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Queer Aging in North American Fiction pp 175–198Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

New Stories About Gay Aging: Mike Mills’s Beginners (2010)

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Abstract

This chapter examines Mike Mills’s Beginners (2010) as a pivotal film that offers a positively connoted and complex narrative focused on an aging gay protagonist. Hess reads the film as representative of multifaceted processes of re-examining and re-claiming LGBTQ history taking place in the early 2000s. The author argues that the film self-reflectively juxtaposes its story of a gay man’s coming out at age 75 in the early twenty-first century with the impossibility of imagining or telling such a story throughout most of the twentieth century. The film exposes the policing mechanisms inherent in heteronormative discourses via its meta-level commentary on memory and on constructing live stories. Moreover, it uses its own portrayal of gay aging to demand new and different narratives of queer aging.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Such concerns could be related to specific medical questions, for example for transgender persons, or persons living with HIV; they could be questions of housing and possibilities to live with one’s partner, questions of power of attorney, and, of course, also fears of homophobic or transphobic discrimination by health care providers.

  2. 2.

    Six Democratic candidates participated whereas all Republican candidates declined (“Timeline” n.d.).

  3. 3.

    Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was instituted by President Bill Clinton in 1994. The policy technically lifted the ban that excluded LGBTQ persons from serving in the military. It only applied, however, as long as individuals were willing to remain closeted and hide their sexual orientation. The policy stayed in effect until 2011.

  4. 4.

    In 1977, Harvey Milk became an elected official of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

  5. 5.

    A film adaptation of Christopher Bram’s Father of Frankenstein (1995).

  6. 6.

    In 2004, same-sex marriages were legalized for a brief period in San Francisco.

  7. 7.

    This topic has generated increasing interest since the millennium, as can be seen from the number of recently published memoirs about gay parents written by their children, such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), Chana Wilson’s Riding Fury Home: A. Memoir (2012), Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland (2014), and Alison Wearing’s Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter (2013). This growth of interest can also be seen in the new popularity of stories that, following Beginners, focus on the coming out of a parent later in life, for example the recent film Tru Love (2013), about a mother who falls in love with a woman, or the TV series Transparent (2014), about a transgender father.

  8. 8.

    While Mills as director/screenwriter, as well as the film Beginners, is often labeled with the term “indie,” Mills himself has made it clear in an interview that he wants to reach large audiences and does not wish to be perceived as “quirky” or as a “niche film maker” (Hubert 2011).

  9. 9.

    Fuelled, to no small extent, by the implementation and then overturn of Proposition 8 in the state of California (Murray 2009, 359).

  10. 10.

    Titles such as Mom, Dad, I’m Gay (2001), by Ritch Savin-Williams, are indicative of this fact. But, often studies with less revealing titles, such as Gilbert Herdt’s “Coming Out as a Rite of Passage: A Chicago Study” (1992), likewise focus on gay teenagers. In addition to those studies, numerous self-help books are available in bookstores or on the Internet that, to an overwhelming extent, focus on the situation of children (of varying ages) coming out to their parents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

    Linda M. Hess

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  1. Linda M. Hess
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Hess, L.M. (2019). New Stories About Gay Aging: Mike Mills’s Beginners (2010). In: Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5_8

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