NEW QUEER CINEMA

THE DIRECTOR’S CUT

By B. RUBY RICH

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5411-6

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………xiIntroduction………………………………………………………xvPART I. ORIGINS, FESTIVALS, AUDIENCES………………………………..1. Before the Beginning: Lineages and Preconceptions…………………..32. The New Queer Cinema: Director’s Cut………………………………163. Collision, Catastrophe, Celebration: The Relationship between Gay and
Lesbian Film Festivals and Their Publics……………………………..334. What’s a Good Gay Film?………………………………………….40PART II. BULLETINS FROM THE FRONT……………………………………5. The King of Queer: Derek Jarman…………………………………..496. True Stories of Forbidden Love……………………………………537. Goings and Comings, the Go Fish Way……………………………….588. Historical Fictions, Modern Desires: The Watermelon Woman……………669. Channeling Domestic Violence: In the Den with Todd Haynes and Christine
Vachon……………………………………………………………7210. The I.K.U. Experience: The Shu- Lea Cheang Phenomenon………………7611. Jonathan Caouette: What in Tarnation?…………………………….8112. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Maladies……………………..8813. Beyond Doom: Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Film………………………..9214. A Walk in the Clouds: Julián Hernández……………………………96PART III. GENRE MEETS GENDER………………………………………..15. Lethal Lesbians: The Cinematic Inscription of Murderous Desire………10316. Queering the Biopic Documentary………………………………….12317. A Queer and Present Danger: The Death of New Queer Cinema?………….130PART IV. QUEERING A NEW LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA…………………………18. Preface to a History……………………………………………14119. Refashioning Mexican Screen Sexuality: Ripstein, Hermosillo, Leduc…..14520. Gay and Lesbian Traces………………………………………….15121. Mexico in the Forties: Reclaiming a Gender Pioneer…………………15622. Revolution, Sexuality, and the Paradox of Queer Film in Cuba………..15923. Queering the Social Landscape……………………………………167PART V. EXPANSIONS AND REVERSALS…………………………………….24. Ang Lee’s Lonesome Cowboys………………………………………18525. Itty Bitty Titty Committee: Free Radicals and the Feminist
Carnivalesque……………………………………………………..20226. Queer Nouveau: From Morality Tales to Mortality Tales in Ozon,
Téchiné, Collard…………………………………………………..21427. Got Milk? Gus Van Sant’s Encounter with History……………………236Conclusion………………………………………………………..261Filmography……………………………………………………….285Bibliography………………………………………………………297Credits…………………………………………………………..307Index…………………………………………………………….309

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

Lineages and Preconceptions

Nothing starts at the beginning, not really. The first chapter ofevery book already has a backstory, every birth its conceptionmyth, every decade the shadow of the one before it. The NewQueer Cinema is no exception. The first generation of NQCfilmmakers, and many that followed, were well versed in the works and livesof their predecessors, the pioneers who’d lost their wagon wheels on the roadto a different way of being. They were all watching films long before theymade their own, and the traces of their cinematic education are coded in theirown work, explicitly or implicitly.

Memory in the United States is short-lived, and cultural memory is no different.With every new technology that debuts, eons of earlier films, videos,and writings disappear into the mists of old technology, unreachable acrossthe borders of phased-out formats, out-of-print books, defunct journals. Ifthe markers of the 1980s live on a little longer in the flowerings of the NewQueer Cinema, we’re all the better for remembering. Movements of historyand cinephilia demand acknowledgment. The nqc didn’t come from nowhere:it came from (almost) everywhere.

Hints and Glimpses

Consider the state of “gay and lesbian” theatrical movies in the United Statesbefore 1969. Arguably there was no such thing, just a scattering of gay and lesbiandirectors, often closeted, making films that were masquerading as mass-marketheterosexual fare, albeit with the occasional gay or lesbian actor orsubtle wink. If characters were openly identified as gay or lesbian on screen,it was most often for a punch line or tragic demise. George Cukor, DorothyArzner, James Whale: they were about fitting in, not standing “out.” Therewere instead gay and lesbian audiences that adopted certain films as theirown, celebrated subtexts and coded language, knew enough gossip to be ableto identify gay and lesbian actors and actresses, and prided themselves atbeing adept enough to read their own desires into the plots. The category wasa relational one, constituted by the interaction of viewers with films.

