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ESSENTIAL QUESTION 1: What are some of the common experiences or themes that present themselves in coming of age / coming out stories?

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ESSENTIAL QUESTION 1: What are some of the common experiences or themes that present themselves in coming of age / coming out stories?

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Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda - Becky Albertalli (YA novel)

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Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda - Becky Albertalli (YA novel)

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Simon is secretly emailing one of his classmates who also identifies as gay. When his secret is revealed to the entire school, he must navigate this new part of who he is without losing his friends, family, or secret crush.

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Call Me By Your Name (film) - Luca Guadagnino

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Call Me By Your Name (film) - Luca Guadagnino

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Elio lives in the Italian countryside with his family each summer as his father does research.  One summer, his father's new assistant, Oliver, inspires something new in Elio as he learns what it is like to love for the first time.

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Grasshopper Jungle - Andrew Smith (YA novel)

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Grasshopper Jungle - Andrew Smith (YA novel)

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Austin is living the typical life of a high schooler in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. While dating his girlfriend, Shan, he discovers that he may also love Robbie, his best friend who also loves him. Also, giant man-eating grasshopper monsters begin to take over the world.

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Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky (YA novel or film)

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Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky (YA novel or film)

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Charlie deals with his first year of high school completely alone. That changes when he meets two eccentric seniors, Sam and Patrick. Charlie learns about love through his feelings for Sam, and the toxic relationship Patrick finds himself in with a closeted classmate.

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Two Boys Kissing - David Levithan (YA novel)

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Two Boys Kissing - David Levithan (YA novel)

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This story follows many young gay men from one Friday morning until mid-day Sunday. Their stories are vastly different, but connected through the experience of exploring their identities. The primary story revolves around a pair of ex-boyfriends attempting to break the world record for longest kiss.

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Am I Blue? - Bruce Coville (short story)

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Am I Blue? - Bruce Coville (short story)

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This short story is about a young man who is questioning his sexuality. He is visited by a fairy godfather who tries to help him make sense of this confusing time and shows him what the world would be like if everyone in the world who is gay turned blue for one day.

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Leaves of Grass: Calamus poems - Walt Whitman (canonical text)

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Leaves of Grass: Calamus poems - Walt Whitman (canonical text)

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In these poems Whitman explores the idea of love.  While at times this love seems brotherly, at others it is clear he is expressing feelings of romantic love for other men.

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A Chorus Line: Paul's monologue (film or text)

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A Chorus Line: Paul's monologue (film or text)

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In this monologue, Paul describes what it was like to explore his sexuality as a young man in New York.  When his parents unwittingly discover him performing in a drag show, he must continue down this path on his own.

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Love Is All You Need? - K. Rocco Shields (short film)

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Love Is All You Need? - K. Rocco Shields (short film)

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In this film, the role of sexuality is reversed. Being homosexual is the norm and being heterosexual is shameful.

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Imagine A World Where Being "Gay" The Norm & Being "Straight" Would Be The Minority! [Short Film]

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The Color Purple - Alice Walker (canonical text)

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The Color Purple - Alice Walker (canonical text)

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Celie is a poor black woman in the south. She comes to fall in love with Shug Avery, the girlfriend of her husband. She gradually learns to navigate the intersection of these identities despite the horrible circumstances she finds herself in.

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The Color Purple - Stephen Bray, Branda Russell, Allee Willis (musical soundtrack)

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The Color Purple - Stephen Bray, Branda Russell, Allee Willis (musical soundtrack)

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This is a great multi-modal way to explore a story. The music from this musical is beautiful and would serve for a rich discussion on why the music sounds the way it does. Why did the songwriters or performers make the choices they did during a song?

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The Color Purple - Steven Spielberg (film)

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The Color Purple - Steven Spielberg (film)

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Again, a multi-modal look at the same story. Students could ask why a scene is acted, lit, or filmed a certain way.

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ESSENTIAL QUESTION 2: How has the depiction of people who identify as LGBTQ in our culture changed in terms of their portrayal in entertainment and media?

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ESSENTIAL QUESTION 2: How has the depiction of people who identify as LGBTQ in our culture changed in terms of their portrayal in entertainment and media?

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Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare (canonical text)

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Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare (canonical text)

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Viola becomes shipwrecked on an island and disguises herself as a man named Cesario. She falls in love with Duke Orsino, who is in love with Olivia, who is in love with Cesario. The attraction between these characters is not strictly defined by gender norms, and other characters in the text seem to be attracted to same-sex individuals as well.

