"When I was in my very early 20's I decided that theater was not really what I should be doing - I had seen a photo of Mother Teresa holding a very tiny baby - the two smiling/beaming at each other and it struck me like lightning that this is what I should do - go to India, find her, own only a sari and a bucket and go around picking up and caring for the sick and dying.

"So I was working temp jobs, trying to raise money to go to India and in the midst of this Mother Teresa makes a surprise trip to NYC. I call all the places she had been, call her convent in the Bronx, trying to find out how I can meet her. Someone at my job suggests I call the Indian Consulate, and when I do the man tells me that she will actually be there for a talk in about 45 minutes or so.

"I dash out of the job - saying goodbyes to all - call my friend Max to try to meet me and head up - the building is in the east 60's off Central Park as I recall...I get there and Mother Teresa has not arrived and the guard will not let me in. While I wait, two cars pull up...out of one exits a flock of nuns, and out of the other tiny Mother Teresa between two tall men. They come down the sidewalk towards me - jumping foot to foot - and she nods to the guard to let me in. My friend Max arrives and I grab her hand and we both follow Mother Teresa, the tall men, and flock of nuns up the stairs trailing behind like the duckling Ping in the Chinese folk tale.

"Max and I stand at the back of a large ballroom filled with beautiful Indian people, women in gorgeous saris, feeling out of place. Mother Teresa speaks eloquently about her work - at one point a man says, 'They say that rather than give a man a fish, one should teach him how to fish.' She says 'most of these people are not strong enough and need to be given what they need..but I will make a deal with you, I will give them a fish and when they are strong enough you can teach them how.' Booya.

"She is funny, she is tough and I am hearing angels of purpose singing in my head. At the end of the talk she is about to be taken into a smaller room and I think now or never. I fling myself at her, she takes my hand in both her hands and looks up at me (she is TINY) First I think - wow, she looks like Elizabeth Swados, and then I am caught by her eyes - which are just like burning coals. I tell her I want to come to India and pick up dying people and she asks you feel you need to do this, and I say yes and she looks at me and says no, you can not come.

"The angels stop singing. I have been rejected at first glance by Mother Teresa. She says, 'When you are so filled with love for these people that you cannot stand to be away from them for another second then you can come' and I get it - it's not about me. She asks what I do - I mumble about theater and singing...nonsense. She says, 'There are many famines. In my country there is a great famine of the body, and in your country there is a great famine of the spirit....that is what must be fed.' And she pats my hand and spins around and enters the room...I stand there and Max has to come up and take me away ....and I still carry those words with me today."

Earlier this year,  I and my film programming colleagues at Frameline—the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival—met to begin the always agonizing process of selecting our favorites from several hundred new films submitted by filmmakers from around the world, to assemble a representative snapshot of our cinematic moment.

There are a few obvious trends  that we could spot immediately: strong narratives from Latin America with gay male or transgender protagonists (In the Grayscale, Mariposa, Carmín Tropical, among many others); fascinating stories emerging from areas like the Balkans, which have rarely produced queer work (Sworn Virgin, Love Island, Xenia); a spate of bracing documentaries about North American athletes, created in the wake of Michael Sam, Jason Collins, and the Sochi Olympics (Game Face, Out to Win, To Russia with Love).

But there’s one development that has taken me a bit longer to identify as it isn’t as clear-cut. Call it the Year of the Bad Queer.

Some of the most memorable North American narrative films of the past year have featured GLBT protagonists—not side characters, but principals—who are deeply, irredeemably flawed. I’m not talking about the traditional flaws of antiheroes—quirks and oddities, suspect motives, disarmingly human failings. I’m talking about polarizing, problematic, occasionally awful people who happen to be gay. Their journey is at the center of the film, so we are asked to care about their fate, but their behavior is offensive, they are morally impoverished, mean, vain, passive-aggressive, violent, immature, or, in more technical language, generally fucked up.

Some examples of the Bad Queer phenomenon would include the following, all of them quite accomplished films with theatrical distribution deals in place or at least a lot of festival accolades and buzz.

  • The title character of Justin Kelly’s I Am Michael—based on the true story of Michael Glatze, played by James Franco—goes from being a committed gay youth activist to a homophobic evangelical preacher intent on hurting the community he once loved.

