Queer Cinema, Queer Cinemas, and Queer Audiences
How lucky we are to have a queer cinema. To view and learn from a cinema made outside the lines of heteronormative systems and ways of seeing. A cinema with its own politics, its own ideas of desirable subjects. A cinema that takes light, all color (Gilbert Baker gave us the rainbow, after all) and turns it into something, a glow, that a marginalized people can touch.
Queer cinema is a historical object made through seeing an image and recognizing something in it, and naming that image as queer. In 1894, William KL Dickson created the first known film with live recorded sound. It was a failed attempt at synchronized sound. In it, two men dance chest-to-chest beside a man playing the violin and a large conic microphone. When Vito Russo mistakenly referred to the film as The Gay Brothers in his 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, and professed an absolute homosexuality of this 18-second film clip, he queered a vital and fascinating part of cinematic history. Many have rebuked Russo’s eager claim, arguing that the film could not possibly be purposefully gay, because such labels were not commonplace at the time the film was made. But the image is certainly queer, even without the intention of being so. The cinematic image of these two men together connotes an inevitable and eternal truth of queerness as being real. To film an image, to project it, and share it — is to make it real and give it power. As Alexander Doty puts it in the first chapter of his text Making Things Perfectly Queer, “Queer readings aren’t ‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along.”
The first film I ever read as containing queerness was probably Dead Poets Society. The film didn’t contain any explicitly queer content, but as a kid watching Robert Sean Leonard’s character Neil Perry and his friends bounding toward the caves at night to recite poetry, some of them expressing their displeasure at the presence of women at later gatherings, I could only see a bunch of fags. Charlie Dalton’s ease with which he handled a female character’s lipstick, applying it to his face as war paint, and calling himself Nuwanda felt subversive and queer to me, even at a young age. I always remember feeling like Charlie was bisexual.
Neil seemed to me to be pretty clearly coded as gay — his delight at getting the chance to play “the fairy” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his isolation in the wake of his father’s furor over his ambitions of becoming an actor (wanting him instead to be a doctor) and his subsequent suicide when he had become convinced that he would not be able to live the life he knew he needed to. The narrative seemed to be saying, this is a tragic gay character, without ever really saying it.
I watched this film alone. Not in a cinema, but on a TV screen. Cinema, for the most part, can only function in the presence of an audience. When a mass of people look at the same thing at the same time, a variance of meaning and experience is created. Queer cinema is given its shape and validity through these queer readings, but also through its existence as a real location. A queer cinema. One could argue that in viewing the film on my own in my living room as a queer man, I have entered into and built a one-man queer cinema through my reception and interaction with the work. But just as cinema functions through an audience, queerness, at least queer desire and interaction, requires a multiplicity of human beings. This is what shapes community and identity. Masses.
So where could these queer cinemas, these real locations, be found? How are they made? I would argue that a queer cinema is made when queer people come together to view something, whether explicitly queer or otherwise. In forming a queer reading of a work, and discussing and examining what a work of cinema does for collective queerness — this is a queer experience, and a powerful one.
In the 1970s, Samuel Delany found his queer cinemas in Times Square. They’re now propped up in our memories as seedy, swampy Taxi Driver tombstones of a New York City that once was. In the introduction to his text Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany laments the orchestrated disappearance of these places and argues for their conservation via written reports like his:
“With the rush to accommodate the new, much that was beautiful along with much that was shoddy, much that was dilapidated with much that was pleasurable, much that was inefficient with much that was functional, is gone. The idea that all that is going was ugly and awful is as absurd as it would be to propose that what was there was only of any one moral color. What was there was a complex of interlocking systems and subsystems. Precisely at the level where the public could avail itself of the neighborhood, some of those subsystems were surprisingly beneficent — beneficent in ways that will be lost permanently unless people report on their own contact and experience with those subsystems.”
Funnily enough, most of the films screened in these seedy “porno” theaters were aimed toward heterosexual viewers, heterosexual audiences. But the abundance of men in the seats, regardless of their sexuality, nevertheless gave way to the creation of a queer audience. As Delany puts it, “The movies presented a world in which a variety of heterosexual and lesbian acts were depicted regularly, even endlessly, in close-up detail. The only perversion that did not exist in their particular version of pornotopia, save for the most occasional comic touches (and even these would still get a groan from the audience as late as ’86 or ’87), was male homosexuality. But its absence from the narrative space on the screen proper is what allowed it to go on rampantly among the observing audience, now in this theater, now in that one.” By coming together as queer men and responding to whatever was happening on screen, queer cinemas were built. These were essential and now-rare sites of mass public queer activity.
