"Best Of Queer Media 2022" Transcript
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Dec 16, 2022
First published.
Dec 07, 2023
Privated post-callout.
May 8, 2024Channel deleted
As of Dec 16, 2022
Nick's Book! Amazon: [link] Everywhere Else: [link]
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00:00 Intro 01:09 Sandman 04:54 Heartstopper 08:23 Everything Everywhere All At Once 11:28 Interview With The Vampire 14:36 What We Do In The Shadows 18:33 Chucky 21:51 Out Flag Means Death 24:04 American Horror Story
#Bestof #Bestof2022
hey everyone 2022 was really a year but one thing that I was shocked by was how much amazing media with queer themes and characters actually came out this year so I decided to do a top eight queer movies or TV shows of the year and I'm actually going to be joined today by Nick the co-writer on all of my videos and since he's joining in today I wanted to announce that his novel gentlemen's club a really fun story about a teenage queer superhero is going on sale for the whole month of December for only 299 you can get an ebook of the novel the critics have called a wall-to-wall delight and a queer superhero Thriller every reader needs and that I personally think is one of the best queer books to come out in years and the paperback is also available so to make a great gift for the queer nerd in your life Link in the description but before we get started don't forget to like And subscribe and share this video everywhere since YouTube hates to let my own subscribers know that new videos are out so without any further Ado let's take a look at the best queer media of 2022 in no particular order in our own opinion Sandman Neil gaiman's acclaimed graphic novel series finally reached the small screen with a smash realistically while the comic is popular and highly regarded I prefer this story as a streaming series rather than I would have as a film while the sprawling visuals and Beauty atmosphere are cinematic its cerebral elements would have had to get cut to accommodate a feature length television especially streaming simply offers a wider range of what could be explored including an open exploration of queerness make no mistake Sandman from its conception is a story about the very exploration of Dreams what dreams mean to people and the ways that dreams reflect on our reality and especially in this first Arc what a world without dreams is want to become gaming creates mythology ever so tangential to DC's principal cast of characters centered around personifications of The Human Experience a family of siblings called the endless all of whom are named after an abstract concept starting with the letter D Destiny dream desire death Despair and because gaming focuses on personal battles in lieu of third act cookie cutter monster fights or beams of light shooting into the sky Studio heads especially given the state of Warner Brothers these days doesn't have any reason to understand why it would be a hit outside of course gaiman's dedicated yet Niche fanbase though really the largest red flag to the rotating door of middle-aged straight men who spend a fortune renovating Executive offices for their brief sojourn at the Warner Brothers headquarters it would be gaiman's weird insistence of putting so many damn queer people into his [ __ ] even gaiman's original 1988 run of Sandman was pretty gay for the streaming adaptation he seemed to be adamant that it would be even care in conjunction with adding more color to the original cast of characters in a world which consistently accuses creators of forcing diversity and wokeness Gaiman can safely say he was doing it before it was cool given that the endless were developed to function as Superior even to Gods especially as they are depicted in other titles dreams peerage are they themselves beings of cosmic significance so great that societal Hang-Ups around sex and gender would be irrelevant the often antagonistic character of desire for instance is depicted as either neither and or both genders desire as it would apply to everyone would befit any range of attractions desire doesn't need to have a gender it only needs to be tantalizing what helps Sandman stand out most of all however is gaiman's Comfort depicting queer characters who are either villainous despicable or simply flawed make no mistake they are depicted alongside and sometimes even interact with queer characters who are vulnerable however with corporate lens queerness notes from Executives often outline that lgbtq plus characters must be glowing beacons of morality Paragons of goodness or tragic figures which while annoying is a very justifiable and preferable reaction to generations of queer-coded or even explicitly queer villains but that shouldn't mean that we snap in the opposite direction queer people can be [ __ ] and we can be competent and a ruthlessness and Sandman is comfortable depicting us as this as well as compassionate and kind inherently heroic albeit flawed deeply flawed albeit kind granted it certainly helps when you have Alan heinberg on board all do credit of course to Neil Gaiman but he's never turned down an opportunity to collaborate with like-minded creatives with credits such as Sex In The City the Young Avengers and the good Wonder Woman movie he's one of the most identifiable queer creators in mainstream media today Gaiman himself is an award-winning writer for the small and big screen though he did want to expand the range Awareness on Sandman and it means a lot to include queer voices in their own representation Heart Stopper heartstopper tells the story of the absolutely Charming coming-of-age romance between two boys Nick and Charlie based on the graphic novels of the same name by Alice oseman heartstoppers seemingly came out of nowhere when it was released this past summer acting as counter programming to the typical Doom and Gloom of most queer focused stories in mainstream media this wasn't about gay bashing or death it was just about two boys falling for each