Screening Queer Memory

LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television

Anamarija Horvat

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350187672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In Screening Queer Memory, Anamarija Horvat examines how LGBTQ history has been represented on-screen, and interrogates the specificity of queer memory. She poses several questions: How are the pasts of LGBTQ people and communities visualised and commemorated on screen? How do these representations comment on the influence of film and television on the construction of queer memory? How do they present the passage of memory from one generation of LGBTQ people to another? Finally, which narratives of the queer past, particularly of the activist past, are being commemorated, and which obscured? Horvat exemplifies how contemporary British and American cinema and television have commented on the specificity of queer memory - how they have reflected aspects of its construction, as well as participated in its creation. In doing so, she adds to an under-examined area of queer film and television research which has privileged concepts of nostalgia, history, temporality and the archive over memory. Films and television shows explored include Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996), Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine (1998), Joey Soloway's Transparent (2014-2019), Matthew Warchus' Pride (2014) and Tom Rob Smith's London Spy (2015).

Part One

Queer memories of the screen

An older man, demonstrably serious, walks into a cinema. He is a writer by profession and has just purchased tickets for an E. M. Forster adaptation, but as he sits in the darkness, he begins to doubt if he is in the right place. On screen, a group of young voyeurs gather in front of the dorm room window, watching unabashedly as two women undress. Behind them, a short-haired woman, overweight and lesbian-coded, catches sight of this and rushes to attack them. ‘This isn’t E.M. Forster!’, exclaims the writer. The scene’s humour stems from its incongruity; the movie is crude, its characters are crass, and the older man most definitely should not be there. And yet, just as he gets up to leave the cinema, Jason Priestley appears on screen. Struck by the young man’s beauty, the writer stays and returns the next day to see the film again. Soon enough, he has seen all of Priestley’s films, each of which is a similar example of B movie trash cinema, and is collecting newspaper clippings about him. Shortly after, he leaves London and attempts to track Priestley down in the United States. This is the plot of Richard Kwietniowski’s film Love and Death on Long Island (1996), which stars John Hurt as the aforementioned writer and revolves around his obsession with the up-and-coming actor. While not a film directly concerned with the matter of queer memory, it nonetheless deals with the specificity of queer spectatorship and fandom. Through depicting Hurt’s fascination with Priestley, it also depicts his entrance into a type of cinema he would not otherwise have considered or taken seriously. All of the films he watches are relentlessly heteronormative and yet, for him, they reflect his own queerness.

Like Hurt’s character, LGBTQ people have a long history of repurposing heterosexist media.¹ In his book Gay Men at the Movies: Cinema, Memory and the History of a Gay Male Community (2016), Scott McKinnon recounts his own similar experience of engaging with heteronormative film in a queer way.² ‘I remember’, he writes, ‘with perhaps only slight exaggeration, that I almost wore out the tape on the video of the film Lethal Weapon (1987), having frequently rewound and replayed a scene in which Mel Gibson climbed out of bed and walked across a room naked.’³ For McKinnon, then a young boy whose awareness of his own sexuality was just beginning to evolve, ‘this memory gives a sense of sexuality developing through movies’; of ‘moments in which [he] could secretly explore, via the movies, possibilities that [he] felt [he] must keep hidden from the world’.⁴ Such an experience is far from foreign to LGBTQ people – rather, it forms an intrinsic part of queer spectatorship.

In part, this specificity can be attributed to the history of censorship and discrimination which marks the development of LGBTQ film and television representation. Be it during the Hays Code era, which prohibited depictions of queerness in American cinema from the 1930s to 1968, or during more recent cinematic and televisual history, which often portrayed LGBTQ people as murderous and duplicitous, the evolution of both mediums has been littered with transphobia, biophobia and homophobia.⁵ Similarly, the scarcity of queer characters in both film and television has also had a notable effect on queer viewing practices. As filmmaker Jan Oxenberg comments in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995), queer people have been ‘pathetically starved for images of ourselves’, and this has shaped the ways in which they approach media works. In this sense, it is impossible to think of queer viewing practices without also considering the ‘symbolic annihilation’ to which LGBTQ individuals have often been subject.⁶

