Loving La Cage aux Folles

Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 La Cage aux Folles is not only an entertaining farce but also a landmark, for the way it opened many viewers’ eyes to both drag culture and same-sex relationships. To find out more about the film’s sexual politics and where it belongs in the centuries-old tradition of drag performance, we talked to Laurence Senelick, a Tufts University professor and the author of The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, for our new special edition of La Cage. In this clip from that insightful discussion, Senelick acknowledges the movie’s somewhat controversial reputation and explains why it’s special.