other and one of them coming to terms with his own bisexuality the show also featured a wonderfully diverse Supporting Cast with lesbian couple Tara and Darcy actually having their own engaging storyline throughout the show and trans character L actually getting to be a trans character whose storyline doesn't revolve around trauma transphobia or hate her story is about learning that people will like her and even love her for exactly who she is the Netflix show received almost Universal Acclaim from critics with many praising it for being the rare queer-centric show to depict a more innocent side of being a queer teenager and actually being pretty safe for parents to watch with their kids without having sex pushed to the Forefront though some people did take issue with what they called a sanitized look at queerness most viewers embrace the show since premiering it's been renewed for two additional Seasons which will likely wrap up the story that's being told in the graphic novels and season 2 has already completed shooting but the show hasn't been without its controversies after the cancellation of another Netflix show with two queer lead characters first kill the streaming service was accused of choosing a gay-centric show over a lesbian-centric show since at a glance first kill had higher viewership numbers than heartstopper the cancellation grew out of more nuanced information that most streamers don't usually make public though in this case that would be the completion rate of the series meaning how many people watched the first episode and then finished watching every episode in the season within the first 30 days lots of caveats there viewership for first kill dropped off drastically about halfway through the season while it stayed solid for Heart Stopper which was also a much cheaper show to produce but luckily though first kill was canceled there is a lesbian couple in heartstopper and some great Sapphic horror representation in other Netflix properties like the Fear Street Trilogy and even stranger things and of course I'd be remiss not to mention the toxic fandom that grew up around the show that demanded kit Connor the actor playing Nick on the show reveal his sexuality to the world at the age of 18. there's a 45 minute long video on my Channel with me talking about that so I won't go into too much detail about it here but suffice to say it sucked don't do that to people Heart Stopper managed to be a ray of queer sunshine in a year otherwise filled with hateful politicians and bigoted internet trolls and while many people my age and older felt like they couldn't watch it because it would just remind them of the teenage years that they never had it did act as a spot of Hope for queer youth desperate for some good news this year and the good news keeps coming with Yasmin Finney the actress who played Elle on the show joining the cast of the new Doctor Who and Joe Locke Charlie joining the ever expanding MCU with a yet unspecified role in The One Division follow-up Agatha coven of chaos and with season two of Heart Stopper coming to Netflix this summer we won't be wanting for non-depressing queer content for a while it's about time everything everywhere all at once probably the greatest theater going experience I've had in a long time everything everywhere is such a unique cinematic experience that it continues to put to shame every iteration of this new wave of Multiverse movies this movie of course hinges on the trans-pacific PowerHouse Michelle yo to offer some emotional realness to a film that supports reality itself Evelyn Quan Wang is an overworked overstressed and overwhelmed mother wife daughter and small business owner under a barrage of tax audits for her strange spending habits her unquiet mind fills with regret for each decision that she has made leading her to this point she does not see her life but sees a hundred other lives she could have lived if only she had made different choices she is so disillusioned with her own life that she struggles to connect with anyone in it her lesbian daughter longs to be taken seriously into no longer have to live up to her mother's expectations Evelyn's husband has grown so distant that he wants to consider divorce and netherland's business is in shambles unlike the range of flashpoints and Multiverse of madnesses roaming the hulls of California studios everything everywhere was not meant to merely be a Multiverse movie but meant to be a representation of what it feels to not only watch your life pass you by but all the other lives that you could be living something that struck a chord in this late stage covered world with so many people wondering what the heck am I doing with my life how can you value your own life when you don't even know whether this is the life you should or want to live in how do you keep track of all these fantasies and decisions you didn't make and what can you do to enjoy the opportunities that you have in this life when you do nothing but wonder about the opportunities you did not take and yes the movie is quite queer with Evelyn's daughter Joy being the force that is going to consume the Multiverse the rift between joy and her mother grows so large that Joyce spirals into self-destruction figuratively and or literally Evelyn at first is comfortable with Joy's queerness in fact at one point she expresses her belief that someone convinced joy to be a lesbian though later in the film Evelyn is exposed to other versions of herself who are lesbians and sees other iterations of herself who are different variations of queer how can you be uncomfortable with someone else's queerness when you realize that in another world you could have been also queer how can you hate anyone for anything they are when the world affords you an infinite range of opportunities and experiences why should you disapprove of anyone when you are who you are because of a collection of circumstances and choices culminating in your very personhood everything everywhere stands out