We queers like seeing ourselves in film and television. We like seeing ourselves in books. Heck, we even like just seeing ourselves in the street!

Visibility does not stop at mere validation; it is resistance against social and political efforts to erase us. When a new film or TV show featuring queer characters appears, I feel a small sense of triumph. Each one is proof that we continue to exist and be recognised.

But visibility alone isn’t enough; not all representation uplifts us. The current awards cycle highlights this: rather than celebrating queer cinema, I find myself uneasy, even angry. Emilia Pérez has made history, with Karla Sofía Gascón becoming the first openly trans actor nominated in an Oscar acting category.

Yet, instead of the joy I felt when Moonlight won Best Picture in 2017, I feel detached and unconvinced that this is a true win for representation. Indeed, GLAAD, a leading queer advocacy charity, convincingly argues that Emilia Pérez‘s trans representation is ‘sub-par, disingenuous, harmful nonsense’. So, we must ask: what do we, as queer people, deserve from our stories?

And is all queer representation good representation? A notion I profoundly disagree with is that all queers in popular culture need to be “good”. Bad queers can be good representation.

Queer philosopher Jack Halberstam eloquently expresses the need for dirty or failed queers in his book The Queer Art of Failure; failure to conform allows an escape from the punishing norms of heteronormativity and patriarchy, he argues. The negativity attached to failure - the disappointment and despair that we queers, isolated from normativity, experience as we move down new and exciting life paths - pokes holes in the predictable, often child-rearing, lifepaths we were ‘meant’ to have. For example, the beautiful exploration of the nihilistic, violent Joy/Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) celebrates new forms of familial kinship and queer being, sprouting from the negative affects associated with otherness.

The film hinges on Joy’s failure as a traditional daughter - specifically, the violence and upset that sprout from her lack of conformity - as it clashes with the homophobia of her mother, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), and, to me, epitomises the anger and fear we queers harbour in a world of phobia. It demonstrates the need for bad queers (that do not rely on harmful stereotypes or caricatures) in media to wholly satisfy this idea of “good” representation. Unlike, Emilia Pérez, Everything Everywhere All at Once was well received and thus may demonstrate a sort of spectrum for the quality of representation in queer film.

But I argue that even controversial films amongst us queers can be productive representations of our lives. The idea of a spectrum that easily allows the categorisation of cinematic queers seems to go against the very essence of queerness: slipperiness, subjectivity, and undefinability. Call Me by Your Name (2017) and the novel it is based on come to mind here.

Specifically, despite very valid discussions of its leaning into damaging stereotypes of gay men as predators, I related to the intense and clashing feelings of unbridled righteous desire and shame felt by Elio (Timothée Chalamet) as he lusts after an older, inaccessible, and often emotionally insensitive man. The film epitomises the unique and complex entangling of positive and negative feelings attached to queer desire and internalised homophobia. I felt my seventeen-year-old self seen in Elio, not to mention the strange entanglement of his pain despite being amongst the most beautiful and romantic vistas of the Italian countryside.

Thus far, you may think I have settled on the side of all representation being good. Yet I think the question is much more complicated; bad, damaging representation unquestionably exists and I think it is important to acknowledge, therefore, that some representation can actively cause us harm. For example, I do not enjoy queer identity being used as a joke in “bro-y” films; I think viscerally here of small and horrendous stereotypical roles such as that of animalistic and masculine-coded gender-ambiguous Alexa (Lusia Strus) in 50 First Dates (2004), whose almost predatory sexuality is played for laughs.

Or of other damaging assumptions such as the implicit link between Freddy Mercury (Rami Malek) and his destruction of Queen (not to mention his drug usage) to his coming out in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). These sorts of deceptions of queer people are damaging because they negatively affect the opinion, and behaviour, of those with power over us in society. Us queers have all experienced being shouted at, spat at, catcalled, or (a lot) worse in some way in public, thanks, in part, to the subjugation of queer people in the media that teaches, reflects, and reinstates queerphobia.

So, is all queer representation good representation? No. It is not.

We should not linger on this though; we should learn. What we queers and our allies should do is consume queer media and embrace the messy, dirty, complex lives of their characters whilst demanding filmmakers avoid damaging tropes and tired stereotypes. We should not put up with films like Emilia Pérez.

We must ignore and delegitimise (and thus devalue) damaging art, and uplift those queer creatives who continue to try to tell nuanced and ever-valuable queer stories.