Techincally these should go on The Story The Person, since they are writing-based, but I think these quotes have a lot to say about present-day pop culture (in all formats).
From Sarah Schulman's Stage Struck:
On gay themes in theatre:
"It seems as though the post-Angels in America theatrical condition is a profoundly retrograde one. Because homosexuality and AIDS have been normalized as the province of heterosexual writers, gay writers are pressured back into metaphor, euphemism, and code. In other wordsm straight writers can now use AIDS and homosexuality to assert their universality while gay writers must obscure the same subjects to ensure theirs. That is not equality."
On Philadelphia:
"It is shocking that an entire film could be built on this premise [that a gay lawyer would go to homophobic lawyer, because there are no gay lawyers], which is not only absurd but grossly ahistorical, since the abandonment of people with AIDS by heterosexual society is the most historically significant factor in the initial escalation of the crisis in the United States...Gay lawyers were among the first professional sectors to respond to the epidemic. In other words, not only was the premise of Philadelphia false, it was the opposite of the actual truth. Yet this film was highly rewarded and made huge, moral claims. Throughout the film, gay people are vulnerable, weak, and alone. We take a back seat while the heroic straight people protect us and defend us. In the end of the film, Hanks dies happy."
And a quote that I just flat-out agree with:
"For the record, I find the reflective, "best"--female friend charater (a.k.a. "fag hag") to be a profoundly annoying mainstay of gay male artwork, and it is upsetting to see it picked up in a heterosexual man's play [David Rabe's A Question of Mercy] about gay life. But in a way, her presence reveals that the piece is written more from other representations of AIDS and gay life than from lived experience. Because in the real world, unlike in most work by and about gay men, a heterosexual woman who is a close friend of a gay man also has a life of her own."
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