First love, a meddling mom & Mama Cass: Beautiful Thing is still a coming-of-age masterpiece, 30 years later
This Mother's Day weekend, revisit a classic that understands the special relationships between gays & their moms.
Mark
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, it’s Mother’s Day weekend, so let’s revisit 1996’s Beautiful Thing, a groundbreaking queer coming-of-age film with a keen sense of the special relationships between gays & their moms.
We all remember our first love. The first time another person made the butterflies in our stomach flutter, kept us up at night, and had us hearing the lyrics of songs in a new way.
How about we take this to the next level?
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For queer people, this tends to be a bittersweet experience. While we all develop our first serious crushes around the same time in adolescence, society has made it harder for us to openly lean into them, or even express them out loud. Without a supportive environment, teen crushes can become more confusing, painful, and filled with shame; sometimes even dangerous.
To celebrate the unique experience of discovering your first love as a young gay man, and to commemorate Mother’s Day weekend (since we all know the pivotal role a supportive mother can play during this time), this week we’ll dive into one of the most beloved British films of the ’90s, which portray the complexity of discovering your romantic feelings are outside the norm with remarkable nuance, heart, and realism.
The Set-Up
Beautiful Thing is a 1996 British coming-of-age rom-com, directed by Hettie MacDonald. It follows the story Jamie (Glen Bery) and Ste (Scott Neal), two teenage boys who live in the same working class apartment complex in South London. Jamie, an introvert constantly bullied at school, has had a deep crush on Ste, which only intensifies when his mother Sandra (Linda Henry) invites the boy to spend the night to protect him from his abusive family.
After kissing in bed one night, the two develop a deep romantic bond that they try to fight at first, and then hide from everyone else, skipping school together and sneaking into local gay pubs. However, when their Mama Cass-obsessed neighbor Leah (Tameka Empson) threatens to reveal their secret during a bad drug trip, Jamie is forced to come out to his mother, and he and Ste decide to go public, regardless of what others may think.
The story is a pretty straightforward young queer romance that touches all the expected narrative beats and character tropes of its kind: the sensitive, introverted boy whose peers don’t understand him, the rougher love interest who learns to soften and accept himself, the initially combative mother that loves her son despite all odds, the shame and fear around being exposed, and the complete freedom and ecstasy that comes with falling in love for the first time.
Welcome To The World
We’ve seen this story told many times before, but what makes Beautiful Thing stand out, oddly enough, is the remarkably unassuming package that it comes in. The film was originally made to be a television movie for UK broadcast only; the quality of the footage, the scope of its production and location, and the unknown nature of practically the entire cast make this quite evident. But the critical response and audience reaction was so rapturous that it was given a theatrical release soon after, making close to $3 million at the box office.
But there’s an undeniable charm in how unpretentious and grounded the movie can feel. Beautiful Thing owes a lot of its aesthetic and narrative inspiration to the wave of British social realist films from the 1960s, which usually focused on working class people going facing everyday troubles like poverty, strained family relationships, doomed love affairs, and a critique of power structures.
Their low production values and themes were a distinct contrast to the glossy, high budget entertainment of the era that allowed regular people to see themselves and their issues represented. And Beautiful Thing is a clear extension of these trends, with its setting in a decaying apartment complex filled with characters just trying to survive, while bringing queer love to the forefront.
Dream A Little Dream
The film refuses to let its characters dwell in the misery and hopelessness that their surroundings suggest. There’s an undeniable sense of hope in Jamie and Ste finding each other, and how they become the sole refuge in their lives.
Whether it’s stealing a kiss in bed, or running through the woods to finally let go into each other’s arms, the movie makes it clear that their love is reason enough to break out of the toxic patterns and dynamics that have kept everyone in that complex trapped or stuck—from Jamie’s well-meaning yet embittered mother & her younger neo-hippie boyfriend, to Ste’s abusive family and Leah’s spiraling drug addiction.
But perhaps the film is most well-remembered for its exquisite soundtrack, made up almost exclusively of music by The Mamas & The Papas and Mama Cass. Using Leah’s obsession with Cass’s celebrity and tragic life story, the film seamlessly weaves songs like “Dream A Little Dream Of Me,” “Make Your Own Kind Of Music” and “Move In A Little Closer, Baby” into Jamie and Ste’s love story, creating an almost ethereal air of yearning and love between them that transcends out of the screen.
Make Your Own Kind Of Music
Beautiful Thing is part of a long line of queer movies made in the ’90s that may have been dealing with similar stories and themes, yet were still able to differentiate themselves and leave their own imprint. The movie garnered significant attention upon its release (winning several accolades in the film festival circuit) and is still remembered fondly today, particularly in the realm of British cinema, where the specificity of its setting and characters helped expand the idea of where queer stories come from and what they can look & feel like.
Beautiful Thing is a beautiful reminder that while the pain and joy of first love is a universal experience, there are still elements that are incredibly unique to the queer community. That just because it can be difficult and terrifying to embrace at first, it doesn’t always have to have a tragic ending, and that our background does not define where we need to go next. But most of all, it’s a reminder that any romantic relationship comes with its very own soundtrack.
Beautiful Thing is currently streaming on The Roku Channel, and is available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon Prime Video & Apple TV.
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Mother’s Day is upon us once again, and we here at Queerty have decided to pay homage to the women that bore us, and bear with us (and let us raid their closets.) After all, there’s nothing more special than the relationship between mom and her gay son. Of course, not all movie moms embody the picture […]
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