Since the 1990s and Oxenberg’s interview, there has been an unprecedented increase in LGBTQ on-screen visibility and diversity on screen. In 2020, GLAAD’s Where We Are on TV report (which measures LGBTQ on-screen representation in US television) found an unparalleled 10.2 per cent of regular series characters on US screens to be LGBTQ.⁷ This increase in number is particularly notable with regard to LGBTQ protagonists of colour, who for the first time outnumber white queer characters, as well as the slightly higher number of queer women represented as opposed to the number of represented LGBTQ men. In terms of the film industry, the results of GLAAD’s Studio Responsibility Index are less impressive – while LGBTQ characters appeared in 18.2 per cent of the major studio releases analysed in the report, more than half of the LGBTQ characters therein had only three minutes of screen time, while 35 per cent had less than a minute.⁸ Taken together, GLAAD’s surveys point towards the somewhat paradoxical position inhabited by the queer spectator with regard to contemporary US film and television; on the one hand, this viewer will find themselves faced with more representation than they might have previously thought possible. On the other, they can still count on being summarily excluded and erased from certain film and television genres, as well as portrayed only as fleeting, cursory figures. Finally, while it is now easier for LGBTQ people to find themselves reflected on screen than it once was, numerous generations of queer individuals have grown up in circumstances where this was not the case and have vivid memories of such media silence and discrimination. In all of these cases, the LGBTQ viewer can still often find themselves defined in opposition to mainstream on-screen representation, and not mirrored within it.

Moreover, the proposed dichotomy between visibility and invisibility is in fact anything but simple and clear cut.⁹ As Melanie Kohnen argues, the screen is ‘both projection surface and filtering device’ and can itself act as a closet. ‘Whenever a particular form of queer visibility is projected on film and TV screens’, Kohnen writes, ‘other possibilities are filtered or screened out’, often leading to the normalization of queerness as white male homonormativity.¹⁰ As shall be seen in the following chapters, Kohnen’s arguments about the screen as both projecting and obscuring, as bringing to light and hiding from sight, are particularly relevant here. For now, it is important to note that even the current influx of queer visibility does not reflect all LGBTQ individuals equally and that there are still media genres which for the most part entirely exclude queer protagonists.¹¹ Taken together, all of this points towards the specificity of how queers relate to media works and towards the (often oppositional) practices of looking which have often formed a pivotal part of queer media consumption.¹² For authors like Brett Farmer, queerness is thus ‘a “difference that makes a difference” in filmic reception’, and so he ascribes ‘intense, overinvested’ qualities of fannish absorption to gay male spectatorship.¹³ In the same vein, others have also argued for the particularity of gay male audiences, while audience research on lesbian and LBT audiences emphasizes the importance these groups place on on-screen representation.¹⁴

Drawing on all of this, I focus here on the relevance of media works to the memory and self-narrativization of the queer subject. How, in other words, do queers tell stories of their past in relation to on-screen representation? What is the place of memories such as McKinnon’s, where heteronormative media is repurposed to mirror queer sexualities? How do LGBTQ individuals remember overtly queer media works? And finally, how are these queer media memories represented on-screen? In looking at the interrelationship between memory and film, memory studies researchers have embraced audience memories of the cinema as a valuable field of study, as evidenced by the recent special edition of the Memory Studies journal on cinemagoing, film and memory.¹⁵ Researchers have also undertaken numerous studies of audience memories in various national contexts, be it in the UK, Spain, Italy, Mexico or Australia.¹⁶ However, studies of specifically queer audience memories are not as easily found, and so leave unexplored the ways in which LGBTQ media memories differ from their heterosexual counterparts. Such a gap is especially relevant due to the particularity of the queer position in relation to the media that I have described, as well as the possibility of such memories eventually fading, unrecorded and unexamined. As B. Ruby Rich notes when referring to Derek Jarman and the importance he attributed to seeing Pasolini and Visconti films as a young queer: ‘[S]uch memories need to be exhumed and followed, like the scent of a track gone stale, utilizing the tools that film theory, cultural studies, and the emergent “queer theory” have given us.’¹⁷ While Rich uttered this call more than two decades ago, I echo it here through my focus on how such queer media memories have been represented on-screen. Instead of undertaking a survey of audiences, however, I look here at the ways in which cinema has represented queer audience memories, with the figure of the filmmaker at once standing in for that of the audience member.

