To Dye[r] For

Dear Richard,

You have just sent me one of your legendary postcards, men in kilts at the urinal this time, prodding me unwittingly to finish converting my SCMS tribute (roast?) from last March, ineptly titled "To Dye[r] for: From Gay to Queer?," into a sober epistolary contribution to Cinema Journal.

There were eleven of us, and we each had to stake out our small parcel of territory. I had no trouble choosing Gays and Film, since your pioneering seventy-three-page first book from 1977 (you call it a "pamphlet," but I call it the Bible) had such a paradigm-shifting effect on both the discipline and my career.¹ That lavender volume, whose ragged cover featuring a washed-out Garbo-in-drag still from Queen Christina (Reuben Mamoulian, 1933), survived almost forty years of attrition on my bookshelf and highlighted my PowerPoint at SCMS, for it had been the spark that led us to meet that same year in New York, thanks to my fan letter, and the rest is histoire.

I guess the question of pamphlet or book is moot: this volume had the timeless impact of many much longer books as it went through a 1980 reprint (with the cover, still lavender, this time haunted not by a pale Garbo but by a larger-than-life Edwige Feuillère from the French boarding-school potboiler Olivia [Jacqueline Audry, 1951], which only you had seen), and then a 1984 revised US edition (which cruelly took the lesbians off the cover), each time with the filmography enlarged. You went on to produce extrapolations of your own 1977 chapter, your essay on stereotypes, in 1979 and 1983 and reprinted them both in your 1993 anthology, and they haven't aged a nanosecond.²

Figure 1.

Well-worn cover of Richard Dyer's Gays and Film (1977), collection of the author.

Why did Gays and Film change my life and our discipline? For one thing this work was the first concretization of gay liberation politics in book form in our discipline. As I launched my teaching career in 1976, with more than one foot in the closet both to my teachers and to most of my cohorts at Columbia and Concordia, your book put an end not only to this glaring contradiction in my intellectual life but also to the contradiction in our discipline, the silent lavender elephant in the room. Your book was profoundly political, and this crystallized in four ways.

The first is editing as politics. In the year of Anita Bryant and the repeal of a gay rights ordinance in Dade County and, across the pond, the tide of Thatcherism (remember the hate campaign directed against the National Film Theatre season of films on homosexuality that was the occasion for your BFI-published volume?), you knew that coalitional politics, the convergence of identities and points of view, were what was required. Your brilliance as editor, recruiting the very different Caroline Sheldon and Jack Babuscio as contributors, matched your strategic skill at matchmaking and alliances. The three essays and your introduction had in common not only their political urgency but also their transformation of gay cinephilia and fan culture into scholarship, yet scholarship that was community-focused and elegantly grassroots-accessible (as your work has never ceased to be).

Second is gender parity as politics (or the "lesbian" in "lesbian and gay"). The presence of Garbo on your cover, it is important to remember, was explicitly and intentionally political as well; no doubt your principled insistence on gender parity in this and subsequent work was carried over from your membership in the all-male Gay Left, the London activist and intellectual group whose biannual journal was both dogmatically feminist and very much in the vanguard of the emerging subfield of gay film criticism.³ At a time when so-called lesbian separatism and gay male sexism had splintered and torpedoed many same-sex intellectual initiatives, you were among the few men who dared to speak on lesbian film—with both humility and honesty—paving the way for the...