Opengender

New Queer Cinema was a term coined in 1992, the year following the watershed of New Black Cinema, in which several independent films with gay themes were launched. Much verbiage has been devoted to trying to figure out what — besides a sudden upsurge in production and relative mainstream recognition — distinguished these films as a genre (or aesthetic type). Gay filmmaking, up until the 1990s, had been divided by critics into pre- and post-Stonewall periods. Pre-Stonewall depicted bravura camp quivering on the surface of tormented exile and bravely transcendent love. Post-Stonewall gay films depicted a new, positive-images, confidence in being gay. Two strands might be said now to distinguish queer from gay (or post-Stonewall) cinema: in its rush to distance itself from stereotypical, effeminate torment, the politicised gay aesthetic had ditched its pre-Stonewall past with a shudder. Part of queer's reaction to the gay-liberation politics of the 1970s was to seek a new rapprochement with this painful history.

Haynes' reworking of Genet in Poison (1991) won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize but was fed into right-wing reactionary campaigns against public funding being made available to openly homosexual projects (Abramowitz, 1996: 85). Queer politics, however, revelled in confrontation, where gay liberation had hoped to disarm it. Gay politics had suppressed any suggestion that homosexuals were in any way tortured, or experienced themselves as abjected, in order to achieve a culture of self-esteem for gay people. Gradually, an increasing confidence gained through these gay strategies fostered an acknowledgement that it was counter-intuitive to suggest that the oppression of homosexuality had produced no negative psychological effects at all. Films such as Kalin's Swoon (1992) worked a more complex articulation of a cause célébre of homophobic representation. The Leopold-Loeb child-murder case in the 1920s had spawned two Hollywood thrillers: Rope (1948) and Compulsion (1959), both of which represented homosexuality as homicidal perversion (see Okewole's interview with Kalin in the programme for ICA's New Queer Cinema conference, 1992:8). The success of queer and black cinemas facilitated, in turn, the financing of more diverse forms of queer cinema. In 1993, The Wedding Banquet, an Asian-American-directed queer feature, was the most profitable film of the year relative to its production cost (Murphy, 1994: 94).

The institutionalisation of queer cultural production has generated counter-discourses from within. Queercore, or homocore, fused the form of punky fanzines with gay pornographic imagery. LaBruce was involved in producing queercult pornographic magazines and no-budget 8mm films in Toronto. These are major determinants of both the style of his films and their ironical urge to èpater the bourgeois. LaBruce looked back with gleeful humour at queers' gay avant-garde predecessors, combining homage and satire on the influence of gay pornography in forming the gay film aesthetic in general and Warhol's underground filmmaking of the 1960s in particular. Warhol was known for, amongst other things, trashing the boundary between high-art and popular culture and for the manufacture of celebrity — with cynical irony turning himself and the bunch of disfunctional transsexuals and queers who hung around his Factory into 20th-century icons as well as highly marketable commodities. In Super 8½, LaBruce wickedly sends up Warhol's transubstantiation of the abject gay underground to art-world celebrity by fictionalising his own life as a queercore filmmaker. The exploitation of the dead-beat hustler by the rich and closeted art-world is reframed in contemporary terms. But La Bruce also exhibits a form of queer nostalgia for the camp exhibitionism of the mythical avant-garde:

I sometimes wish the homosexual world were still like this — the furtive signals, the hidden signs, the unanalysed affectations that suggest rather than proclaim deviation. I suppose I'm an anachronism, a throwback, but at times I imagine myself more at home in the thirties or forties, surreptitiously, or perhaps brazenly entering a movie theater with my special friend to watch a Cocteau movie, our flamboyant style alone causing people on the street outside to speak in hushed tones. (LaBruce, 1995: 191)

It would seem that it was actually a new readiness on the part of the mainstream to recirculate homosexual imagery which distinguished queer filmmaking, as much as its relatively upfront confrontation with 'repression' (after all, Anger's Fireworks and Genet's Un Chant D'Amour were both banned in the 1940s and 1950s for their 'explicitness' – as noted in Dyer, 1990: 47, 118). This was not merely a question of changing public sensibilities — Genet's film is pretty explicit by any standards. Of a conversation with a friend in the early 1990s, LaBruce remarked:

[H]e tells me I should direct the marketing for my new movie towards a 'regular' audience, and steer clear of the ghettoisation of the gay and lesbian film festival circuit. I'm at a bit at a loss to think how an explicit movie about a washed-up gay porno star who is shown sucking a lot of cocks and getting fucked up the ass could appeal to a heterosexual crowd, but I guess you can market anything these days. And you know, somehow I think he's right. (LaBruce, 1995: 191-2)