Gay and lesbian stories, aesthetics, and filmmakers were found elsewherein the avant-garde cinema of the time. The New York filmmakers JamesSibley Watson and Melville Webber were some of the first, with The Fall of theHouse of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933). The American expatriate poetH.D. and her lover Bryher were in Switzerland, where they published the filmjournal Close Up and made Borderline (1930), a feature starring H.D. and PaulRobeson, with Kenneth MacPherson, H.D.’s lover and Bryher’s husband backthen, before he became “gay” (or gayer).

The postwar avant-garde cinema that developed in the United States hasbeen written about at length in terms of its experimentation, aesthetic invention,and modernist sensibility. What’s rarely noted is that this early avantgardeis manifestly a gay cinema (though not lesbian), where artists shut outof other worlds could find expression. Starting in 1947 with Kenneth Anger’sFireworks, the “underground” cinema would grow to include Jack Smith,Gregory Markopoulos, Taylor Mead, George Kuchar, James Broughton,Nathaniel Dorsky, José Rodriguez-Soltero, and the most famous and successfulof them all, Andy Warhol. The official histories of the New American Cinemaas recorded by heterosexual chroniclers don’t take note of the sexualityof so many of its practitioners or link their aesthetics back to the subculturesand traditions to which they paid tribute. Today it is impossible to show Anger’sScorpio Rising (1964) or Markopoulos’s Twice a Man (1963) without facingdisbelief from audiences over how they could have ever not be consideredgay films. The American avant-garde was a very queer place indeed, hiding inplain sight for years until it was safe to come out.

In France too a new cinema was under construction. The most enduringgay film of this period was Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). Based onmemories of prison and its erotic regimes, it would be a major influenceon Todd Haynes and others. More mainstream audiences could turn to theEuropean art cinema, with its long tradition of openly gay filmmakers andfilms. Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) and Death in Venice (1971) andPier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) influenced a generation. Lesbianismwas still a fillip for voyeuristic tastes — Claude Chabrol’s Les Biches (1968) orBernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) — yet films were eagerly adaptedby image-starved lesbian viewers. If hints and glimpses were the currencyof the time, well, gay and lesbian audiences were used to reading betweenthe frames.

After Stonewall

When Gay Liberation arrived, it came hand in hand with the movies. Thelegendary Stonewall Riots started on the night of June 27, 1969. It was theday of Judy Garland’s funeral at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home uptown,which had stayed open the previous night to accommodate the crushof weeping mourners in lines around the block waiting to view the casket andbid their idol goodbye. Garland was a gay icon too, and it’s easy to imaginethat on Judy’s night, butch dykes, nelly queens, and fierce trannies were notgoing to take any bullying by the police who routinely raided gay bars. ForJudy, they fought back. And in that moment, and the day of street fightingthat followed, a new era was born. And with it, a new cinema.

In the United States the gay and lesbian cinema that emerged in the 1970semphasized documentary and experimental work. On the West Coast in1971, Milton Miron’s documentary Tricia’s Wedding (1971) captured the TheCockettes for posterity, and Jim Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971) updated experimentalcinema for the new era. Jan Oxenberg’s A Comedy in Six UnnaturalActs (1975) became a classic of lesbian cinema. In the Bay Area, the filmmakersCurt McDowell (a friend and disciple of George Kuchar) and BarbaraHammer created an aesthetic for the gay and lesbian scene exploding aroundthem in Thundercrack! (1975) and Dyketactics (1974). In 1977 the landmarkdocumentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives was (collectively) released.It was made while Harvey Milk was still alive and the Castro district’sbaths were still steaming.

Despite such West Coast classics, gay cinema would become most firmlybased in New York City, the storied metropolis, where it flourished amidother subcultural arts and figures of its time, from Allen Ginsberg to FrankO’Hara, from Langston Hughes to Djuna Barnes. In fact the history of NewYork City ought to be viewed in terms of its gay and lesbian history as muchas its Italian or Puerto Rican or Irish or Jewish history; gay men and lesbianstoo were immigrants, part of the great domestic migration that left the heartlandfor the coasts in search of a better life.

