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This essay connects Sarah Schulman's discussion of aesthetic gentrification in The Gentrification of the Mind with the concept of disruptive innovation to analyse patterns in recent mainstream film exploring LGBTQ histories. Since the Great Recession, LGBTQ cinema in the Global North has become structured by disruptive narrative strategies that reroute the transformative power of queer and transgender histories upward and away from the most at-risk LGBTQ populations. Films such as Dallas Buyers Club, Stonewall, and The Danish Girl purport to represent 'actual' moments in LGBTQ history, but instead appropriate aesthetic space from communities with little to no cultural representation - HIV positive, working-class, and of colour, queer and trans populations - instead offering that space to symbolic gentrifiers. Cultural erasure of AIDS activism and of trans people's important roles in LGBTQ histories and politics are among the most deleterious shared outcomes of this new wave of cinema. This essay contends that historical disruption and resulting aesthetic gentrification of queer and trans cinema in the Global North has potentially global implications for the future of LGBTQ representation.
Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.
Why does a film like Roland Emmerich's Stonewall (2015) exist? The event Stonewall purports to represent - the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion that is commonly recognised as launching the US LGBTQ rights movement - has been well-explored to the exclusion of many other important LGBTQ histories. When the trailer for Stonewall was released during summer of 2015, a torrent of rebuke from critics and social media users poured across the internet, lambasting the film for its erroneous 'historical' depictions. Stonewall drew fire particularly for how it supplanted the critical role lesbians and queer/trans people of colour played in starting the riot, instead centring on a fictional white, gay male lead. In an interview with Buzzfeed's Shannon Keating, Emmerich defended his decision to alter LGBTQ history in ways that disrupt its true political legacy, mostly for the comfort of straight viewers:
'You have to understand one thing: I didn't make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,' he said. 'I kind of found out, in the testing process,...