Billy elliot gay

Over Christmas, Billy learns his best friend, Michael, is gay. Billy is supportive of his friend. Later, Jackie catches Billy and Michael dancing in the gym, and realizes his son is truly passionate. Although stunned at first, he resolves to do whatever it takes to help Billy attain his dream. It is not explicitly stated in the movie or stage versions whether Billy Elliot is gay. Billy Elliot, played by Jamie Bell in the movie, is a young boy in a mining town in England who loves ballet.

Young Billy is not a ‘poof’ (as he repeatedly tells us, a disavowal which might as easily mark Billy as gay as unmark him as such). In the scene in which Billy teaches Michael ballet, we notice not only that Michael is wearing a tutu, but that Billy is not wearing one. Billy’s best friend Michael (Stuart Wells) is gay, however–a cross-dresser who reaches the high point of his young life by putting on one of the tutus.

Michael is attracted to Billy, who doesn’t reciprocate, but seems unusually sophisticated about the implications for a boy his age. For Billy Elliot, the primary objection his father, brother, and any other of the disapproving townsfolk have against ballet is that it’s for “poofs” — a desire to dance must equate with a. Like his namesake, Billy Elliot has a missing parent in this case, his mother , and is routinely belittled by an older brother.

Both Billies reject the traditionally masculine activities football, boxing they are encouraged to pursue, as well as the potential future that is laid out for them in working down the coal mine. Instead, both find a passion that they struggle to develop in secret. Some scenes seem like direct echoes, especially the sequences where the boys steal a book in order to learn more about their new-found interest; and there is a key moment in both films where each of them is able to articulate in a more public setting how it feels to engage in their passion.

Nevertheless, the outcomes of their two stories are very different: unlike Billy Casper, Billy Elliot is supported by a charismatic teacher, and eventually by his family and local community; and where Kes ends in tragedy, Billy Elliot ends in triumph. They are also very different kinds of films: Kes is a naturalistic drama, produced by a small UK independent company, while Billy Elliot is a high-budget entertainment, produced by Universal Studios and clearly targeted at a large global audience.

As I intend to show, the politics of these two films are also quite different — even if both of them ultimately focus on an individualistic form of escape. Billy lives in a small mining village near Durham with his widowed father, Jackie, and older brother, Tony, who are both coal miners out on strike; and also his maternal grandmother, who has dementia, and once aspired to be a professional dancer.

By chance, he finds and eventually joins a ballet class that is using the gym. However, Billy secretly continues lessons with his dance teacher, Mrs. When she tells Jackie and Tony about this, they are outraged at the prospect of Billy becoming a professional ballet dancer — not least because they think he will be considered to be gay. Later, Jackie catches Billy dancing in the gym and realises that his son is truly talented; he resolves to do whatever it takes to help Billy attain his dream.

Wilkinson tries to persuade Jackie to let her pay for the audition, but he refuses.

At the audition, Billy is very nervous, and punches another boy in frustration, fearing that he has not performed well enough. Seemingly rejected, Billy returns home with his father; but some time later, the Royal Ballet School sends him a letter telling him he has been accepted, and he leaves home to attend. Although he is less obviously a misfit, this Billy also fails at traditional masculine sports. His true passions and talents are vilified and misunderstood.

Billy has lost his mother, and throughout the film her presence is invoked both directly and indirectly. The heavy police presence in the village is constantly made apparent: police sometimes in riot gear appear in the background whenever Billy is shown walking through the village, although this is rarely remarked upon. Tom, Mrs. In fact, there are striking parallels — reinforced by the editing — between the two narratives. The individualistic story of salvation through art seems positively to require, not just escape, but the negation of collective social movements.

Thus, when Billy and his father travel to London, we learn that Jackie has never been to the capital city; and when Billy is asked by another boy at the audition about Durham cathedral near where he lives , it emerges that he has never been there. The working class child can only succeed if he escapes from his origins; and in the process, those origins must be defined as merely a constraint. As in much of New Labour policy, class struggle is seen as an irrelevant relic of the past: inequality, it seems, will somehow disappear in the magic fairy dust of culture and creativity.

The traditionally masculine miners Jackie and Tony — and seemingly, the rest of the community — gradually overcome their homophobic prejudices, in a manner reminiscent of the more recent feel-good movie Pride , in which miners and gay activists unite during the strike. Yet in other respects, the message seems more ambivalent. The film constantly insists that male dancers are not necessarily gay, not least by referring to presumably heterosexual dancers such as Wayne Sleep, Gene Kelly and in one clip that must have cost the producers a fortune to acquire Fred Astaire.

Is transvestitism somehow considered a tell-tale or even necessary characteristic of being gay, one wonders.

billy elliot friend, michael

He refuses the advances of Mrs. Wilkinson brilliantly played by Julie Walters. Yet she too is an ambiguous character. In a recent article, Ahmet Atay has argued that Mrs.