Local homosexual movies ( by Stephanie Chow)

We have a lot of local movies produced each year. People say Hong Kong Kung Fu movies are great as we have Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and some say our local comedies are great as we have Stephen Chow and Wong Jing. So have you ever noticed our homosexual movies?
Homosexual relationship is not so popular yet, however, when we compare to the past, we can see there are more gays or lesbians walking on the streets nowadays. And these relationships seems more acceptable to the public now. In the past, people treat these relationships are unacceptable and they usually felt uncomfortable about that, and that’s also how they see homosexual movies. However, as people are getting more open-minded, they no longer treat it as abnormal and the homosexual movies at the same time are no longer strange to them.

In the past, when we only had Opera films, we had a famous movie called “The Purple Hairpin” which was performed by Yam Kim Fai and Ivy Ling Boh. Yam Kim Fai starred as the main male character in the movie, and she needed to dress up like a man there. This movie was surprisingly getting more and more popular. So why didn’t the audience feel uncomfortable while watching this Opera? It’s actually two females who were performing a love story which made a big contrast to the traditional Chinese thinking. So what’s it about? So I guess this has become a new culture since that time, so let’s take a look on an example, girls wear skirts in the past would give people a feeling of low class and impolite as they show too much skin, however, girls nowadays wearing something like that is just common and we see them as fashion. According to Raymond Williams, he suggested popular culture is a particular way of life which is preferred by most people. I believe there are something in this world is not preferred by most people but by a particular group people and which is called subculture. And when the subculture are preferred by most people here, they become popular culture, just like Hip Hop music, it was subculture before and it is now a popular culture. By referring our case, I guess homosexual movie is subculture nowadays as it is preferred by lesbians and gays but not most people here.

As we can see more and more homosexual movies are coming out such as “Butterfly” which is a lesbian movie produced in 2004. In the past, these movies are being categorized in “Category 3” which is for adults only, however, since people are more open-minded and feel comfortable about these relationships, and moreover, the population of homosexuals has increased a lot lately, these kind of movies are longer in “category 3”. Besides, the directors are now freely to produce these queer movies as we are under the policy of “One country, two systems”, Hong Kong is free to keep its social systems for 50 years since 1997.
According to this case, I believe people start the cultures themselves. It is believed that this subculture ,’homosexual movies” would continue and would be more acceptable later, people would finally treat these movies as a piece of art, this is not something dirty or something ugly, it’s something beautiful, it’s just simply a romantic story of mankind, a piece of art. It’d change from subculture to popular culture someday; it’s just the matter of time. And when people learn more and slowly developed from the traditional Chinese culture, I believe this piece of art would stay forever.

 

Reference

http://www.glbtq.com/arts/hong_kong_film.html