While all of the films discussed in this book express gender in one way or another, the first feature film made in New Zealand for theatrical release about gay adolescent masculine sexuality, 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous (Stewart Main, 2005), is also one of the first, along with Niki Caro's Whale Rider, to foreground gender issues explicitly as the main preoccupation of the movie. Based on a novel by the expatriate New Zealand gay writer Graeme Aitken published in 1995, the film was ‘really a very brave one to make,’ just as the novel had been a bold one to write. As the author himself states of the film that was based on his work:

Both the book and the film are extremely courageous, not merely because the subject of gay sexuality and love between young men was a taboo subject in New Zealand until well into the twenty-first century, but also because the approach that Aitken took to the subject was unflinching in its realism – a quality that was appreciated by at least one reviewer when the film was released overseas:

Predictably, the combination of taboo subject matter and a de-romanticized approach meant that neither the novel nor the film was well received by critics in New Zealand and Australia.