among Multiverse movies for this reason using multiple realities to ask and provide guidance on these big questions but also because it actually let itself go into the Absurd when every other movie just uses alternate realities as an excuse to break out the all green screen and underpace some digital effects artists everything ever at once invites you to Revel in the absurdity of reality and maybe that a little bit of absurdity is good for an overworked overwhelmed soul Interview with the Vampire Interview with the Vampire based on the novel of the same name by the iconic novelist Anne Rice who passed away this past year just a few days before my own mom was phenomenal the vampire Chronicles on which interview is based are notoriously queer in and of themselves with a cast of almost exclusively bisexual characters with a few gender non-conforming characters thrown in as well such as lestat's mother Gabrielle the pre-production of this show was scrutinized and criticized from the jump even from me fans were very worried about the show changing the race of two of the main characters Louis and Claudia and changing the time period of the story from the Antebellum South to the early 20th century but in my opinion they pulled it off and then some by changing Louis from the owner of a plantation to the owner of multiple brothels he's still using people to make his money and Jacob Anderson best known for his role of gray worm in Game of Thrones absolutely knocks it out of the park playing Louie Louie is kind of a whiny [ __ ] in the books sorry Louis stands but he's so much more complex and engaging in the show and Bailey bass is Claudia an aged up version compared to the five-year-old in the book and the 10 year old in the movie is a 14 year old force of absolute Terror and Charisma making a star at a Bailey bass almost as soon as she enters the cast but post-release the most controversy grew out of two aspects of the show one just how gay it was somehow people had managed to read the vampire Chronicles and not pick up on all of the vampires being Queer as hell and they were very angry that there were men kissing each other on their TV screens but actual fans were looking forward to the queerness and were certainly not disappointed but the second controversy actually grew out of the the existing fan base for the books that being that the absolute toxic abusive and downright evil depiction of the series star Lestat de Leon Cole played here to gaslighting Perfection by Sam Reed while Lestat was certainly emotionally abusive and manipulative in the original book as well as the film adaptation he never reached the level of violent toxicity that he did in the show beating Louis to within an inch of his vampiric life on one occasion personally I think this is brilliant because it's playing with the unreliable narrator Trope that we know was employed retroactively to Louis Story Once Lestat became the main POV character for the book series in the books it's well known that Louis made Lestat out to be a much worse person than he actually was which is what I think is happening here especially with the very powerful influence of a very powerful vampire no spoilers who happens to hate lestock because of an interaction they had a few hundred years ago it makes perfect sense for Louis to describe Lestat as being the Devil Himself and it will be deliciously juicy when Lestat gets to tell his side of the story the series currently has a 99 nine percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was listed as one of the best new shows of the Year by multiple media Outlets after the release while the ratings were soft for its traditional television release with about a million viewers per episode its digital releases on AMC plus each episode coming out one week before they aired on traditional cable represented the top rated launch for a new series ever on the service so we'll be seeing a lot more of Anne Rice's creatures of the night in years to come what we do in the shadows vampires are gay it's just a thing sorry no it's not woke garbage it's always been a thing to the point of Street vampires being errantly homophobic there I said it sexy monsters for straight people is Peak queer appropriation when we had nothing we invented the sexy monster when all of Street Media was about Gallant Heroes rescuing the princess from the monster gay people who had been decried as society's monsters turned around and said well if this is monster [ __ ] it's actually kind of hot not just gay people but any kind of unashamed sexual deviance including asexuals really because Society was so anal retentive about purity that when you did have sex they were gonna be weird about whether you enjoyed it or not hegemony is so weird which is why when you get a horny vampire Convent they end up feeling just like family this layer of Staten Island vampires was already very established to be sexually fluid in their first three seasons specifically through the character of Laszlo cravensworth who was proudly omnisexual from the very first up episode yet in spite of Disney's acquisition of fox and their IPs the show winners and improv heavy cast decided to couldn't double down on just how gay it was going to get for this fourth season and not only were there more explicit discussions of queerness and very explicit often coming from that very signature line delivery and nandor's confusion over why he needs to explain that he had boy wives but the season itself has commentary about queerness Believe It or Not mark my words what we do in the shadows will be discovered as an Untold Brilliance of social commentary one day using the idea of immortal vampires to criticize our societal misconceptions about history our contemporary Society but also demonstrating what kind of people we become when we don't have to really be worried about eating or dying consider just how much of our existence revolves around being alive and how much anxiety do you experience from knowing that you're