Mad Max: Beyond Homophobia

I've been watching the Mad Max movies.  Well, sort of watching them -- they're 90% Wacky Races, colorful post-Apocalyptic figures in weird cars chasing each other through the Australian desert.

With an obvious good vs. evil plotline, and guess what?  The good guys are all patiently described as straight, and the bad guys as over-the-top gay.

Mad Max (1979), set in an Australia that just started to break down, pits good, noble, uber-heterosexual Family Man Max, who has a wife and daughter, against an outlaw gang of mohawk-haired gay guys who hug and kiss all over each other.

Oddly enough, Max wears a leather-fetish outfit that looks like it belongs on Folsom Street.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), is set about 10 years after the Apocalypse, with the kind, gentle, white-clad, and uber-heterosexual residents of Gasoline Town hounded by a gang of post-Apocalyptic gays.  Their leaders look like refugees from Folsom Street.

There's also an explicit gay couple, the psycho Wezand and his boyfriend//slave, the Golden Youth, who gets killed.

The heterosexuals escape and flee north to a heterosexual future.

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the only one of the franchise I saw at the time of its release, stars gay-fave Tina Turner as Aunty Entity, leader of an evil Bartertown full of grotesque gay men.

By now AIDS is in the news, so the gay men are all diseased, like this leather-clad, tattooed Angry Anderson with his drag-queen totem.

But Max shuts it down, with the help of a group of kids and hunky teenagers  living in a heterosexual Blue Lagoon Paradise.  They fly off to the fabled Tomorrow-morrowland and a heterosexual future.  In the last scene, they've all reproduced.

How many different ways are there to demonize gay people?

Looks like three.