Author: Dalton Valette

  • Asia and the Rise of LGBTQ+ Openness

    Asia and the Rise of LGBTQ+ Openness

    There is no shortage of negative news surrounding the LGBTQ+ community as of late in the United States, with the community being targeted with healthcare and history rollbacks. Fortunately, amidst all the negative news we may be overwhelmed with, there are still some positive developments to highlight, a lot of which are in a continent not often featured or discussed when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues: Asia. 

    Nepal elects its first transgender woman lawmaker.

    Nepal’s first transgender lawmaker, Bhumika Shrestha.

    Nepal has been heralded as one of South Asia’s most progressive countries in terms of LGBTQ+ rights and protections. Over 900,000 Nepalese identify as being sexual minorities, and earlier this March, Bhumika Shrestha was elected as the country’s first transgender woman lawmaker. 

    Nepal’s Election Commission confirmed the 37-year-old LGBTQ rights advocate’s victory following the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) landslide victory in the March 5 general election. The RSP won 182 seats out of the 275 available in the Nepalese House of Representatives.

    “I am very excited but also feel the responsibility on my shoulders,” Shrestha said.  “Our constitution has provisions for our community, but they have not translated to laws and policies. Our community expects me to raise our issues [in parliament].”

    Blue Diamond Society, one of Nepal’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organizations in Nepal, established in 2001, hailed Shrestha’s election. Blue Diamond Society’s president, Umisha Pandey, said this was “historic.” 

    “Our pains, our sufferings, our feelings, our stories, and our every problem is only understood by us, not by others,” Pandey said. 

    Despite its progressive laws for LGBTQ+ individuals, an openly queer lawmaker hasn’t been elected to public office since 2008. 

    India elects its first openly queer lawmaker ever 

    Just south of Nepal, India has had a more contentious history with LGBTQ+ rights and protections. However, during the March 16 election, Menaka Guruswamy was elected as a Member of Parliament, making her the first openly queer woman to be elected in such a role. 

    India’s first openly queer member of parliament, Menaka Guruswamy

    A constitutional lawyer educated at the University of Oxford, Harvard Law School, and the National Law School of India University, Guruswamy has been one of the leading voices of democratic and civil liberties in India. She is a member of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), a political party that has long focused on improving women’s political representation. 

    Malavika Rajkotia, a fellow Indian attorney, said that Guruswamy’s victory signaled a new wave for leaders who are “fearless, intelligent, and inspiration.” 

    “They stand against toxic crude masculinity that defines present-day politics,” Rajkotia said.

    While other openly queer politicians have been elected to roles at more local or regional levels, this is the first instance in which an LGBTQ+ voice has been added at a national level. 

    Guruswamy and her partner, fellow attorney Arundhati Katju, were instrumental in having the Supreme Court strike down India’s 158-year colonial law criminalizing same-sex relationships in 2018. 

    Taiwan gears up to host the 2026 Kaohsiung Asia Pride Games.

    This April 30-May 4, Kaohsiung, Taiwan is set to host Asia’s largest queer multi-sports event. Taiwan’s second-largest city after Taipei, Kaohsiung, has hosted these games since 2023 and includes sports for queer athletes such as volleyball, tennis, swimming, bowling, and basketball. The Games will be jointly hosted by the Kaohsiung City Government to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion alongside athleticism. There are planned to be over 1,000 athletes participating in these sporting events. 

    Taipei will also host the country’s largest LGBT+ Pride event in October, which brings in over 150,000 attendees and is the largest Pride event in all of Asia. Taiwan has also been named one of the 26 best travel destinations for LGBTQ+ people by TravelPulse. 

    Progress, But More to Be Done

    What we are seeing in Asia is a greater championing of LGBTQ+ voices and greater visibility in all levels of government and culture. But there are still tremendous obstacles ahead. Japan, for instance, recently elected its first female Prime Minister, but Sanae Takaichi is staunchly conservative. Though she has said she is “fine” with same-sex partnerships and that “there should be no prejudice against sexual orientation or gender identity,” she has also said she would not support legalizing same-sex marriage. Japan remains the only G7 country not to offer same-sex marriage. 

    Additionally, 21 Asian countries still have laws barring same-sex relationships, and 14 have laws in which same-sex relationships can be punishable with imprisonment. Seven Asian countries still have the death penalty for same-sex relationships. All this is to say, progress is being made in often incremental steps, but it is occurring. 

