Jesus, what’s up your butt about this? So “Go” is a bad example. Say they’re too lazy to type “Berlin Alexanderplatz” into a search engine instead. And yeah, I can see someone, perhaps on a friend’s recommendation, seeking out a movie without knowing what specific genre it falls into (or a movie that doesn’t fall clearly into one genre).
Neither, since I don’t believe Ripley’s homosexual. But that’s for another thread.
The “gay and lesbian” category at Netflix is definitely a bonus to those people who feel uncomfortable renting titles like “Queer as Folk” from the straight teenagers at their local Blockbuster. It makes many more titles with gay themes accessible, and it’s a lot easier to browse and rent titles in the comfort of your home when you are in the closet.
Ding. Ding. We have a winner. (Please select your prize from the 3rd shelf).
It is all about the marketing. Hell, if it makes people feel special or acknowledged you can go ahead and select a prize from the 2nd shelf! 
Well geez, from the looks of things, I’ve got a pedantic, argumentative gay man up my butt. Ah well; it’s not like it’s the first time.
You said you don’t see how putting a movie in the “Gay and Lesbian” section attaches any significance to it. Let’s see if I can answer that a third time:
Somebody recommends “Berlin Alexanderplatz” to me because he says it’s an interesting character study and portrayal of life in pre-WWII Germany. I might check it out if I’ve got time to kill. Somebody else recommends “Berlin Alexanderplatz” to me because it’s chock full o’ homos. I say, “So? What else is it about?”
The only thing the movies in that section all have in common is that they have “gay characters and gay plotlines” in them. Which means that anybody searching on that section is looking for movies that have gay characters and/or gay plotlines, regardless of when or where they’re set, whether they’re comedies or dramas, whether it’s all gay or just has the sensitive gay friend of the female lead, whatever. Which means that he’s attaching significance to that.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I can assure St. Pauler and Sol Grundy that livng in Northern Virginia is as far as one can get from living in a “rainbow-colored basement.” Heck, the state legislature just struck down --by ONE vote–a ban on offering health insurance for domestic partners employees of private companies.
Maybe you two have no interest in gay culture or romance, but some of us like to watch entertainment that addresses our interests and our lives. I watch enough hetero romance, and sometimes I want to see the boy getting the boy instead of the girl. GLBT is just a category, like Crime or Comedy or Mystery or Science Fiction or Drama. If you have a problem with it, that’s for you two to work out.
Yeah, so anyway…
I was following linkies here and there and I clicked on a review of the movie Ocean’s Twelve. I have no idea exactly where it was published, but it was apparently a site/zine that catered to the “alternative” sexuality market. I was kinda amused - it gave “gay points” and Ocean’s Twelve got one because Eddie Izzard (who, in his real life, is a straight transvestite) was in it. I found that so … odd… that I started clicking on other reviews on the site and discovered they seem to award gay points to the STRANGEST films for the STRANGEST reasons. One film got a point because an actor in the movie played a gay character in a completely different movie!
As for the Netflix thing, I’d be likely to check that section, because I don’t think I have a broad enough exposure to anything but a white-bread suburban background. I’m prone to renting “black” movies, too (although I tend to stay away from the comedies in that section… but then, I stay away from “white” stupid comedies, too.)
That’s actually a good point you make there stpauler. If, by “good point” we mean stupid and ignorant.
I highly doubt that people who “only live within those confines. [O]nly watch movies with GLBT characters or themes, only go to bars, restaurants that cater to GLBTs, and pretty much stay in their little GLBT circles,” would have any need for netflix. They’ve already got all their movies right there in their own communities.
Maybe, just maybe, there are, oh, I don’t know, a few gays & lesbians in the world who don’t live in this little gay ghetto you seem to think we all live in, and maybe, just maybe a few of us never see movies advertised with huge “THIS IS A GAY MOVIE” advertising attached to them, and maybe, just maybe, we’d like to be made aware of some of these movies, even though we don’t happen to LIVE IN A FUCKING GAY ONLY WORLD.
Jack-ass.
What, exactly, is wrong with a gay person consuming predominantly gay-themed movies, books, etc. anyway? How exactly is that “sad?” I mean, sure, if a person avoids every single piece of media that’s not gay-themed, they’re missing out on a lot, but I don’t think it would even be possible for someone to do that.
If we lived in a parallel universe where 99.9% of the movies, books, etc. were about gay people, I don’t think I’d fault straight people for, basically, wanting to get away from the gayness for a while.
And I’m really not sure what’s wrong with a gay person only wanting to go to gay bars. I mean, what exactly are they missing out on there?
