Female Filmmakers in Focus: Georgia Oakley on Blue Jean | Interviews

One aspect of the film that I found really interesting is that Gene is watching a “blind date” normalizing heterosexual dating and behavior on his TV at home, and the film copy of Radcliffe Hall. It was a contrast with Gene, who found well of loneliness at her girlfriend’s apartment. “Blind Date” just came out and everyone can see it, but she practically has to stumble on this book.

It’s thinking about the barrage of heteronormative messages that everyone is exposed to, and that was one of my main motivations for telling this story. Not only Gene, but also a little boy named Sammy. The whole idea is that we all grow up in the same vacuum, we’re shown certain kinds of experiences over and over again, and it doesn’t even matter if we’ve had them. is. Even if there are others in your immediate family, it still looks wrong because of the other messages.

I talk about it all the time with my queer friends. I have a stepdaughter, and she often makes comments that you wouldn’t expect from someone who basically grew up with her two mothers. “Why did you say that now?” you may ask. She says, “Oh, I saw something on Netflix,” and you’re like, “Okay, yeah.” So I thought about that a lot, and how I grew up in a household that watched “Blind Date” every Saturday night and no one thought anything about it.

I wasn’t expecting to find anything like this when I was going through the “Blind Date” archives…so misogynistic it almost feels like comedy. It’s in every episode. That alone makes my spine tingle. Essentially from my experience growing up in Section 28, if you eliminate all role models and eliminate all conversations about homosexuality, homosexuality will cease to exist in your world.

But all these messages get inside you without your permission. Every day I just get hit on the head and I don’t even notice the billboards I drive past. Or newspaper articles. Back then, it was just like a newspaper. If you work at a school, there is a newspaper that the school has decided to subscribe to, and everyone will read whatever the day’s headline is. It helped shape public opinion. So, if something was written, let’s say there were a lot of headlines like, “Crazy lesbians…something, something, something.” If that’s what everyone’s reading at lunch, and you’re in it, how is that different from how we experience news and stuff like that right now?