting, Hans is emaciated and timid, clearly traumatised by his time in the camps. At first Viktor is somewhat enraged to find that his new cellmate is a gay man, seeing Hans’ offense under his name on their cell door, and for a time they keep their distance. This doesn’t last as Viktor comes to learn more about Hans as a person, and his compassion seeps through. While sharing cigarettes Viktor offers to cover up Hans’ camp tattoo. 

The instruments Viktor uses to tattoo Hans are found by the prison guards and both of them are punished with solitary confinement, in a dark room with nothing but a bucket and divested of their clothes, a place similar to the one the allies liberated Hans from. He is violently forced to comply and experience that trauma all over again.

Hans’ second stay is in 1957, he is arrested along with his boyfriend Oskar. They are separated and unable to speak to each other. Hans devises a way to communicate through code in a bible, he enlists Viktor to deliver the message – the book – to Oskar’s cell, and in return Viktor requests a blowjob. The message is delivered and they’re able to meet, but Oskar cannot share in Hans’ emphatic optimism and finds that he can’t see a future where they’re free to be who they are.

Oskar jumps from the roof, killing himself. Hans learns of Oskar’s death from Viktor while they’re in the yard and collapses, bereft. Viktor allows himself to show sympathy for Hans, he comforts Hans and berates the guards for trying to punish him for his grief. Hans is dragged into solitary confinement again.

In his last sentence, Hans has been caught on film, as part of a sting operation, having casual sex with men in a public bathroom. While in prison he starts something of a relationship with another young man who was caught with him. Viktor reminds Hans of what happened the last time, and Hans lets the relationship go, helping them to have their sentence overturned and released from prison.

Hans stays behind and, after managing to once again become Viktor’s cellmate, helps Viktor get clean off the drugs he’s become addicted to. Over their time as cellmates, their relationship turns toward romance and even becomes physical. Hans begins to talk of escape and Viktor shoots it down.

In 1969 Paragraph 175, the law that Hans is being held under and which makes it illegal for men to perform ‘homosexual acts’ together, is revised and Hans is released.

After spending so long in prison, under the thumb of criminality, Hans doesn’t seem to know what to do with his freedom. Hans visits a bar that is heaving with men. He goes from room to room, seemingly searching for something, and catches the eye of another. Following the man down into the bowels of the building, moving through the cold stone halls of what appears to have once been a kind of jail, and Hans passes by men in the middle of various sexual acts. Before he catches up with the man he’d been following, Hans changes his mind and leaves.

In the final moments of the film, Hans breaks the window of a jewellery store, pockets whatever he can get his hands on and waits patiently on the curb for the police to arrive as the store’s alarm blares behind him. And as the credits roll we’re left to assume that Hans intends to return to prison and to Viktor, to return to what he knows, understands and can make sense of.

The way criminality, the law and prison has shaped these two men, changing them slowly over time, beating them into the desired shape and cutting off all of the unwanted pieces, stunts and stifles them and their humanity. It is no accident that after so long staying in captivity, Viktor seems far more free and sure of himself than Hans does with his intermittent freedom. But there’s an important difference between them. Viktor knows that what he did was wrong, while Hans knows that who he is cannot be morally wrong. There is a large difference between doing something reprehensible and being punished for it, and being yourself and being told that who and what you are is wrong and that entire parts of you must be suppressed and eradicated.  In this sense, Hans has never before felt true freedom, even while outside of prison, and finds that after all this time dreaming for freedom, that he cannot do as the free do.

Great Freedom is an indictment of a society that has criminalised, and continues to criminalise, people for fundamental aspects of their being and the horrific treatment this criminalisation entails. How can you be free, when you don’t know what it means?

The Problem of Queer Representation and the Angry Inch.

There’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to representation, you cannot create the perfect queer character that represents everyone, it’s simply not possible. Besides the issue of intersecting forms of oppression (i.e. sex, race, class, disability and sexuality), there’s also the fact that people are just different. People have different personalities, interests, talents, styles and so on. There is no single character that everyone can relate to completely.

In some internet circles a strange dichotomy of queer representation (which I will be focusing on as it’s what applies to me and what appears to stir the most discourse) has been created. Some people have decried many characters as problematic representation, and those who like these characters, and have begun to uphold a new ideal for queer representation. This new style of approved representation creates a character that is relatable to a very narrow range of queer people, they’re often young, usually white, their issues either have nothing to do with their queerness or is exclusively their queerness, though their queerness is often treated as nothing more than a personality quirk. These characters are uncomplicated and their queerness is palatable to a mass audience. And though it’s the most often referenced movie in his sphere, I’ve not seen Love, Simon, but I have seen Easy A, Clueless, The Old Guard, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Pride, A Single Man, Mean Girls and many others.

While I enjoyed every single one of these movies and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these characters and their stories existing, I just don’t think that they’re the only representation that should exist.

