Building the Future through the Past: Biopics and the Construction of a Queer History

Abstract

The paper examines four biopics: “Markova,” “Piñero,” “Before Night Falls,” and “Beautiful Boxer,” which reconstruct the lives of four influential yet controversial individuals in the gay community: Walter Dempster, Jr. (Philippines), Miguel Piñero (Puerto Rico), Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), and Parinya Charoenphol (Thailand).  Each participated in important events in the history of the gay community, and the filmic representations of their lives contribute to the elaboration of a filmic timeline of gay history.  They include Dempster’s exploitation as a “comfort gay” by Japanese soldiers during World War II, Piñero’s odyssey as a gay Neorican pimp, prisoner, and poet, Arenas’s gay adventures in a notorious Castro prison and his exploits as a gay outlaw, novelist, and AIDS patient, and Charoenphol’s struggle in becoming the first Thai transgender athlete to attain superstar status both nationally and internationally.  My paper studies, from an international perspective, four contributions to the construction of a filmic history of the experiences of gay men in four periods and four nations that resist the notion that “queers” do not figure prominently in history.  As I will show, each man resists the “chrononormativity” described by Elizabeth Freeman on various levels, first by being gay, then by “betraying” the “respectable” career paths marked out for them by society.  These “betrayals,” however, will lead to each man making singular contributions to his local culture as well as to universal queer cultural history.