Audiences had long looked to European cinema for sexual sophistication,and that continued to be the case even after Stonewall, as a gay and lesbiancinema developed there. In 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday was John Schlesinger’scoming out; in 1978 Ron Peck’s Night Hawks uncovered gay London. StephenFrears’s gutsy gay films My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Prick Up Your Ears(1987) opened an era of frankness barely rivaled since. In Germany, R. W.Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Frank Ripploh (Taxi Zum Klo, 1980) were allin their prime. In 1981, when Vito Russo published Celluloid Closet, the fieldwas already changing: an independent American cinema was about to end thebinarism of U.S. filmmaking.

When Christine Vachon started out, she said, “there were extremely experimentalfilms and there were Hollywood films, but there wasn’t a wholelot in between.” Not a lot, no, but there was one. At Sundance in 1988 I wasescorted up a rickety staircase to the Egyptian Theater and settled into a foldingchair next to the projection booth by the festival’s director Tony Safford.It was there I saw the world premiere of John Waters’s Hairspray, the film thatbrought his radically outré sensibility to a mainstream audience. The crowdwent crazy, and Hairspray won the jury’s grand prize. Waters predates theNew Queer Cinema by decades; he’s a creature of the hippie past, the counter-culturalrevolution, a pre-Stonewall era of shock and awe. He’s an indeliblepart of nqc prehistory, a patron saint presiding over its doings, chuckling atits follies, applauding its successes.

John Waters was there first. He and his films were formed by the nutty,exuberant prelapsarian days of the 1970s, after gay liberation, before aids.The trademark Waters style, with its camp sensibility and impatience withboth heteronormativity and homonormativity, is well reflected in the NewQueer Cinema, as if its traits were lying in wait all that time like a recessivegene. A shout-out, then, to the ever-young daddy of us all, the one with theMaybelline moustache, Mr. Waters.

Queering the American Independent Film

If the emergence of an American independent cinema is the fertile groundfrom which the New Queer Cinema will soon leap, then the year 1985 is asclose to its defining moment as any. It was in that year that Susan Seidelman’sDesperately Seeking Susan and Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts thrilled a newgeneration of lesbian audiences and filmmakers and showed it was possibleto make a sexy movie that could be empowering to women and even lesbians,and actually play in theaters, something not taken for granted at the time.

Four other American independent features, all released in the mid-1980s,stand out as precursors to the early New Queer Cinema: Lizzie Borden’s Bornin Flames (1983), Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche (1985), Bill Sherwood’s PartingGlances (1986), and Sheila McLaughlin’s She Must Be Seeing Things (1987). Allfour blazed a trail of formal innovation, queer sexuality, and eccentric narrativethat deeply informed the early NQC filmmakers. All four were low-budgetbroadsides issued to the world by communities of outsiders, laying claim toa new and authentically queer way of being: sexual, a/political, courageous,and, not incidentally, urban.

Lizzie Borden was part of a downtown radical art world that includedAdele Bertei, Cookie Mueller, Kathryn Bigelow, and a host of others. HerBorn in Flames was an exercise in utopian imagining, set in the near futurewith women battling an indifferent state. The women of Radio Ragazza andRadio Phoenix swing into action, fight the powers that be, form bike brigades,and even blow up the transmission tower on the roof of the World TradeCenter. Conceived during the heyday of feminism, it starred Honey, the AfricanAmerican leader of Radio Phoenix and Borden’s partner at the time.Honey’s face dominated the posters for the film, plastered all over the plywoodconstruction walls of lower Manhattan, beaming out at passersby witha defiant, irresistible gaze. Released when Ronald and Nancy Reagan inhabitedthe White House, Born in Flames offered a vision of a different world.The soundtrack came straight out of punk, bands like the Red Crayons andHoney’s own music. With a stirring vision of political organizing and militancy,it was a vicarious experience of battling power in some alternative—andsexy—universe.