I’m not a Netflix member, but I do subscribe to Blockbuster Online. There too we have a Gay & Lesbian top-level category. About the only thing I find particularly interesting is that, while there is a Gay & Lesbian top-level category, there aren’t any other categories specifically named for a subset of the population. I guess to me the question isn’t “Why is there a Gay & Lesbian category?”, but rather “Why aren’t there Black or Latin or Republican or Canadian categories?”
I apologize to the board, that is, Cafe Society. I didn’t need to be a jerk there, outside of the Pit. I just… nevermind. I was a jerk.
::: Moderator rings bell for attention ::::
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
OK, listen up, all of you. This forum is Cafe Society, and is for a discussion of arts and entertainment. You may criticize Netflicks all you want, but you may NOT insult other posters. Comments about other posters will stop NOW.
I’m not going to worry about how this started, but I’m going to stop it. That is, I’m not going to make a call on whether st pauler’s initial comment was out of line, but the responses and counter-responses are clearly out of line.
So, listen up: if someone makes a comment that you believe to be inappropriate for this forum, the proper response is to hit the REPORT BAD POST button (the little exclamation point [ ! ] in the upper right of each post.) You do NOT reply in kind. When you reply, then they respond, and things escalate.
When the teacher walks onto the playground and finds two kids fighting, the first thing to do is stop the fight. It no longer matters much who insulted whom or who threw the first punch: it takes two to fight.
Everyone clear on this? Now, all of you: behave yourselves.
I apologize for not having got here sooner.
For Black and Latin, marketing and content. Someone ran the numbers and figured out that it made economic sense to have a GL category and ran the same numbers for other categories and decided it didn’t.
For Republican, I would imagine that would be more of a content issue. Can anyone even name a mainstream movie that would fit the category? OK, Primary Colors but besides that there just doesn’t seem to be enough to support the category.
And as for Canadians, well, Canadians just have lousy taste in movies.
When I’m in the mood fora comedy, I click on ‘comedy’ and there they are. When I’m in the mood for a love story, I do the same.
If I were a lesbian, and in the mood for a love story, and I had to wade through all the straight love stories looking for a movie about two girls in love, I think I would find it annoying.
I might be glad there was a G/L category, to save me some time.
BTW, I think ‘Ocean’s 11’ and ‘Ocean’s 12’ would certainly be of interest to gay men, regardless of the plot. There are some pretty, pretty men in those movies.
Ah shit, I have (or had before I watched it) all that on my queue (except for LTC). Does that mean I’m a gay man now? My boyfriend’s going to be pissed! 
Yikes. As long as we’re talking films in the GLBT category, may I recommend Hanging Garden and Lilies?
For those others who don’t approve of queer people wanting to watch films with queer content, I’m just going to say I’ll be seeing Mambo Italiano this summer. I’ll be renting it because I’ve heard it’s good, because it’s set in my city, and because it’s a queer film.
That’s a factor. I’m not going to apologize for participating in queer culture.
I 
Queer as Folk. It totally makes me hot.
However, I cannot imagine a straight guy being able to sit through it without squirming quite a bit.
Still, I think it would be weird NOT to rent something just because it might have something gay in it. And guys, you’re really doing yourself a disservice if you avoid Bound because of your gay freakout syndromes. Same goes for Gia, or some of those other lesbionic movies.
You do realize I’m gay, don’t you? I’ve been out for the last 11+ years in one of the “top 10 gay cities” in the U.S. I’ve met a BUTTLOAD of people that fit my example. People that are so far into a “gay community” ideal that they’re borderline heterophobic if not just being outright heterophobic.
Own both of them. Great starnge films both.
See, I said Canadians have lousy taste in films. Thanks for rpoving my point.
Interesting choice of words…
Actually, it’s a problem I’ve had with friends, especially those from small Southern cities and towns where repression isn’t the norm so much as necessary. They move to one of the Gay Meccas (Atlanta being the dream of all provincial Southeastern queerboys) and within a few weeks they totally ghetto-ize, even limiting their business and contact to (not making it up) gay restaurants*, gay dentists, gay bookstores, gay gyms, even gay grocery stores. If they made “gay dental floss”, these guys would use it. They totally exist and I have actually known the ghettoization to break up relationships (when one partner goes “Over the rainbow flag” as I call it and the other is more “it’s great not having to be closeted but get a grip! A good movie is a good movie and a good restaurant is a good restaurant!”). It’s a phenomenon in the gay community similar to the hardshell Black Muslims among the Afr.Am. community or Veegans to the teenaged community, a leaderless cult if that is somehow possible. There have been scholarly articles written on this.
*Restaurants that serve conventional food of varying quality but primarily if not exclusively hire and cater to gay men and lesbians, not a “made of real girl scouts” type thing