Is billy elliot gay

The story gives a closeup of interpersonal, organizational, and family struggles among the miners as they confront the hardships of the strike—but unlike Billy ElliotPride does not blame or treat the strike and the union as alien forces.

is billy elliot gay

This film takes a different approach. The only clashes we see are miners battling police with clubbing, arrests, and a very long chase scene and miners yelling, snarling, and throwing things at strikebreakers. In contrast to their negativity and inarticulateness in Billy Elliotthe miners and their families in Pride are vivid, intelligent, sympathetic characters we readily identify with.

So far, so good. Billy is supportive of his friend. The story concerns his efforts against society’s wishes and his journey to follow his dreams. The movie follows their poignant and often hilarious encounters as the two groups explore the complexities of solidarity.

After all, fiction illuminates social issues precisely because it shows them up close, through the struggles of individuals. Although stunned at first, he resolves to do whatever it takes to help Billy attain his dream. In both films, striking miners are central characters, and all involved must battle class and gender-based oppression as well as their own prejudices.

Do these stories increase our understanding and connection to the reality of a union on strike? A valuable contribution, but what particularly interests me is that both present up-close views of workers living through a prolonged strike.

Each of these films challenges gender stereotyping in distinct ways. Moreover, unlike Pridewhere the union women are as key as the men, in Billy Elliot the women of the strike are simply not present. We learn virtually no information or background. At the same time, many details, impressions, characterizations, and even the bleak color palette and other cinematographic choices, present the union and the strike in a negative light.

Billy Elliot Wikipedia: Hey, I was having a chat with some friends and we were talking about the movie Billy Elliot and in time we discuss the sexual identity of Billy, we can’t agree if billy were gay or straight at the end of the movie cause this wasn’t never clear, what do u think or understand about that?

Granted, the themes of the two movies are different: Billy Elliot is about the power of art to overcome preconceptions and stereotypes, with the strike in the background. Unions and strikes do not often appear in mainstream cinema, so as a student of fiction featuring activists and social movements I pay attention when they do.

Over Christmas, Billy learns his best friend, Michael, is gay. The project raises money for the strikers and eventually makes a journey to the North of England to personally hand the funds to the miners. After they are won over, the story centers on whether Billy elliot get into a famous London gay school, and whether the father can afford the tuition.

Even so, Billy Elliot, billy the other contemporary male dance films I have identified, is a bit twisted, for it secures heteronormative masculinity in queer spaces and through queer performances. The problem is that the union is portrayed as a remote entity, and even though the strike is the setting for much of the film, we learn virtually nothing about its workings, demands, accomplishments, or progress, much less what it feels like to be part of one—because the workers appear to consider it a separate force exactly what bosses want workers to feel about unions, in fact.

We spend the entire film with these folks, at what turns out to be a crucial moment in their strike, yet we never see the characters engage in ordinary cooperative tasks of organizing, nor in the camaraderie they would certainly show each other much of the time.

Billy Elliot, played by Jamie Bell in the movie, is a young boy in a mining town in England who loves ballet. In Pridewe witness conversations and arguments that illuminate the political and social issues the characters are facing.

Young Billy Elliot hates his boxing lessons. It is not explicitly stated in the movie or stage versions whether Billy Elliot is gay. Later, Jackie catches Billy and Michael dancing in the gym, and realizes his son is truly passionate. The briefest on-screen glimpse of this generous gesture could have somewhat counterbalanced the scenes of workers yelling at each other and would have shown us how not only the father and brother but the union itself experienced transformation by overcoming macho prejudices.

If the film had allowed the workers to clearly express their demands, as they would on any picket line, we could have learned what motivated them. Subtle emphasis and de-emphasis matter. Pride illustrates the joys and challenges of building solidarity, and how this process changes people in both groups in ways that go beyond the strike itself.

To what degree are the strikers and organizers shown as multidimensional humans rather than stereotypes?