    In countries large and small, progress, acceptance, and openness can be achieved as colonial laws and attitudes are addressed, activities such as sports events and Pride rallies gain greater prominence, and individuals from the LGBTQ+ community are elected into office.

  • Is the Best LGBTQ+ Book About a Mountain Lion?

    Is the Best LGBTQ+ Book About a Mountain Lion?

    We seem to be in something of a Renaissance with queer media (Heated Rivalry, The Emperor of Gladness, and Pluribus to name a few), which is more essential now than ever if you ask me, but I wanted to take a moment to spotlight a queer story that’s a little less known and a little stranger, told from a mountain lion’s point of view. 

    Immediately after I finished reading Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel Open Throat, I thought to myself, “This may be the best queer story I’ve ever read.”

    Open Throat follows a queer mountain lion on the prowl in Los Angeles. This lion spends its days observing humans and their strange ways of life. After a fire forces this lion to come down closer to the city from the hills, new temptations and threats emerge, and the feline begins to question whether they want to eat a person or become one. 

    When I first read this, I was immediately hooked, though a bit skeptical. Maybe this was just a case of “all flash, no substance” storytelling. However, in reading Open Throat, I found myself deeply resonating with this lonely feline. 

    In discussing the origins of Open Throat, author Henry Hoke said, “I was catching up with the real mountain lion, P-22, who was an L.A. celebrity. There was a Nick Cave song where he talks about a cougar in the Hollywood Hills, and that just sparked something in me… I felt kind of displaced and strange in Los Angeles the whole time… Instead of actually looking in on the cat I decided to just take a couple months and inhabit the fictional headspace of the cat and do a monologue of my experience of L.A., but as a mountain lion.” 

    As for the queer perspective and trans experience exhibited within the story, Hoke said in a separate interview, “It was very close to myself, an expression of deeper aspects of my own character, so I didn’t have any trouble there; I just had to meditate and tap into those inner fires.” 

    But what is it about Open Throat? How does this LA-dwelling solitary mountain lion tale stand head and shoulders above other similar stories about queer identity and the trans experience? There are a few key aspects that stood out to me. 

    For starters, there is the setting. Often, members of the LGBTQ+ community feel compelled to live in larger cities, if not purely from an economic or cultural perspective, but out of a need for safety. Rural or less densely populated areas of the United States historically tend to skew more conservative and have harsher legislation, which in some cases even targets members of the LGBTQ+ community. The unnamed mountain lion in Open Throat is driven to LA and specifically into more densely populated areas. Through this change in setting, the lion details isolation and loneliness in a new place, all while simply seeking companionship. This is an experience we may individually feel when moving to a new place, and even more so if we feel forced to move. 

    Next, there is the sheer strangeness of the story. This may be a purely “me” belief, but what is often glossed over in more mainstream queer books is the removal of the uniqueness of being part of the LGBTQ+ community. As a queer man, there are quirks I’ve discovered over the years about myself and other friends and family members within the community that aren’t often outwardly addressed. From emotional reactions to different events in life, to gravitating towards different people, to general interests, and vernacular and slang, let’s be honest with ourselves, one of the best (but most terrifying parts) about being in this community is the “not normal” quality. Or at least, “not normal” in a modern, western heteronormative socioeconomic culture. It’s “not normal” to read a story through the perspective of a mountain lion who wants to eat a human being and feel close to crying at the end of it (this is no Free Willy or Old Yeller), but critically too, it’s perhaps “not normal” to read a story from this point of view that also doesn’t shy away from the quirks of living and experiencing life in such a body as this. 

