“The queer present negotiates with the past, knowing full well that the future is at stake,” scholar B. Ruby Rich wrote in a landmark essay for The Village Voice in 1992.
Rich, who first described the genre of New Queer Cinema in that essay and has been its preeminent chronicler ever since, clearly sensed how crucial the moment was for queer film. AIDS was ravaging the LGBTQ+ community, Reaganism had created and accelerated socioeconomic devastation for those most at risk, and neoconservatism was baring its fangs. On the surface, it might have seemed like a difficult time to launch a queer film movement. But paradoxically, artists wanted to exorcise their pain, hurt, and, most of all, fury. They put that pain on screen in what remains one of the most productive eras for LGBTQ+ cinema in history.
Todd Haynes’ Poison and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning had premiered at Sundance the year before Rich’s essay, both to accolades. Video artist and former Le Tigre founding member Sadie Benning was experimenting with video at the festival, alongside Tom Kalin’s queering of Leopold and Loeb in Swoon. Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston sought to queer Langston Hughes’ work. At Rich’s now-legendary Barbed Wire Kisses panel — a seminal conversation between critics and filmmakers that was the subject of a recent New York Times retrospective — this infant cinematic form began to take on definition and shape.
This wave of films, which were released mostly on the festival circuit from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s, were (to borrow from the internet) not “gay” as in “happy” but “queer” as in “fuck you.” Films like Rose Treche’s Go Fish and Gregg Araki’s The Living End helped solidify a grammar and style that drew from both avant-garde and populist genre works; they aimed to examine, deconstruct, and pillory heteronormative ideas about cinematic aesthetics and social politics.
AIDS, marginalization, class, race, conservative politics, and social alienation were all on the table, visually vivisected to craft new stories and experimental fever dreams alike. These were cinematic kicks to the face — fresh, angry, campy, and incendiary. They connected systematic oppression, the politics of identity, and a history of subversion, combining them into a new form.
Thirty years after Rich’s article, the legacy of the New Queer Cinema can still be felt in films like Sean Baker’s Tangerine, Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, and Janicza Bravo’s Zola. Shortly before Sundance 2022, them. spoke with Rich, a great traverser of the festival circuit, about what’s changed since 1992 and where the energy for the queer film movement can be found today.
What made the New Queer Cinema possible was an ecosystem of cheap rent and democratized access to art-making tools. We have an incredible array of tools at our disposal now, but the economic context has changed quite dramatically. Do you think that such a radical moment like New Queer Cinema could come to exist today?
I wonder… I think it would have to be an extraordinary group of people, perhaps. It used to be that if you lived in New York, everyone that you wanted to know lived within 10 square blocks. When I was still teaching, I used to try to convince students, don’t go to LA, don’t go to New York, pick a spot on the map, where there used to be a factory [or something] and where it’s now abandoned, and derelict, and get all your friends and go there and buy the buildings and fix them up, and get a website and start your own online gallery, and make that the place that other people will want to come.
I think the economy of the world, and the United States in particular, has been so distorted. I mean, people like to talk about late capitalism, but I think we’re living in neofeudalism. Now, the tools are cheap, so if you can get a group of people, then I think you could still do it. The dilemma is that now, there’s such competition for attention. We were in that sweet spot when suddenly it became cheaper to make work.
So much of your original New Queer Cinema article has the diaristic quality of being there with artists and audiences and discovering the new. Are you able to still find that joy of discovery on the festival circuit these days?
It’s hard, but you know, I live for that. That’s it. If I find one film that I’m thrilled about at a festival, then I’m happy. There’s a short film that’s at Sundance, a Brazilian lesbian fantasia, called A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here [directed and written by Érica Sarmet], and it’s deliberately quoting the Adrienne Rich poetry collection of A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. It’s very sexy, about a group of young lesbian and nonbinary Brazilian party kids who pick up this aging dyke on her motorcycle, who hasn’t had any fun in years, and scoop her up and take her home with them. It has that New Queer Cinema energy.
Do you remember the feeling that you experienced when you were observing these various videos and experimental films that were coalescing into what would become the New Queer Cinema?
I guess it really started in the late ’80s, even though I wrote the piece in ’92. Isaac Julien had just made Looking for Langston, which showed at the New York Film Festival, and the sound had to be turned off in the middle because the Langston Hughes estate had threatened the festival with an injunction. I was sitting there with the sound being turned off, and Hughes speaking, and no words coming out of his mouth. [It] was just wonderful, breaking the rules and bringing all these different ways of telling a story into it.
These are the AIDS years, the Bush/Reagan years. [They were] also the crack years in New York. And the heroin years, which never went away. The sense of urgency that I think fueled a movement was really this sense of emergency, and you didn’t have a language for it. And so you had to invent language, whether that was in film, music, literature, poetry. The way this happened in film, I thought, was just terrific.
So much of New Queer Cinema and its ability to embody the queer spirit lies in its ability to really challenge the status quo — to articulate a sense of rebellion against the very institutions that often shut queer people out. How do you think queer cinema’s relationship to the institution has changed over time?
Well, we got in the front door, right? We don’t have to go through the service entrance anymore. And that always makes people a little bit conservative. You know, dress right and use the right fork. It probably had a blunting influence on that radical edge of it. But [then there’s] somebody like Andrew Ahn, who's [part of] a new generation.
You’ve written about the conflict between your taste as a critic and the demands of what the community wants. Is there a particular work that best exemplifies that conflict for you?
The film that I got into so many fights over was Go Fish, which I loved, and had such a hard time convincing anyone to love. There was a really uninteresting commercial version lesbian film around the same time called Bar Girls that I thought was pretty boring. And all of these young lesbians loved that one and Go Fish, because it was black-and-white and experimental, [they would say,] “What was the point?” and all of that. So I had a lot of fights about that.
You’ve also written that the “next stage” will depend on “the willingness of queer publics to be both accepting and demanding.” Do you think they are willing?
I think they’re more accepting than demanding. When people have been starved for images and haven’t seen their own stories, [they] are willing to accept a wild divergence of forms; they’re willing to accept very experimental work like Poison, or Swoon, or Go Fish. Maybe they’re willing to work much harder as an audience to engage with work, when they have a stake in it. Then as soon as that push gets commodified, and gets funded, and earns a place in the marketplace, and starts getting brought out every season, they’re no longer willing to do that. Then they want it to be in nice, digestible, bite-sized pieces. And I think the work gets much more conservative.
And full of “positive images.”
Yep. Well, they always want positive images. Except for that one moment, when we wanted negative ones, we wanted the villains, and we wanted monsters. This isn’t that kind of moment.
What should we as queer audiences be looking for in terms of new language for queer cinema?
Well, I think you need something inspiring, we’re in very dark times. So somebody has to be able to kick the wall out; you need something that’s going to jolt you into some joy or fury. But what would that be? I’m not sure what that would be. We have to rise to this moment that it can’t just be about sexuality anymore, right? There has to be a common cause because there's a common enemy. And one of the people that I held up as giving me a vision of what things could be like was Janelle Monáe [and her video] “Pynk”, which I think is so incredible. I think we’re in a moment when people are too scared to have that flexibility, fluidity, [and] openness. So maybe some other people could be open to, like, shouts of liberation and joy. You know, who knows?
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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