The term “New Queer Cinema” has, on its surface, a fairly simple definition: almost exclusively independent, the genre is mostly concerned with diversifying queer stories and exploring alternative relationship models – polyamory, BDSM, and occasionally even romances which are perceived as transgressive (for example, lesbian or gay romance stories set during a time in which being homosexual was a crime). Although the genre has existed since the earliest days of cinema, the point at which the New Queer Cinema genre really took off was with the works of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
The most notable early ones of Fassbinder’s films are the lesbian drama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and the social realist film Fox and his Friends (1975). From there, the genre had brief forays into the mainstream, mostly due to the controversy created by telling stories which encapsulated the realities of being homosexual. William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), which tells the story of a serial killer hunting gay men in New York’s leather scene, and the detective, played by Al Pacino, who is tasked with entering that world to apprehend him. The film was rejected and panned by most critics and met with derision by the LGBT+ community at the time, but has since become a moderate cult classic.
All of this culminated in the nineties with the works of Gregg Araki, who is most well-known for his drama Mysterious Skin, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This film is somewhat different from his other works, which live at a strange intersection between various hard genres and racy relationship dramas. Their entire purpose is to explore the aforementioned alternative relationship models, and those films, with their cheap cobbled-together aesthetic and loose plots, became some of the most influential films of the ‘90s. It would be unfair not to cite Lana and Lily Wachowski’s 1996 erotic thriller Bound as an influence on some of those films, too, namely the films Ken Park, Shortbus and the French film Baise-moi.
Since the 90s, queer cinema has changed somewhat. Though the mainstream still doesn’t really allow the diversity it does straight romance, queer people have transitioned from being tragic figures, like the characters of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain (2005) to ones with identities beyond their sexuality like Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy (2014) and Luca Guadagnino’s Call me by your Name (2017): these films allow people to be queer in ways that are not hampered by any familial or social tensions. These films may not be as provocative or daring as the films that influenced them, but they do represent a sea change in mainstream attitudes towards queer cinema. In some ways they are less taboo than they used to be. Despite that, those films are few and far between.
In 1934, the Hays’ Code would result in Hollywood effectively outlawing homosexuality from its films, resulting in those relationships being ‘coded. In the mainstream, most queer stories have diverged into two separate categories: the tragic story, which has existed for decades, and the one in which they are sidelined or otherwise reduced to comic relief, rendering them less nuanced than films which were produced in Pre-Code Hollywood or the alternative cinema landscape. This phenomenon is present in everything from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) to Lady Bird (2017). The effect of this is that the characters have been adapted to become palatable to mainstream audiences: it seems as if the more provocative or detailed the queer characters are, the less suited to a big-budget piece of entertainment they become.
As a result of this, mainstream queer cinema has become a genre for people who are on the outside looking in: watching the films, you’re seeing something which is closer to a concept than a fully formed character; even characters like the titular Simon in Love, Simon only exist to highlight the idea that being queer is neither controversial nor incorrect, but in alternative genres like New Queer Cinema, this is something that goes without saying, which allows film-makers to explore other facets of queer life, and represent them onscreen as they are in real life.
The only upside of those films existing so far from the mainstream is that many of them are easily available online; some are available to rent cheaply on Amazon Prime and others are completely out of print, but have been uploaded to the internet by fans of the director. The Living End (1992) and Nowhere (1997) are both available on archive.org. If you want to experience some queer cinema a little off the beaten track, there’s no better place to start than with Gregg Araki.
Image Credit: The MovieDB
