Gus van sant gay
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His film, Milk (2008), portrays the life of gay activist, politician, and martyr Harvey Milk. Van Sant also received the festival's Best Director Award that same year, making him one of only two filmmakers—the other being Joel Coen—to win both accolades at the festival in the same year. At his queer best, Van Sant usually is dealing with young people, and seems primarily interested in the young white male: his sexual desires, his talents, but primarily the social pressures upon him.
They were what brought me out of the closet...
Image from Gus Van Sant’s Milk
Gus Van Sant’s first film to be released in theaters was Mala Noche (1985), based on the memoir of the same title by Portland poet Walt Curtis. Van Sant is considered one of the most prominent auteurs of the New Queer Cinema movement.
His early career was devoted to directing television commercials in the Pacific Northwest.
Roberto’s cock fucks Johnny fucked me, that’s about as close to Johnny I’ll ever get, unless I had the money, poor boys never win.”
Walt is completely confident in his sexuality as he calmly comments on Johnny and Roberto.None of Johnny’s lashes against homosexuality even carry any power because Johnny is the original prototype of Van Sant’s androgynous young man.
Following Mala Noche there are hardly any mature gay characters that pine after the ubiquitous young androgynous men, but the films themselves capture these young males in such a way that the adoration is still felt.
There is even a scene where one of Milk’s young cabinet members is pressured at a meeting to come out to his parents. It suggests a frozen moment with life underneath. There is beauty without any of the squeamishness of explicitly depicted sex, almost like a painting or sculpture that points to an ideal without the messiness of the carnal. A book of his photography, 108 Portraits, has been published, and he has released two musical albums.
He is gay and lives in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, California.
AKA Gus Van Sant, Jr.
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation:Gay[1]
Occupation:Film Director
Thus, the scenes all feel austere and distant. In Elephant, Van Sant makes the interesting choice to make the killers lovers. They are the vessels of Van Sant’s ambiguity. That's what my interest was. Regardless, Phoenix’s pink shorts are incredibly conspicuous and point to another possible factor for how Van Sant’s stylizes his sex scenes: the actors are too young to engage in them.
Paranoid Park continues this line of ambiguous queerness filtered through an ostensibly heterosexual suburban boy’s experience.
The androgynous young male is a motif that runs through all the films and allows Van Sant to deal with queer themes in what are often seemingly heteronormative narratives.These androgynous young characters become more prominent and more significant post-Good Will Hunting.After the huge critical and financial success of that film, released in 1997, Van Sant redid Hitchcock’s Psycho (1998) and then made Finding Forrester (2000).
Part of this reputation undoubtedly derives from a desire to claim his high quality and original films for the gay community simply because he is a gay filmmaker. The film is hardly concerned with the crime as much as it is with Alex’s reaction to the crime and the resulting emotions, which are felicitously close to those that any young queer person might feel in a heteronormative high school where every guy is supposed to want to have sex with the cheerleaders.