Bethany Black examines the history of queer coding and queer cinema, and wonders what’s changed…
A boo went up around the cavernous Riverside Cinema in Hammersmith that evening in 1999. The whole audience had braced itself and been let down. That energy had to go somewhere, so it came out as a collective jeer. We'd just watched the lion's share of John Waters's seminal (in all senses) movie Pink Flamingos - under the rules of the local council the cinema wasn't allowed to show the final scene where, in a single unedited shot, we see a dog take a poo and the star of the film, the drag queen Divine, eat it and smile at the camera. "An exercise in bad taste" so the tagline went, and Waters wasn't kidding.
I was a Film Studies undergraduate who had moved to London and was enjoying the freedom that the capital brought, being openly queer. WatchingāØthis wonderfully, outrageously, unapologetically queer piece of shock cinema with an audience who appreciated it remains one of my favourite memories of going to the pictures. It took a bunch of classic Hollywood tropes and turned them on their head. I didn’t realise it at the time because the term had only really just been coined, but without the 50 years of queer coding that preceded it, this film couldn’t have been made.