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Two bachelors living together murder a former friend then host a dinner party to try and prove how adroit they really are. There are often allusions to the likely relationship between the two men, but it is never explicitly stated. Why is this the case?

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The Celluloid Closet - Vito Russo (book or documentary film)

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The Celluloid Closet - Vito Russo (book or documentary film)

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This book was turned into a documentary which focused on how LGBTQ people have been treated and portrayed in Hollywood throughout history. Many of these accounts take place during the time of the Hollywood production code when any depiction of homosexuality was forbidden.

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The Children's Hour - William Wyler or Lillian Hellman (film or play)

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The Children's Hour - William Wyler or Lillian Hellman (film or play)

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Two women run a school for young girls. After one girl becomes angry with them, she accuses them of having a lesbian relationship with one another. The women must try and continue on with their lives after the fallout of these accusations.

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The same plot as the YA novel. However, the film was a landmark in LGBTQ cinema for a number of reasons as well. This could be incorporated at the end of a lesson on LGBTQ representation.

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Same Love - Macklemore ft. Mary Lambert (song / music video)

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Same Love - Macklemore ft. Mary Lambert (song / music video)

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This video could be used for EQ 1 or 2. Part of the video depicts a young man coming out. The lyrics also call attention to representation of LGBTQ people in music.

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MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS - SAME LOVE feat. MARY LAMBERT (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

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Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On - Bob Mondello (non-fiction article)

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Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On - Bob Mondello (non-fiction article)

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This article is a brief account of the Hollywood code which designated what was allowed to be shown in films during the 1930s - 1960s. It is a good framework for leaning how homosexuality was strictly forbidden and representation of LGBTQ people limited during this time.

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When people talk about the "more innocent" Hollywood of years gone by, they're referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. But that early Hollywood wasn't always so innocent.

For decades, it's true, the major film studios were governed by a production code requiring that their pictures be "wholesome" and "moral" and encourage what the studios called "correct thinking."

But that code, which was officially abandoned 40 years ago this year, was the result of a nationwide backlash - an outraged reaction to a Hollywood that by 1922 had come to seem like a moral quagmire, even by the bathtub-gin-and-speakeasy standards of the Roaring '20s.

Silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle charged with manslaughter in the death of an actress; a bisexual director found murdered; movie stars dying of drug overdoses - small wonder the nation's religious leaders were forming local censorship boards and chopping up movies every which way to suit the standards of their communities.

And at first, when Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster General Will Hays to come up with a list of 36 self-imposed "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," it's no wonder no one believed them. There were no penalties, no laws, no enforcement.

Moralists were so outraged, meanwhile - by Mae West's casual slatternliness in I'm No Angel, by Barbara Stanwyck's promiscuousness in Baby Face, by Cecil B. DeMille's racy biblical epic Sign of the Cross - that calls for official government censorship became overwhelming.
A Power Play,
For Propriety's Sake
Of course, they were calls that Hays himself, working behind the scenes, had helped to make overwhelming - and he used the pressure to force filmmakers to toe his line and obey the new Production Code he eventually promulgated.

"The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers," Hays proclaimed when the new code was unveiled. "It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment."

Among those considerations: that no picture should ever "lower the moral standards of those who see it" and that "the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin."

There was an updated, much-expanded list of "don'ts" and "be carefuls," with bans on nudity, suggestive dancing and lustful kissing.

The mocking of religion and the depiction of illegal drug use were prohibited, as were interracial romance, revenge plots and the showing of a crime method clearly enough that it might be imitated.

Of course, you couldn't really do most of Shakespeare under those strictures. But you could hang a blanket across a motel room in It Happened One Night, and let Clark Gable embarrass Claudette Colbert into sleeping on the other side - with a mock tutorial on "how a man undresses."

Colbert fled - she got an Oscar for fleeing, in fact - and propriety was upheld.
A 'Voluntary' Code
That Proved Mandatory
Now, the Production Code was voluntary for film companies, who figured it was a nifty way to avoid government censorship. But it was mandatory for filmmakers, if they wanted their films to play in American theaters.

And filmmakers didn't much care who was doing the censoring if their scripts were getting watered down. Howard Hughes threw a well-publicized fit when his western The Outlaw was kept out of theaters - not for its content alone but because the film's advertising focused attention on Jane Russell's cleavage.

