Cinema
from the Editor
July 2024
Back in the mid-to-late 80s, when I co-edited a queer punk fanzine called J.D.s that helped spearhead the queercore movement, we published an issue dedicated to “queer” cinema. It covered underground, experimental, and avant-garde films with overtly political queer content, as well as more mainstream films representative of the ways in which the cultural zeitgeist habitually portrayed queer characters as perverts, criminals, or even monsters, often to entertaining effect. Although not traditionally expressing a camp sensibility, J.D.s had an appreciation for these grotesque or distorted representations of “queers”, treating them less as insulting or injurious and more as empowering and politically useful.
At the same time, I became a member of the original editorial collective of the publication CineAction, subtitled “a magazine of radical film criticism.” The group was comprised of film professors and graduate students at York University spearheaded by critic Robin Wood, whose 1978 Film Comment essay, “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic” made waves. In that essay, Wood, who had come out as gay later in life after living a closeted existence with a wife and family, famously interpolated his personal life into his criticism, laying bare his soul in the service of popular critique. Wood’s humanistic approach, influenced by literary critic F.R. Leavis and characterized by an appreciation of art that was beneficial to society, was somewhat at odds with my own. At J.D.s, we had a punk/anarchistic streak — a situationist-influenced ethos that was far more interested in deconstructing and tearing down the existing superstructures than participating in them, no matter how ambivalently.
Today, I find myself in that in-between space, embracing what William Blake referred to as “contraries”: the necessity of embracing the contradictions in human nature in order to make progress. As an artist and filmmaker, my work is sometimes experimental or avant-garde, dismantling or exploding conventions of art and society and leaning in, like the situationists, toward surrealism and Dadaism. In other instances, I work with conventional forms, though still attempting to twist them around. At times, I find myself identifying as queer, both politically and aesthetically, and participating in and exhibiting my work in (wo)manifestly queer contexts; other times I eschew such easy identification and resist the temptation to reduce everything to identity politics.
When I do deign to identify, sometimes it’s as a “gay man” with a more “old-school” gay spirit — camp, hauteur, political incorrectness, sarcasm, melodrama — and sometimes it’s as a more sincere queer with a penchant for social justice, political solidarity, diversity, and class consciousness. In my “The In-Between” column in this issue of Queer Majority, I explore my contradictory pull between making full-on hardcore pornography too graphic to be taken seriously as “art”, and making sexually explicit films that are far too “arty” to be considered pornography. These are all contradictions I don't merely “live with” — they are, for me, essential to making meaningful and personally satisfying work.
As editor of the “Cinema” issue of Queer Majority, I reached out to a number of my film colleagues and artistic peers, asking each to write something about cinema that elucidates their perception of queerness.
Featured artist Slava Mogutin, who is currently exhibiting a compilation of films and videos under the banner “Gay Propaganda”, speaks to queer art that has been censored or banned — whether by the PC left, the reactionary right or through the self-censorship and shadow-banning enacted by social media. The art curator and writer Bradford Nordeen, for his part, embodies the contradictions of old- and new-school gay/queer sensibilities better than anyone. Bradford interviews Slava and also contributes a lovely, personal piece of his own on the importance of video stores of the past in his burgeoning queer education.
In our cover story, sensational trans writer/filmmaker Vera Drew grants us extraordinary access to her artistic process and legal tribulations in making her breakout feature film, The People’s Joker (2022). The great filmmaker Julián Hernández, one of the leading voices of new Mexican cinema, contributes a heartfelt piece on the advent of LGBT representation in his country, and dares filmmakers to “move beyond the label of ‘queer cinema’ in order to reach broader audiences.”
For the issue’s featured interview, I spoke to the wonderful Brazilian queer filmmaker Gustavo Vinagre about his quest to push the conventional boundaries of cinema to include non-binary representation, pornography, and alternative approaches. Travis Jeppesen, senior editor of Artforum magazine, pens an essay on the subversive cinema of Malaysian film master Tsai Ming-liang. Zheng Yi Sung writes a “scene report” about queer cinema in Taiwan. QM columnist Talia Squires explores her pregnancy through movies such as Bridget Jones, Mad Max, and Venom. Award-winning Cuban-American filmmaker Anna Margarita Albelo, who is also profiled separately, discusses how Barbra Streisand’s Yentl (1983) was the queer anthem she needed as a lesbian teen in 1980s Miami.
And of course, the issue showcases the regular Queer Majority series such as the Business of Sex and Painted Stories, featuring filmmaker/writer Brontez Purnell, intimacy coordinators Lidia Ravviso and Laura Desiree, the nomadic sound designer Manuela Schininá, and acclaimed trans actress Gabrielle Tremblay.
In keeping with my “training” as both a queer punk and gay (recovering) academic, I’ve tried to curate a broad and diverse range of voices in my selection of contributors. I’ve also tried to encourage expression that questions the presuppositions of both the dominant order that so often tries to squelch us, and those sticky orthodoxies that govern the unruly realm of sexual difference. As queer cinema is more vibrant and influential than ever, I humbly offer a small cross-section that I consider politically, aesthetically, and spiritually on point!
Published in Issue XII: Cinema