not going to be young forever all those times you say well maybe next year and how many hobbies and interests you're putting off just because you need to pay for food and shelter what if you didn't have to worry about either of those things what if you could just do all the things you wanted to do with no social expectations no timeline no need for resources what reason would you have to make a bucket list in the first place just do the thing and these vampires kind of looked down on people who have these Hang-Ups they're doing fine outside the confines arms and they don't understand why people are so married to them in a brilliant moment of meta commentary about queer characters coming out in media Guillermo a human and former slave slash servant comes out to his family trying to get an emotional moment to celebrate the courage he had to muster to do this the Empire Queen Naja doesn't feel inclined to give him the credit I mean who isn't gay a lot of people oh okay I'll get the trumpets out sorry queerness and the often absurd pursuit of personal desires are her world she doesn't feel that coming out needs to be celebrated because she doesn't understand why anyone in this environment would ever need to be in the closet in the first place she and her vampire Bros are so detached from social expectations she understands that sexuality gender fashion and etiquette really have no impact on who a person really is coming out is unremarkable because any kind of social hangup is a matter of preference and therefore unremarkable which can be a good good thing and can also be a bad thing after centuries of disconnecting from the world you kind of lose your ability to exist in it so maybe some tethers of polite Society are necessary in this strange little television show about vampires who are completely separated from reality there's this running commentary about privilege the real privilege isn't wealth but what wealth or immortality can afford the ability to do the things that you want and not worry about the things that you need Chucky Chucky is one of my favorite shows of all time it's at once scary campy funny and touching season one which came out last year introduced us to Jake and Devin a gay teenage horror power couple fighting to survive against the titular serial killing doll the first season ended with a giant bloodbath leaving our pair of final boys in the Foster system but after Chucky comes back into their lives and blows everything up literally they along with their friend Lexi are sent to a reform school run by the Catholic Church where we get fabulous callbacks to horror icons like the Exorcist and The Omen throughout as well as some original religious horror iconography since Chucky likes to kill in style Jake and Devin's relationship is strained though when one of a seemingly endless parade of Chucky dolls convinces Jake that he's actually good after A Clockwork Orange style deprogramming adding emotional tension to a story already piling up with dead bodies and elsewhere in the show we get to see Camp Queen Jennifer Tilly give the performance of a lifetime as Tiffany Valentine Chucky's serial killing ex who once inhabited the body of a doll but now inhabits the body of oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Tilly we even get a standalone episode with Tilly at the center of a bloody dinner party murder mystery clue style and elsewhere in the show we get Glenn and Glenda the non-binary children of Chucky and Tiffany who were once one split personality inhabiting a doll but are now two people both played by non-binary actor Lachlan Watson best known for playing Theo on the chilling Adventures of Sabrina their dynamic as basically the good twin and the evil twin plays out throughout the season sometimes wanting to kill their dad sometimes trying to kill their mom but always being there for each other an absolutely Bonkers Christmas episode closes out the season with more blood thrown around on screen since a bad night at the house of blue leaves the second season of the show managed to introduce multiple new characters that I really cared about and further developed Jake and Devin's relationship past just a cute teenage crush and into this kind of love that can only happen once you've been through a war together Don Mancini who's been the Evil Genius behind Chucky from the very beginning except that horrible 2019 remake which I will never forgive brings so much campy fun and real heart to this slasher TV series that it's one of the very few shows I'm willing to watch week to week I usually only binge watch shows once they're finished now but Chucky had me rushing to my TV ever every week to follow the over-the-top Adventures of Jake and Devin Glenn and Glenda Tiffany and Chucky Lexi and Nadine and Nina a paraplegic woman possessed by Chucky and held captive by Tiffany who's kind of in love with her she's played by Fiona Dora the daughter of Chucky's voice actor Brad Dourif and she Nails it she even plays a young version of her father in flashbacks and it's uncanny this show is so weird between killer dolls crazy psychiatrists further developing characters set up all the way back in 1988 and Devin saw while playing no less than three different characters it might be one of the oddest shows on cable and I love every minute of it it's like Heart Stopper for slasher fans in other words the perfect show for me our flag means death nobody really expected this quirky to come about Pirates to be as gay as it was I mean for us in the know we know that pirates were pretty gay and the fact that taekwatiti was attached to the series both as a contributor and co-lead this definitely signaled that it would at least appeal to our queer sensibilities but it was surprising to us pleasantly that there was first such a stark depiction of non-binary identity and then an actual gay romance subplot between two secondary characters however and maybe this is because we're just so used to being baited even that didn't prepare