In the 1980s, Barbara Hammer found her queer cinemas in an international tour of all- women screenings of her films. Going from festival to festival, she kept a journal and recorded the many responses that all-women audiences had to her films. On April 7th, 1982, she wrote that in the audience at a “culture center for those with alternative lifestyles” (read: gay) in Vienna, after a screening of her film Multiple Orgasms, one woman described the sensation of viewing the film as “the first time she saw a film with her entire body active, not just her mind.”
For Hammer, engaging in these discussions and posing these questions through her work seemed to leave her feeling encouraged and open- minded. “Most importantly, I note the diversity of attitudes and often contradictory ideas. This great array of views enhances my freedom to continue to make personal decisions, to give permission to my preferences without analytical judgment, and to continue to do what pleases me as a film artist, lesbian, and feminist. Maybe one way for all of us to learn from each other and see our differences and similarities is by watching our response to the same piece of art.”
In the case of the “porno theaters” of Times Square, what was happening in the audience as a response to these films was a formation of queer desire and activity. However, this activity was almost exclusively of a physical nature. Hammer had found something different by the 80s: a queer audience willing to go beyond having the sensorial and erotic experience of viewing these films into having discussions and debates about it.
By the 90s, a cinematic practice and school of thought known as “New Queer Cinema” was beginning to take hold. Now queerness was beginning to converge with mainstream cinema. The movie theatre was becoming the queer cinema. There were an abundance of film festivals that focused on queer content — some entirely devoted to LGBT cinema. Festivals were becoming the site of groundbreaking queer work and discussion.
B. Ruby Rich describes the scene on the ground in her text New Queer Cinema: Director’s Cut: “There, suddenly, was a flock of films doing something new, renegotiating subjectivities, annexing whole genres, revising histories in their image.” Queer cinema was entering new territory — telling new stories in new ways. And the filmmakers were not content with just making their work and showing it. They wanted to investigate what the work meant in a broader context — how it fit in with modern queer politics and ideas. To me, it seems that this was the zenith of engagement within queer cinema. Gender, politics, aesthetics and artistic investigation were at the forefront of these festivals. There was a dialogue between queer filmmakers and filmgoers of different generations. An effort was apparently being made to build a cinema that would last.
Things look different in our current age. The utopian, community- oriented dream of the festivals of the 1990s has seemingly come and gone. Streaming has killed off the audience as a mass group. At at time when both queerness and cinema have taken on much more fluid and ambiguous forms, it has become more difficult, seemingly less important, to get everybody to sit down together and watch a movie. The conversation around queer cinema is different now. The public is pretending it is a new phenomenon. Nobody tells them otherwise. It is not altogether impossible in the current day to form these cinemas, however. All hope is not lost.
I found queer cinema at Bard College. Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks and then his Scorpio Rising. Back to back, on my birthday, in an avant-garde cinema class my freshman year. I cried through Fireworks — met for the first time with something so crystal-clear and invincible, overwhelmed by the site of flexing muscles and urinals. I saw myself in scrawny Kenneth Anger, cradled in the arms of a large, God-like sailor. I watched blood drip from his face, Christlike passion — nightmares, desire, all of it. Before the film’s beginning, Anger says in a voiceover, “In Fireworks, I released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream.” I watched the dream of queerness presented to me through the screen. A dream made actual, made possible. And then Scorpio Rising — tears dried, grinning throughout. I never knew such perversions, such radical images, could exist. This work, I would learn, birthed nearly every single movie I had ever loved.
I spent the last few months of my time in college in a course called Queer Cinema. With a group of queer classmates, together we formed an audience and responded to different films. Each week we inched our way toward something close to what had been accomplished in the 1990s. Sitting in the dark of the theatre, feeling safe in our camaraderie, our shared identity — I watched my classmates transformed by the experience of viewing queer cinema. I watched them learn about their own history. I watched their minds work differently, approaching new ideas and new images. Confounded, disgusted, enraptured, stimulated.
We are a people lucky enough to watch our existences become validated, our histories recorded. We have made an art out of our living. This must continue. We must build more queer cinemas, and encourage their existences — in major cities and in small towns. In houses and classrooms, and so on. We must come together as a queer people, engaged with and in a practice of cinema.
