Chapter 15: Love and Respect in Torch Song Trilogy: Film: Torch Song Trilogy (1988) 

Love and Respect in Torch Song Trilogy

The histories of LGBTQ+ communities remain under-told and underappreciated within history education. The term itself— LGBTQ+— is incomplete and evolving, a product of ongoing activism and efforts at more inclusive and accurate ways of naming and understanding the genders and sexualities that exist among people who identity as queer. None of these communities are monolithic and they each have experienced their own historical arcs with varying degrees of mutual support, alliance, and, at times, even divergence and tension. These identities are not discrete but, often, overlap and intersect with racial, religious, and class categories as well. Torch Song Trilogy captures the subcultures, yearnings, violence, and struggles against adversity that exist for a small subset of the more expansive LGBTQ+ communities. It focuses on three chapters of Arnold Beckoff’s life during the 1970s and 1980s in New York. As a Jewish gay man who works as a female impersonator, Arnold experiences various forms of ostracism, external and internal to the gay community to which he belongs. His loneliness and longing for love and acceptance are communicated throughout the film and are driving forces of his relationships with partners and his mother, whom he loves yet struggles to gain acceptance with throughout the course of his life. The film communicates the tenderness of love, the brutality of homophobia, and the isolation felt by those wishing to express themselves freely, in spite of social conventions that would keep them from being true to their sense of self.