At the same time, across the country, Gus Van Sant was back in Portlandafter trying to break into the film industry in L.A. He turned to low-budgetfilmmaking instead, with his debut feature Mala Noche, based on the autobiographicalnovel by Portland’s native son Walt Curtis. Filmed in atmosphericblack-and-white, it focuses on a skid-row universe populated by theeponymous Walt, a down-and-out Anglo store clerk, and the desperate youngMexican workers he meets, lusts after, and tries to get into his bed with $15offers. One of the few films to look at the erotic economics of gay cross-race,cross-class desire, it had a creative intensity at least as powerful as its sexualcharge. A gritty style and a loopy nonlinear narrative defied the bland viewer-friendlymovies of the time, appealing instead to a band of subcultural adventurers.By example, Mala Noche announced how tame gay representationshad been and suggested the potential of the medium to capture life as lived,off-screen, if only filmmakers would dare.

More conventional in form but no less radical in subjects and themes, BillSherwood’s Parting Glances constructed a very different slice-of-life piece ofevidence. Steve Buscemi was Nick, an acerbic no-illusions gay man livingwith aids in a tiny New York City apartment, tended to by his ex-lover. It wasBuscemi’s first starring role, and Sherwood was the first to bring the quotidianrealities of aids to the screen, presenting the horrors of the illness with amatter-of-fact clarity that was the exact opposite of the hysterical demonizingin the newspaper headlines, television news, and government propaganda ofthe time. It was a hugely important film for the city’s gay community, shot in1984 and released in 1986, one year prior to the founding of the aids Coalitionto Unleash Power (ACT UP). Its qualities were those of early independentfilm: unrepresented communities, low-budget rough-hewn production,characters who appeared in daily life but never yet in movies. A gay man withaids certainly fit the bill, especially one who was full of opinions on NewYork’s bars and relationships and hangers-on. He was full of catty cynicismand wary romanticism, with dreams and despair to match. Just like us.

Equally revelatory was the representation of lesbian desire drawn by SheilaMcLaughlin’s She Must Be Seeing Things, which drew its themes from herown life and from the seventeenth-century legend of Catalina de Erauso (the”Lieutenant Nun”), its style from the taboo-breaking work of performancesin a storefront theater in the East Village, near where McLaughlin herselflived. The wow Café’s Lois Weaver starred as Jo, a filmmaker having troublekeeping her girlfriend happy, her life on track, and her cash-strapped film inproduction. Sheila Dabney, a member of the repertory company founded bythe famed Cuban lesbian playwright Irene Fornes, played her paranoid girlfriendAgatha, convinced that Jo is cheating on her with a man in her crew.

Remarkably for a film that today appears so innocent, She Must Be SeeingThings endured the kinds of fights that erupted in the NQC years. It wasdenounced by a cadre of antiporn feminists, including Sheila Jeffreys of GreatBritain. In the United States it divided the crowd by ideology, for it arrivedat the height of the feminist “Sex Wars.” McLaughlin’s film became a case inpoint for both sides and helped lead the way to the new queer representationsthat lurked just around the corner.

All four films were shot in 16mm, a sign of their predigital era. All madeon a shoestring budget, they departed from established aesthetics by goingfor a rough urban look, using friends as actors, using borrowed apartments orlofts for locations, even borrowing passersby for demonstrations and rallies.All four struck a blow for the outcasts, the subcultural heroes and heroineswho’d been waiting so long in the wings.

Life goes on. Bill Sherwood died in 1990 of complications from aids withoutever getting to make another film. Sheila McLaughlin stopped makingfilms; she lives in the same East Village apartment where she shot her film, buttoday she’s one of New York’s best acupuncturists and a terrific photographer.Lizzie Borden made two more films and now lives in L.A., but Honey, herstar and lifelong friend, died of congestive heart failure in the spring of 2010.

Breakthroughs

Harbingers of the NQC had bubbled up throughout the 1980s, as filmmakersstruggled to make sense of the time. Or to make fun of it. In 1987 a little filmtitled Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story made such a brilliant satire ofNixonian pop culture that the filmmaker Todd Haynes became an immediatesensation, though he was just two years out of college. In the same year,Isaac Julien’s This Is Not an aids Advertisement and John Greyson’s The ADSEpidemic struck back at the fear-mongering official campaigns against aids,using the new language of music video. Greyson’s humor and parody usedlyrics as manifesto: “This is not a death in Venice, it’s a clear unholy menace,acquired dread of sex.” Julien’s take was elegiac, a subdued outrage leakingdesire and soliciting dignity.
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