In focusing on these issues, I draw in particular on the work of Dijana Jelača, whose concept of dislocated screen memories encapsulates within itself the ways in which on-screen representations both mask and represent the past, at once revealing and obscuring its contours.¹⁸ For Jelača, ‘cinema is always an interplay between memory – both reflected and constructed through film – and its role in the present’.¹⁹ She therefore draws on Freud’s concept of screen memory to comment on how one memory can serve as a ‘screen’ for another, more traumatic one. Jelača notes that

[w]e might deploy Freud’s screen memory as an analytic that may illuminate … something about the dynamics of cinematic memories as both revealing and concealing, authentic and inauthentic at the same time. Cinema and the concept of screen memories curiously emerged around the same time … and indeed, the analytical stretch from screen memories to cinematic screens is not difficult to make, particularly when one takes into consideration a prominent aspect of the cultural workings of cinema: cinema is always an interplay between memory – both reflected and constructed through film – and its role in the present.²⁰

In her own work on trauma and representations of war, Jelača deploys this concept to comment on how on-screen representations both screen and dislocate the traumatic – in other words, how ‘cinematic memory’ represents trauma through its ‘simultaneous erasure and emergence’.²¹ The films Jelača analyses often do this by leaving the traumatic event itself unrepresented and focusing instead on the ways in which trauma’s echoes can still be felt in the present. In this section, however, I use the concept of dislocated screen memory not in relation to representations of trauma, but to describe the complex memories LGBTQ people have of the screen and the ways in which it both reflects and obscures their experience.

By adopting Jelača’s approach to the screen as a surface which both depicts and conceals the past, I address two distinct aspects of queer spectatorship; on the one hand, I utilize it to describe the ways in which media works both represent and annihilate queer pasts and memories. On the other, perhaps less immediately evident level, I use the concept to address queer dislocated memories of the screen – for example, of how McKinnon might remember Lethal Weapon as both obscuring and reflecting his desire or how another LGBTQ individual might recall a filmic or televisual work in a similar manner. As Jelača writes, ‘the encounter between the spectator and screen [which creates] cinematic memory often takes a hybrid shape of inorganic and organic forms mutually intertwined and informative of one another until they can no longer be fully separated’.²² In this sense, how a queer individual might remember a work of cinema or film surpasses recollections of what is found on screen and instead encapsulates the entire range of affect and interpretation which the viewer might attach to the work. This process of interpretation is of course not unique to queer people; however, the particular positionality of LGBTQ individuals as both seen and unseen, coupled with the specific history of discriminatory representation to which queers have been subject, shapes queer memories of the media in ways which do not always match those of their straight counterparts. Significantly, such memories can even extend towards media works which the subject has not seen, but nonetheless attaches affective relevance to, as evidenced in McKinnon’s example of a gay man he spoke to reminiscing about a famous queer film whose screening he was too afraid to attend.²³

In the next two chapters, I will therefore look at specific examples of how queer memories of the media have been represented in film. The films I focus on are part of what Rich has termed ‘New Queer Cinema’, a predominantly American and British period of LGBTQ filmmaking stemming from the early 1990s, which presented a definitive break ‘with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics’.²⁴ New Queer Cinema was characterized by a move away from trying to advocate for the positive perception of LGBTQ people and by ‘traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind’.²⁵ Such a focus on queering historical narratives was not unprecedented. The filmography of Derek Jarman is particularly significant here with films like Sebastiane (1976) and Caravaggio (1986) serving as precursors to New Queer Cinema both in terms of style and its focus on historicity.²⁶ Affectionately nicknamed the movement’s grandfather by Rich, Jarman continued to make films that embodied all the descriptors she attached to New Queer Cinema until his death in 1994. Nonetheless, while Jarman’s work exemplified the movement, the influx of younger queer filmmakers, as well as the attention they received from the wider film community (best exemplified by their success at film festivals such as Sundance), enables us to consider New Queer Cinema as a distinct period in LGBTQ film development. In looking at contemporary queer representation, I begin with New Queer Cinema precisely because of its pivotal place in the turn towards increased queer cinematic visibility.

In looking at New Queer Cinema, it is necessary to recognize the influence of the AIDS crisis on queer memory projects in general and on the movement in particular. As Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy notes, the AIDS crisis brought an ‘urgency’ to the queer search for history and pushed both grassroots activists and later the academy ‘to reclaim a history before its bearers died’.²⁷ A similar urgency can be recognized in the films of New Queer Cinema, which Michele Aaron correctly describes as defying ‘the sanctity of the past, especially the homophobic past’.²⁸ While often not tackling the AIDS crisis directly, these films nonetheless addressed the various temporalities of queerness. In movies such as Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991), which adapts Christopher Marlowe’s eponymous play; Christopher Münch’s The Hours and Times (1991), which focuses on John Lennon’s relationship with The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, famously rumoured to have been in love with Lennon; Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992), which recalls both the real story of Leopold and Loeb as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), which reimagines the poet Langston Hughes while also depicting the AIDS crisis, it is thus possible to see an engagement with quee...