    I feel it’s sufficient to say, as LGBTQ+ people, we each have uniquely queer experiences and, if we relayed those experiences even to the most understanding straight ally, they could question or recoil. A joke about this that I’ve heard is that while women avoid men in dark alleys, parks at night, and parking garages, these are the places gay men actively congregate to seek out men. An example of this “strangeness” in Open Throat reads, 

    “piss splashes my face and wakes me up/ the sharp smell bristles my fur and my eyes pop open/ I watch the man’s dangling part and the wet pouring from it onto the pebbles in front of me/ the salt covers my lips and I lick it away/ I’m hungry again/ I turn away from the spray and my eyes must catch the sunlight because the pissing man makes a deep noise and clutches his chest and turns before pulling up his pants and he skids on the gravel and falls on his face/ he recovers and runs out of the cave and doesn’t look back/ if he looked back he’d see me not chasing/ not moving/ he’d see me not giving a fuck/ I’ve been pissed on before/ I stand and leave my cranny and sniff his puddle and straddle it and piss and the puddle gets larger/ I can smell his fear/ I walk over to where he fell and paw the frantic marks he made in the gravel and I think/ what it would be like to hunt him.” 

    There’s a great deal to unpack here (potential kinks and fetishes, past experiences with such bodily functions from oneself and others), but the one I want to focus on is right at the end. After this degrading act is done to our narrator lion, their thought goes to thinking about hunting them. Through this story, we understand that this has a double meaning. For a mountain lion, there is the literal hunting aspect of stalking and killing this man, but in a more metaphorical sense, there’s also a desire for the pursuit of such a target. Why do we so often find ourselves pursuing those who have scorned us?

    Finally, there is the trans experience. At the start of Open Throat, our narrator says, “I’ve never eaten a person but today I might.” From a predator pursuing humans to, by the end, wishing to be a human themselves and feeling uncomfortable in their furry, feline skin, our protagonist goes through an identity crisis. They begin to relate and even sympathize more with the humans that often live in fear or have animosity towards them as wild animals than they previously did. They believe that in the end, they are a human, just a human trapped in a lion’s body.

    There’s a genuine desire for connection and community found through the lens of our protagonist, wishing to be recognized as living their authentic self. Perhaps the most essential quality about queer existence is a desire to live as one’s true being—quirks and all. No queer person, no human being, or mountain lion, is perfect, nor is the queer experience a tale of striving for perfection. If anything, the truest queer experience is about coming to terms with our faults, with the experiences we’ve had along the way, and reconciling them with the individual we wish to be and finding those around us who will accept us as us. Perhaps no one, or no thing, has embodied that drive for acceptance more than a mountain lion in the City of Stars.

  • Is Rope the Queerest Thriller of All Time?

    Is Rope the Queerest Thriller of All Time?

    You may know director Alfred Hitchcock thanks to films like Psycho and The Birds, each of which pushed the boundaries of cinema through their depiction of horror and violence. But before either of these films, Hitchcock pushed boundaries with an equally revolutionary film—Rope.

    Released in 1948, Rope very well may be the queerest thriller of all time, thanks in no small part to everything on and off screen. 

    The film follows a pair of “friends” who decide to commit the perfect murder. They kill their former classmate with a piece of rope and subsequently hide his body in a wooden chest, which is then prominently displayed in their apartment as the two host a dinner party. The tension lies not in whether the murder occurred or who did it, but whether the murderous protagonists can get away with it. 

    From the onset, Rope is steeped in queer…well, we can’t even call it subtext now, can we? The two friends and former classmates, Brandon and Phillip, share a one-bedroom apartment together in New York City. They decide to kill their prep school classmate, David, with a piece of simple, taut rope. This is done in the opening scene, and the camera lingers on the faces of all three characters, notably David, whose pain in his own death could be misconstrued as almost arousal. All three men are packed closely together, hands across one another’s bodies, to commit this deed. 

    Throughout the subsequent dinner party, Brandon and Phillip are staged physically close—often shoulders against one another—and discreetly reminisce about the sensations the murder filled them with, along with their superior intellect for committing such a crime.

    Brandon says, “We’ve killed for the sake of danger and for the sake of killing. We’re alive, truly and wonderfully alive.” 

    Later, he remarks, “I don’t remember feeling very much of anything… until his body went limp and I knew it was over. I felt tremendously exhilarated.” 

    There are innuendos throughout about not just the pair’s homosexuality, but that of both their murder victim and their prep school housemaster, Rupert, who appears halfway through the film. Brandon notably says, “I’m not interested in Janet’s prattle, but you always interest me, Rupert.” 

    The innuendos of homosexuality likely flew over Republican James Stewart’s head as the elder intellectual, but they certainly didn’t for others in the cast and crew. 

    Rope, based on a 1929 stage play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton, was loosely inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Leopold and Loeb, having been in a relationship, were determined to murder as a means to tout their “superior intellect” and commit the “crime of the century.”  

