Queer Relay

Crossing Over

In April 2006, at Anthology Film Archives in New York, I ran into the distinguished writer, artist, and cultural producer Sarah Schulman during the MIX-NY Queer Experimental Film and Video Festival. Schulman asked what had brought me to MIX, and I explained that I’d come to see a program of shorts that included the writer-director Liza Johnson’s 2005 Desert Motel. As fieldworker and script supervisor, I had joined Johnson’s crew on Desert Motel to write about queer film-making at the interstices of industry and independent resources and aesthetics. “Ah,” said Schulman, “crossover dreaming!” It was a valuable response, one that left me a little defensive on Johnson’s behalf and that quickly exposed my anxieties about a queerness defiled by markets and commerce. It equally exposed my contrasting fantasy of a cultural milieu answering only to queer sexual and political impulses.

Weeks later, Schulman’s and my exchange had me grasping for crystallizations that resist that ideological split, a split that Schulman herself has had to negotiate as novelist, archivist, and playwright.¹ In the queer case, crossover dreaming signifies a spatial and cultural polarity between a queer here that is pure and sequestered and thus makes outsiders want in and some denizens want out, and a nonqueer there, mixed, polluted, driven by capital and cultural normativity, both morally compromised and the target of recognition and success—a dream, after all, not conscription.

Were I to recount my own history with the idea of crossover dreams, it would probably begin with Rubén Blades’s film of the same title (USA; 1985) about making it as a Latino salsa performer in the Anglo-American mainstream of popular music. But the polarities themselves evoke a centuries-long standoff between art and commerce, a standoff reinvested with moral depth when the differences are not purely aesthetic (when are they ever purely aesthetic?) but mindfully political. This is certainly true in the queer case, even more so as the conscious, marketable presence of queer cultural forms displaces their coded or haunting one in the history of commercial cultural production. Such an effect—of crossover tension and anxiety—is especially heightened when what once was haunting becomes the hook, as in the feverish and repressed love between Jack and Ennis in the film version of Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, USA; 2005)—a hook aesthetically celebrated, liberally welcomed, and politically misrecognized. Along with many critics, Brokeback’s director and male leads (Lee, Heath Ledger, and Jake Gyllenhaal, respectively) claimed that the film spoke to anyone stricken by the loss and grief of deep but unnavigable love or the sadness of a closed and troubled soul. But Brokeback drew many to something more particular, to its image of sexual and emotional urgency and its raw and tender physicality between two men perilously in love in rural Wyoming of the 1960s, a distinctly queer effect available in the film but missing from mainstream publicity.

When the cultural costs of commercial representation include another round of anxious marketing at queer expense, renewed accolades to nonqueer actors for brave gay performances (when queer actors can count on effacement, not reciprocity, for playing straight characters), and little opportunity to explore the queer foundations of American culture save when queers are shopping or dying, it is no wonder that “crossover dreaming” stirs up the defensiveness that Schulman’s comment drew from me. But alongside the histories of exclusion and aggression that make queer political and cultural distrust sensible, in their own way queer skepticism and anxiety about crossover sustain—at queer expense—the opposition between queer and not queer.

Can we produce a different critique? One whose primary move is not to rush in with self-preserving refusal at the first or last sign of queer encounter with nonqueer market culture? In the interest of a different kind of self-preservation, can we resist what, borrowing from Michel Foucault, I call the commercial repressive hypothesis, the idea that for queer culture, politics, and sexuality, the history of commerce is a history of repression? So often it is, but trading in dismissals of Queer Eye...