  • The screenplay of Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby is almost sadistically constructed so that its central character—a garden-variety Brooklyn performance artist, played by Silva himself—transforms (spoiler alert) from likable prospective gay dad in the first half to brutally violent criminal in the second.

• In her feature debut, writer-director-star Desirée Akhavan creates in Appropriate Behavior a central character, Shirin, who’s best described as a lesbian, Iranian-American version of Hannah Horvath from Girls—socially awkward, narcissistic, immature for her years, and incapable of taking responsibility for her failings.
 
•  In Joey Kuhn’s debut feature Those People, the film’s most volatile, charismatic gay character is Sebastian Blackworth, a self-absorbed, manipulative, Upper East Side socialite who may have abetted his swindling father’s crimes (think Bernie Madoff).

  •  Lily Tomlin’s title character in Paul Weitz’ Grandma, while admittedly a fierce and admirable advocate for her pregnant granddaughter, is mean, self-pitying, occasionally violent, and a self-described “asshole.”

  •  The irreverent Canadian black comedy Guidance is about a self-loathing, alcoholic former child star who’s in denial about his homosexuality and, in career desperation, lies his way into a job as a high school guidance counselor, offering the children vodka shots and such affirmations as “I want you to be an inspiration to all the other sluts.”

Rather than be appalled by this newly hatched cast of fuck-ups or lament the scarcity of queer heroes, I think we should see this trend as reassuring—precisely because these films refuse to repeat the tropes of two decades of GLBT protagonists. Unlike their predecessors, the dramatis personae in this new generation of indies are not defined primarily by their sexuality, and their struggles are not about their sexual orientation. They’re dealing with a host of dysfunctions— bad parents, economic distress, addiction, grief—but they’ve largely integrated being gay into their otherwise messed-up lives. What’s most striking about these new antiheroes is that their flaws usually get the better of them. Most of these films’ denouements do not come with a side order of redemption (with the possible exception of Elle in Grandma, which, interesting enough, was created by a heterosexual writer-director).

So why this sudden proliferation of queer jerks and nasties? (Okay, there have been a few such characters in the past, like Aileen Wuornos in Monster or Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, but they were once the exception.) I believe we’re seeing a new generation of writers and directors who are eager to create characters that veer away from the well-worn track of indie queer protagonists to date. Ironic and unsentimental, these filmmakers have moved beyond brave teens coming out to disapproving parents, misunderstood rural folk heading for the big city, or anything smacking of martyrdom for a gay cause. They’ve seen enough episodes of Modern Family to know that America may not need another likable homosexual on the screen on whom the audience can project its sympathy or approval. They’re feeling emboldened, or even entitled, to present what might be considered offensive gay or lesbian characters. Perhaps they wish to be seen as provocateurs as well as auteurs. They certainly show a healthy disregard for accusations of “internalized homophobia” (which have been leveled by some critics of these films). And they seem to trust the audience is ready to embrace stories that aren’t, in the end, an exercise in community pride.

As a result, queer film audiences finally have a narrative pleasure that has long been afforded to straight audiences since the dawn of film noir: a central character who is highly problematic, but fascinating.

There is an instructive parallel to this phenomenon that happened nearly fifty years ago involving another minority, namely American Jews. In the wake of growing social acceptance of Jews and waning anti-Semitism at home, a wave of cinematic “bad-boy Jews” swamped the screen in the late ’60s and early ’70s.” Think of the cad played by Richard Benjamin in Goodbye, Columbus, the matricidal George Segal in Where’s Poppa, or several of Elliott Gould’s rakes, cynics, and reprobates. This loosening and complicating of Jewish characters on-screen reflected a newfound confidence among young Jewish writers and directors, who were willing to risk offending people in order to widen the spectrum of Jewish personae beyond the pleasant pigeonholes of scholar, singer, soldier, milquetoast, or suburban assimilator that predominated in the postwar period.*

Could we be witnessing an analogous “bad queer” moment now, even as we witness the onset of marriage equality and I Am Cait? I suspect we are in for an extended run of “gays gone bad” on the big screen, if only because screenwriters now need something spicier than vanilla queerness to flavor their films. Expect a rash of Patricia Highsmith adaptations (two are already around the corner) and, who knows?, maybe another biopic about J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and Jeffrey Dahmer.