    Hamilton himself was a closeted gay man and the screenwriter for the film, Arthur Laurents, was also gay–and one of the few openly gay Hollywood screenwriters in the 1940s. He and Hitchcock had a productive working relationship. Laurents said in an interview with Vito Russo for his book, The Celluloid Closet, “We never discussed, Hitch and I, whether the characters in Rope were homosexuals, but I thought it was apparent.” 

    Laurents had been drawn to write the screenplay for Rope because his then-lover, openly bisexual actor Farley Granger, was set to star as one half of the murderous duo, Phillip. The other half of this duo, Brandon, was also played by closeted gay actor, John Dall. On top of this, Brandon and Phillip’s murder victim, David, was played by Dick Hogan, yet another gay actor who had previously been with Farley Granger. 

    In writing the script for Rope, Laurents had a delicate balancing act given that the Hays Code was at its peak in enforcement. The Hays Code was a set of censorship guidelines for the film industry, which barred any “unacceptable” content in films, such as homosexuality. Laurents said, “I don’t think the censors at that time realized this was about gay people. They didn’t have a clue what was and what wasn’t, that’s how it got by.” 

    Hitchcock, though not initially intent on crafting such a queer film, had begun working on Rope to push back from the studio system which he had been trapped in for years (also using Rope to employ groundbreaking filming techniques to create the illusion that the film was done in one continuous long take). He, in many ways, sympathized with queer artisans and characters. 

    Hitchcock was more than willing to cast queer actors, wishing to promote and elevate struggling performers who, like himself, wished to push back on the studio system. Stewart, as the most bankable star, was cast to quell censorship concerns and to secure financing. But all the other primary persons associated with creating and starring in the film were keenly aware and eager to showcase queer characters less in a villainous light, but in a complex one.

    Laurents and Granger even had a double date with Hitchcock and his wife, Alma. Laurents said of Hitchcock, “He didn’t give a hoot in hell whether I was gay. It tickled him that we had a secret he knew. It was a slightly kinky touch, and kink was a quality devoutly to be desired.”     

    There were missed opportunities with Stewart’s casting, however. Laurents lamented that Stewart’s character was supposed to be the unwitting, queer inspiration for the murderers. In Laurents’s words his character was, “the head homosexual…Jimmy Stewart? Jimmy Stewart has no sex.” 

    Still, the film carries on with its queer imagery and textual assessment of vice–from smoking cigarettes after murder to stroking champagne bottle necks, all of which can be tied back to the queerness of the story.   

    Phillip and Brandon are, despite being murderers, the film’s protagonists. As an audience member, one is keenly aware of the malicious deed committed at the onset, but can’t help looking away and being charmed by the murderers. While not necessarily a positive representation of homosexuality, what Rope did was employ queer artisans in a time when punishment for sodomy in California included forced sterilization; Hitchcock crafted a thriller steeped in homosexual undertones, queer history, and evoking tawdry, sensuality between multiple characters. 

    Most essentially, the film addresses fascist ideology head-on. The murderers commit their crime after having learned of “superior intellect” from their mentor, but by the end, their headmaster rejects this thought experiment that individuals of “superior intellect” can or should dictate the lives (and deaths) of others. Hitchcock had crafted anti-fascist British propaganda during World War II and Stewart had served in the Army during the War. In the end, it’s not the homosexuality of the characters that’s repudiated, it’s their fascist thoughts, which can be held even by members of the larger queer community (I’m looking at you, “LGB without the T”). 

    Even prior to Rope’s release, the film received backlash and was either banned or severely restricted across such major cities as Seattle and Atlanta. The film was also met with mixed reviews and wound up being a financial disappointment, though not an outright financial failure thanks in no small part to its small, $2 million budget. Since the 1940s, Rope has been reassessed and, while not as appreciated as some of Hitchcock’s other films, has endured because of its bold stylistic cinematography and use of long takes, as well as its queer storytelling and complex depiction of queer characters.   

    Rope is the queerest of all thrillers perhaps not because it’s the most shocking or graphic of queer stories put to screen, but because of all that was put into the film by its multifaced creators and actors, all that the film says about vice, kink, and ideology, as well as all that the film implies through inventive cinematography and editing.