Still New, Still Queer, Still Cinema?

Queer Cinema: The Film Reader , Edited by Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, New York: Routledge, 2004. viii + 242 pp.

New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader , Edited by Michele Aaron, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. xiii + 204 pp.

Queer Cinema Is Back!"—so trumpeted the cover of the Advocate on April 26, 2005, a full five years after B Ruby Rich, who coined the phrase New Queer Cinema, had declared the co-opting of the movement into "just another niche market" by the dominant culture.¹ The brash pronouncement from the only national gay and lesbian newsmagazine in America followed the appearance the year before of a movie called Eating Out, a college comedy said to herald the new wave, and the cover features the film's three young male stars arrayed in comely poses with the usual combination of lean beefcake, distended biceps, hooded goo-goo eyes, high-fashion grunge, and carefully applied hair gel. As an added bonus, one of the three is even really queer, the accompanying text advises us; the other two are just "playing gay," and they recall that experience in their interviews with a semihysterical pseudoequanimity that whisks you right back to those unmourned days of yore when Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin in 1982 talked about their screen kiss in Making Love with a weird mix of laid-back bonhomie and outright panic. If this is what queer cinema amounts to, then one can only wish that it had stayed away, and Rich's concern that it has devolved into just another product line is well founded.

What had seemed to be a movement, Rich wrote in her cranky elegy, turned out to be only a moment, that brief window of a few years when the energies of queer theory, the furies of AIDS activism, the legacies of independent and avant-garde filmmaking, and the schisms of postmodern identity politics came together in a bluster of cultural production fierce enough to persuade the devoutest skeptic that something was afoot. The wave of queer texts over a period of months in 1991 and 1992 included Poison, Swoon, Paris Is Burning, Tongues Untied, Edward II, My Own Private Idaho, The Living End, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dyke, R.S.V.P., Mano Destra, Flaming Ears, Young Soul Rebels, The Making of Monsters, The Meeting of Two Queens, and, for a few years, dozens more—films, videos, multimedia performances dedicated so fervently to realizing certain facets of poststructural theory in artistic and political practice that their ancillary effects of demonstrating revived capacities for outrageousness and renewed abilities to outrage in modern media seemed only by-products of a larger commitment.

New Queer Cinema was not the first film movement to find inspiration in theory, but, drawing on a particularly vehement strain of social constructionism, it was the first to make questions of sexual identity its defining influence, and probably for that reason it existed from the start in a relation to dominant culture more fraught than that of most vanguard movements. Emerging from an oppositional politics, it arose in a popular medium, raising from the outset concerns among its partisans about its ability to retain an adversarial, critical position. No movement can stay "new" for long, but the question of whether this one could stay queer, against the forces of Hollywood, was a pressing one from Rich's first—and decidedly more optimistic—essay on the subject in 1992.² That cinema itself, in the years since Rich wrote that essay, has faced challenges to its primacy from video and digital media is a circumstance that could only exacerbate such definitional problems.

Two new books on queer cinema gather a heady range of writing on the topic into complementary volumes that serve alternately, and in varying ways, as manifestos, calls to arms, and postmortems. Both take up at length, from various perspectives, the fate of...