For Heat and Light and Outrageousness
- For Heat and Light and Outrageousness
Where to start? There is so much to do. I want to see the lesbian family drama where the kids aren’t all right. I want the road movie to challenge Kerouac forever, dykes on bikes having adventures in fifties Amerika. I want the cheating wife in the Mad Men world, hot in love with the neighbor. I want queer stories across the spectrum, up and down Brokeback Mountain and every other peak and valley. I want us on TV on our own terms. I want the Barney Frank story starring . . . George Clooney! I want John Waters to make a movie again. And Rose Troche, too. And Lizzie Borden. And Alex Sichel. I want Lucrecia Martel to be as famous as her producer Pedro Almodóvar. I want queer work that breaks out of the market’s suffocating genre traps and tired plot points to bring us heat and light and newer queer cinema, all at once, all over again, like nothing before and after and forever.
B. Ruby Rich is a professor of social documentation in the film and digital media department at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement was published by Duke University Press in 1998 and New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut in 2013, also by Duke. Her career in film exhibition includes positions and programs at the Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago, New York State Council on the Arts, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and other institutions. Effective July 1, she is the editor of Film Quarterly (University of California Press).
