Saturday, 11 November 2017

It's Literally 2017, So Why Are We Still 'Straight-Washing' Movie Posters?

Twitter users are accusing Sony UK of "straight-washing" a poster for their upcoming film Call Me By Your Name.

CMBYN is a coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old boy named Elio who has a sexual relationship with an older man who works for his father.

The poster shows Elio and a female friend sitting together. It is also captioned with a review from Empire that reads, "It’s a romance overwhelming in its intensity, a heart that swells until it has to burst." Sony UK released the poster in a tweet that they have since deleted.

Twitter users were quick to call out Sony for implying that the romance in CMBYN was heterosexual. However, others noted that this isn't the first time studios have used heterosexual relationships to promote movies about gay romances.

It's not at all uncommon for movies about LGBTQ characters to be marketed in a way that hides their queerness.

In 2010, the poster for A Single Man, a movie about a gay professor coping with the loss of his longtime male partner, implied it was about a relationship between Colin Firth and Julianne Moore; multiple posters for Brokeback Mountain also focused on the film's heterosexual relationships, and just last year, Moonlight was promoted as film about "human connection" and "self-discovery."

When studios make choices like these, it perpetuates the toxic notion that queerness shouldn't be openly advertised and that straight audiences won't turn out for movies about gay characters.