Well said! I've never seen Pleasantville, and it sounds like I need to correct that. Your description makes me wonder if Pleasantville's metaphors were intentionally queer.

Not too many people today remember how queer people adopted The Wizard of Oz as queer metaphor, and how the transition from black-and-white Kansas to Technicolor Oz was a big part of that metaphor. But in the 90s, older queer people were still calling themselves "Friends of Dorothy" and using other Oz references to refer to queer life.

Even today, I've seen queer people use "flying monkeys" (characters from the Wizard of Oz) to refer to anti-queer activists. Think Libs of TikTok calling for protests of drag shows, and the inevitable Proud Boys protest response. Members of the queer press occasionally refer to the Proud Boys in that context as flying monkeys.

So I wonder if the Pleasantville creators adapted the Technicolor queer metaphor as a deliberate nod to the existing Oz Technicolor metaphor.

Regardless, I'm glad to see you calling for more clear and direct storytelling. We certainly get more of that now than in the 90s, but in mainstream cinema and television, queer storylines and characters don't yet approach the percentage of queer people in real life.

I'm glad to see you working to be part of the solution to that problem!