Even cartoon characters had to beee-have: Betty Boop stopped being a flapper and started wearing a longer skirt. (This from the temptress who once teased audiences with the musical double-entendre of "Don't take my boop-boop-a-doop away.")

But the thing about community standards is that they change - and codes either don't change, or they change slowly.

And after World War II, with competition from TV on the family front, and from foreign films with nudity on the racy front, movie companies were less inclined to rein in filmmakers who couldn't wait for the rules to catch up.

The Catholic Legion of Decency notwithstanding, films about banned topics like drug addiction often made for intriguing, well-received movies: When Otto Preminger made The Man With the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra as an addict, he didn't get a seal of approval - but he did get good reviews, and enough theater bookings to make plenty of money.

When Sinatra received an Oscar nomination in 1955 - from the same Hollywood establishment that had refused to give the film he was in its seal of approval - it was clear that something was amiss. And attempts to make the code flexible? They just made it meaningless.
Pushing Boundaries In 'The Proper Frame of Reference'
By 1959, the man charged with enforcing the rules conceded that if a "moral conflict" provided "the proper frame of reference," a Code-approved film could deal with pretty much any topic but homosexuality.

Famous last words. What came up that year? Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, in drag, fending off male suitors. The film's plot was a veritable catalog of once-forbidden topics - gambling and racketeering to get the plot going, a booze-swilling Marilyn Monroe to keep it going.

When Monroe's Sugar Kane Kowalczyk climbed into a train berth with Jack Lemmon's "Daphne," there was no longer a hanging blanket to separate them - and when Sugar's breathless, dingbat recollections of bedtime games with her sister inspired a strangled, hormonal snort from Lemmon - the code was dead, whether Hollywood admitted it or not. And judging from attendance at the nation's theaters, it was not much missed.

A year after Some Like It Hot was released, the head of the MPA began suggesting that some sort of classification system might work better than a censorship system that no one was paying attention to. In 1968, his organization finally shifted from restricting filmmakers to alerting audiences, using the film-ratings system we know today.

How's that approach been working out? It took all of one year for an X-rated movie to win an Oscar for Best Picture - Midnight Cowboy, which violated more "don'ts" and "be-carefuls" than it observed.

And it took just two years after that for Midnight Cowboy to be re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. Community standards had changed - as they invariably do.

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Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On

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When people talk about the "more innocent" Hollywood of years gone by, they're referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. But that early Hollywood wasn't always so innocent. For decades, it's true, the major film studios were governed by a production code requiring that their pictures be "wholesome" and "moral" and encourage what the studios called "correct thinking."

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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo - Jill Twist (picture book)

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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo - Jill Twist (picture book)

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This book was written in response to Mike Pence's children's book about a day in the life of someone in the white house. This book focuses on a bunny who falls in love with another male bunny. It would make a nice framework for discussing representation of LGBTQ people in picture books.

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ESSENTIAL QUESTION 3: What are some of the struggles that people who identify as LGBTQ have experienced through history?

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ESSENTIAL QUESTION 3: What are some of the struggles that people who identify as LGBTQ have experienced through history?

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This play is an historical fiction account of what it was like to live as a gay man during the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s in New York.  It is a rich text that has won the Pulitzer and Tony.

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Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives - Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman (documentary film)

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Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives - Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman (documentary film)

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This film focuses on stories of women who navigated their LGBTQ identities during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. It also explores the representation of these women in lesbian pulp novels.

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The Normal Heart - Larry Kramer or Ryan Murphy (play or film)

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The Normal Heart - Larry Kramer or Ryan Murphy (play or film)

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This story focuses on the rise of the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s and the subsequent response in the gay community in New York. Many leaders in the community try and organize a response to save the lives of their friends and loved ones, but they struggle with lack of support from the US government.

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There is also a film adaptation, but the novel deals heavily with the historical aspects of the AIDs epidemic.  Sixsmith is a reporter who helped Philomena try and find her son who was taken from her when she gave birth to him in an Irish convent.  They learn that he died of AIDs and Sixsmith outlines the lack of assistance the Reagan administration gave to support the thousands of American citizens dying of AIDs during his administration.

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This play is an account of how LGBTQ peoples were treated in Nazi Germany. This is an important piece of history that is typically overlooked or forgotten.

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Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. The film focuses not only on his life, but also on his role as an activist and a change-maker despite the harsh realities of his time.  The history of the gay rights movement is explored heavily in this film.