1 ©2020 Lance Weldy. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Citation: Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, Vol. 43, 2020 http://dx.doi.org/10.14811/clr.v43.523 Lance Weldy Visual Identity and the Queer Aesthetics of Passing Gay Teen Body Politics in Sebastian, Beautiful Thing, and Get Real Abstract: The theatricality of passing as heterosexual in the face of legisla- tive, medicalized, and stigmatized homophobia serves as the primary lens through which I analyse three European, gay coming-out flms from the 1990s. In all three flms – the Swedish-Norwegian flm Sebastian (När alla vet, 1995), and two British flms Beautiful Thing (1996) and Get Real (1998) – the physical bodies of the white protagonists complicate normative binaries and stereotypical queer aesthetics ascribed to homosexuals in the late 20 th century. Specifcally, these three flms serve as cultural artifacts about the time period, lending insight into how late 20 th -century govern- ments from the two regions treated the homosexual experience through the implementation of legislative, medicalized measures, specifcally regarding HIV/AIDS. Keywords: visual identity, camp, passing, body politics, HIV/AIDS, gay teens, 1990s European flm, queer aesthetics, social welfare, homonormativity