us for the decoding of the romance between Steve Bonnet and Blackbeard as a matter of fact the iconic kiss between these incarcerated Pirates was improvised by taikwa TV reez Darby was of course in on the subtlety the script even without the kiss was designed to bring them into romantic territory probably smartly the actors realized that garnishing a true fan base for the show especially among its queer viewers would require more than crumbs even if the provided crumbs had been substantial the show takes a defamiliarized approach first of all to depicting piracy that said our modern conceptions about piracy are often flawed hardly the bloodthirsty yet loyal crew of visually smelly men that you may be familiar with from the Pirates films when in fact piracy was born out of an ideological resistance to British and or Spanish colonial rule and though the framing of the show is absurd the fact of the matter is that this is indeed based on real people and real events and probably broaching a lot closer to reality than you may realize just don't Wikipedia these people and learn what actually happened to them in real life our flag means death however is a significant stride forward in queer media in general hardly about queerness in any specific way nobody really needs to justify their sexuality or gender in spite of having discussions about it this is a good story which is told about queer people who don't like queer people won't tune in but people who just want a good story will keep watching and feed them to the demand for the upcoming second season hopefully the outrageous success of this series will shed a light on how queer stories can be told to Executives and other creators alike American Horror Story okay spoilers for this one American Horror Story has been hit and miss for most of its run while some Seasons like Asylum are Rock Solid from start to finish some waiver halfway through like the admittedly iconic coven and others fall flat on their face like double feature I was beginning to wonder how many ghosts witches serial killers aliens vampires and even the Devil Himself the show could keep churning out so in the latest season simply subtitled New York City started being advertised with the most vague commercials of any season yet which is saying something I didn't know what to expect and then the show started airing and we were introduced to two forces of evil killing gay men in 1980s New York a serial killer and a seemingly Supernatural sex Spirit the usual craziness in Camp of other Seasons didn't materialize this time around with the real focus on the show being the way gay men are ignored by society and how they gauge their own worth based on attractiveness and sex appeal and not much else I was intrigued by the mystery and motives surrounding the main serial killer and confused by the inclusion of the supernatural elements that seemed all sorts of out of place it felt like no other season of the show before it focusing heavily on realistic characters with an almost entirely queer cast playing an almost entirely queer cast of characters I kept waiting for sex demons from the sewer to pop up or something when the main serial killer is taken out with three episodes left to go in the season I was worried we'd have another season on our hands where everything just falls apart in the Final Act but then it didn't because the characters who had been showing odd but not that troubling ailments throughout the season seeing the sex Spirit even being assaulted by him are finally confronted with the truth the Real Horror AIDS had arrived in New York City and the faceless demon we've been confused by all season is actually an allegorical stand-in for the then unknown virus secretly ravaging the gay community without being acknowledged without the Flash and Pizzazz of a serial killer it was ignored and even ignored by we the audience of the show it was just a weird thing on the periphery until it wasn't until there was no ignoring the Grim Reaper hovering around our cast of characters in the final two-part episode of the Season almost everyone in our cast dies all but one gay character and we're shown the horrifying results of AIDS infections before the days of protease Inhibitors we see the slow painful death of our caste far worse than the relatively quick deaths brought on by a serial killer we even see several straight female characters one had been married to a gay character before he came out and another for whom a gay character had been a sperm donor and they fall victim to the disease as well showing the audience that no one was safe from this vicious virus that the leather-clad Grim Reaper doesn't care if you're gay or straight in a surprisingly powerful and Abstract moment we see the countless gay men piling into an open grave one after another this Force takes them away never to be seen again but within memories American Horror Story New York City the 11th season of this long-running horror Anthology was not at all what I was expecting and for the first time in the series left me feeling actually horrified by the abstract realism in the final moments of the show it might just be the final season of the show and what a way to go out forcing the audience to witness a killer that felt very Supernatural in the early days of the epidemic cold heartless without motive and with authorities unable or unwilling to stop it so as I said this year had a surprising amount of really good and sometimes great queer content and we didn't even talk about shows like A League of Their Own which I haven't gotten a chance to watch yet or foreign series like young Royals and semantic error or the animated shows like the return of the owl house or the ongoing Brilliance of dead end paranormal park or the overtly queer and delightfully offensive hell of a boss but don't worry the holidays are coming and we're getting ready to go to hell [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
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