Some argue that characters like the one Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays in Mysterious Skin, Neil, are problematic because of their complicated feelings, actions and the things that are depicted happening to him. The fact that the book was written by a gay man and was adapted into a movie by another gay man is somehow irrelevant to this argument. And while I agree that Neil is a transgressive and complicated character, problematic is a loaded term that has almost no fixed meaning besides ‘something that is personally upsetting to me’ which of course is different things to different people. And while there are many things within Mysterious Skin that are upsetting, it depicts things that really happen to real people and it touched me deeply. As many have begun to say ‘depiction is not endorsement’ and these stories are important to tell, they may be problematic or upsetting but so is life.

This isn’t to dismiss the worries and concerns that surround the representation of marginalised people. There are too many outright offensive depictions out there to even begin to count, the predatory gay man, the masculinised ‘ugly’ man-hating lesbian, the promiscuous and unfaithful bisexual, the deceptive transgender woman, and I could go on and on. I want to clarify that I’m not out here say that these representations have a right to exist. No one, hopefully, is arguing that Dressed to Kill or Sleepaway Camp or Ace Ventura were important, accurate or good depictions of the transgender experience.

What I am talking about are the flawed and complicated characters that feel like real people, people I can relate to as someone who is also flawed and complicated. And this is why I enjoy and usually prefer these so called problematic characters, characters such as Hedwig of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Hedwig, the movie and the character therein, is another transgressive story and character that touched me deeply. And while it’s important to note that this is the story of a transgender person (possibly non-binary though this wasn’t a widely used term at the time of the movie’s creation) was written, directed and acted by two cisgender gay men, which has the effect of the depiction being clumsy and somewhat ignorant while also well intentioned. As a messy non-binary person who hasn’t always treated those around them with the greatest kindness or care, I found Hedwig validating and the movie allowed me to consider myself and my own actions from another perspective. Hedwig does and says some pretty awful things in the pursuit of her goal, she withholds the passports of her band members, is continuously awful to her current husband, gets entangled in a brawl, stalks and harasses her ex Tommy and the people who work for him. And that’s not to mention to contentious relationship between her and the teenaged Tommy which is a part of the movie that I do have criticisms of, while her sexual grooming of Tommy is detestable and disgusting, her grooming of him to become her ideal of a rockstar and lover is interesting and important to Hedwig and Tommy’s characters. It’s a story about someone who looks for love everywhere else but within themselves and when she finally looks within, giving up on her obsessions and vain attempts to regain something she never really had, she lets go of all these toxic beliefs and that allows her to grow as a person and to begin to right her wrongs. Without much of the things that make her imperfect and problematic, Hedwig’s story would not be half as impactful.

One character does not represent a whole community, they cannot and they should not. This phenomenon of needing a character to be a paragon of whatever identity they’re representing has only come about because of a severe lack of diverse characters in media to date. While this is getting better there’s still a long way to go.

The goal of diverse representation is not to create the one prefect representation of a specific identity and to stop there, it is instead to have as many varying characters of all kinds of people as there have historically been for able-bodied, straight, white, cisgender men. It’s important that people are able to see how different we are, to have experiences of people who are different from them, and arguably more important that people are able to see themselves in fiction too.

Wholesome Queer Media

Over this summer and pride month I’ve been reading and watching a lot of queer/lgbtqia+ media. What I’ve found, and what a lot of other people have found, is that a whole bunch of  queer of media is unrelentingly sad, miserable or pessimistic. We’re all haunted by the ‘bury your gays’ trope that pervades all media and finding something where everyone’s happy and alive at the end is difficult. So I wanted to make a handy list of wholesome nice queer media for those of you that experience the same struggle.

But I’m A Cheerleader (Gay & Lesbian) is a funny and fun loving movie that will make you laugh and fill your stomach with bubbling butterflies. It’s a light comedy about teenagers who are sent to the strangest conversion camp there is, the kids rebel and break free with the help of a few gay adults. The cast is fun, but the star of the show is the popping block colour set design and cinematography that has a sense of humour. Overall, just a really fun movie that most will enjoy.

Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour (Lesbian) is a joyous book that manages to capture the essence of the golden era of Hollywood, a genre noir style mystery and a teenage love story all in one book. It’s a really easy read, I could hardly put this book down because I just needed to know what happened next. The twists and turns are exciting and you get heavily invested in these characters that you end up rooting for them from the second chapter. It will leave you warm inside with a longing for a California that only exists in movies.

Handsome Devil (Gay) is a movie filled with great acting and a genuine story that will give you flashbacks to school. This movie is about two boys in an Irish boarding school and is filled with the usual fare that you would expect. Andrew Scott and Fionn O’Shea really shine. The shot style and storytelling is very grounded, and while it does get a little sad it ends up being quite uplifting. It certainly left me smiling.

Go For It, Nakamura! (Ganbare, Nakamura!) (Gay) is possibly my favourite piece of queer media I’ve devoured all year. It’s a manga about a gay boy in high school who has a crush on his classmate and it’s the most precious and cute thing you will read all year. The art style is soft and really adds to the whole feel. It’s funny, adorable and extremely relatable. Please read about Nakamura being an awkward teenager who wants to be noticed by his crush and somehow manages to get octopus ink all over himself instead, I promise it will leave you with the biggest smile on your face.

I hope you enjoy these recommendations and the rest of your summer.