The Gay Conversion of a Gay Film


Everyone's been a-buzz of Designer Tom Ford's Directorial Debut: A Single Man.

But now the oscar-buzzed film may soon face backlash from potential fans and possibly the LGBT community. It appears that the second trailer released for the film underwent a Gay Conversion ceremony and A Single Man turned into a story about a man and a women in love instead of Colin Firth getting it on with Matthew Goode.


From Indiewire:
The new trailer essentially is altered to suggest the core of the film is the relationship between Colin Firth and Julianne Moore’s characters, even removing from the end of the trailer the names of both Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult (who play Firth’s love interests). Moreover, in the first trailer, we see Firth’s character kiss both Goode and Moore, in the second we just get Moore.  There’s also a sequence of shots in the first trailer which crosscuts Firth, who plays a professor in the film, staring into the eyes of both a female student and a male student.  In the second, as you might guess, we only get the female (in a telling twist, instead of cutting to the male eyes, the trailer cuts to a quote from Entertainment Weekly saying “[Firth’s] performance is bound to win attention in this year’s Oscar race”).

Trailer #1:



Trailer #2:




What confuses me about this new promotion is why remove the gay context of the film? Brokeback Mountain  proved that a story with a gay storyline can be well received by both the academy and a wide audience. I wonder if Tom Ford is aware of this slightly homophobic promotion of his film, and if he is, does that represent an innate homophobia within himself as being labeled as a gay director only capable of making gay films?

In other news, I effing love Colin Firth and am so looking forward to seeing this film.

Photo: Courtesy The Weinstein Company

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