Staying In The Closet Won't Change Anything

So as I was watching this film I was feeling like it was opening me up to this entire new subject that never even crossed my mind. In the Celluloid Closet they talk of movies in the 1920s until around the 1970s that had gay and lesbian undertones, all of which were depicted as being angry, bad, or hostile people. What was interesting is if you were gay back then you looked to these movies just even maybe the smallest scene to relate to something, just anything, that made you feel more comfortable with yourself. As Harvey Feirstein said in the film, "The hunger I felt as a kid looking for gay images was not to be alone." The rating system that was implemented gave little hope to the gay people to find these images because they came down hard on the movie makers. In 1982 the movie Making Love came out. What was different about this film, it was the first lead role by a gay character and also depicting homosexuality as an act of love not violence. They went as far as to warn the public at the beginning of the film for depicting something nobody has ever seen. Part of the warning the very last paragraph reads,"Making Love is bold but gentle. We are proud of it's honesty. We applaud it's courage." I think for Twentieth Century Fox to make that jump was great because it finally after so long depicted something positive in the movies. I think the release of the Celluloid Closet was great to reach more people on the subject. But like myself I was still caught in the dark on this subject. It was just something that had never crossed my mind, homosexuality in films in the 1920s? I just assumed it didn't even exist at all. There have been many releases of movies after the making of The Celluloid Closet that have opened up positive outlooks on the gay community, the biggest one Broke back Mountain. But in addition digital media has opened new doors for all linking people of all backgrounds in beliefs to enlighten them on different subjects. I am a huge fan of You Tube because you get to see images that real people post. Its a huge change from just searching for undertones in movies. I think it has changed the world and opened people up to feeling comfortable with themselves and being able to express their thoughts and feelings instead of hiding in the closet because they had nothing to relate to. And that leaves me with another great quote from Richard Dyer in the Celluloid closet, "Most expressions of homosexuality in most of movies are indirect. And what's interesting about that is of course that is what it was like to express homosexuality in life, that we could only express ourselves indirectly, just as people on the screen could only express themselves indirectly. And the sense in which the characters are in the closet, the movie is in the closet and we are in the closet"