This movie is over the top gay...

I don't think it's meant to be like that. Unfortunately for you and most straight people, homosexuality is all around you. This movie just uses it in the story line. Look around you. You live/work/can't get away from alternative sexuality. That's life, man.
As for the teacher, that's different. If I could teach anything to the world, it's that homo's/gays aren't the same same as perverts. f*'n A!

I just made the point in another thread you wouldn't think twice about a male teacher having sexual thoughts about the 17/18-year-old girls in his class so long as he wasn't touching them up. Teacher-student sexual tension is natural, it's just that this story is set in an all-boys school so there aren't any girls to throw into the equation to balance things up (except the member of staff Dakin is trying it on with).

Anyway, "mind-numbingly gay"? There isn't a single gay-gay relationship in the film.

And pedophilia? I didn't see any under-16s there...

This movie is over the top boring.

"They talk about homosexual behavior like if it's normal. How exactly can a student who holds his religion so highly, want "details" about a teacher giving head to a student??"

Please, go away! Why do pregudiced people always assume that they can use religion to justify their own discriminations? And I admire that student becuase he practiced TOLERANCE, which is far more important than condemming something as normal as schoolboy banter.

Take your normal and shove it, if you don't get that this movie was about so much more that sex (of any orientation) then I really don't want to hear it!

I'm gay and I thought this film was appalling. I really can't see what all the fuss is about and why it's been praised so much. The portrayal of sexuality is extremely confused and the film confuses homosexuality with paedophilia - something I'm surprised seems to have gone over most people's heads and more people aren't saying. The guy who is a kiddy fiddler (Hector) is treated like a hero in the film, and even Irwin is eventually portrayed as considering acting on his feelings towards Dakin. The thing that appalled me most of all thought was the future Posner at the end saying that he finds it hard "not to touch the boys". WTF????? What is this film on? A straight male teacher wouldn't be expected to "have difficulty" not touching female students!

Every adult gay male character in this film is portrayed as being attracted to children in their responsibility. If I was a teacher I would be furious at this portrayal. I know Alan Bennett is gay, but this film actually demonises gay people, by portraying them in all three cases (Hector, Irwin and Posner) as lonely, unhappy, spineless paedophiles destined to a life of unhappiness who have difficulty not acting on their feelings, not "touching" the boys. As professionals, this is ridiculous. Attraction to teenage pupils is presented as normal without explanation, as a standard form of homosexuality.

Other than the "gay" aspect, there is really very little to this film. All the other things it claims to be about are just by the wayside and play very little role in things. With the exception of Dakin, the kids' performances are also theatrical in the extreme, especially in the group and classroom scenes. They're not acting, it's blatantly obvious that they're just going through the motions, performing a series of pre-rehearsed set pieces and reading out lines they've read a thousand times.

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The future is just like you imagined

To start with, I'm not a homophobe. but i did find the homosexual aspect of the film to a bit unerving. It's hard to explain but it just seemed like the inclusion of a lot of it was unnecessary to the plot (mainley the daken and Irwin thing). I think what bugged me wasn't that many people so accepted it, but rather then none of the kids seemed at all disturbed by it. It made the characters seem painfully hollow. The only two characters that seemed to have any real depth were Rudge and the religious one (can't remember his name). It just made the entire movie seem like I was watching lifeless characters (To no fault of the actors). The movie "stayed" with me for all of 2 seconds after I saw it.

You also need to understand that American society is sexually uptight and repressed. Most of the rest of the free world, Especially Europe, are far more accepting, freethinking, and at ease with sexuality. Bi-sexuality is considered pretty much the norm. Sexual experimentation is very normal and common in youth, but in the United States, it is "hush-hush," we prefer to pretend it is undesirable and doesn't exist.

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