What Ever Happened to Queer Cinema?

Oscar Night 2006 feels like a million years ago. You remember – it's the night that Brokeback Mountain, although being shamelessly robbed of its deserved Best Picture statuette, still managed to take home three awards. It's the night that Philip Seymour Hoffman's gay novelist squeaked past Heath Ledger's gay cowboy in the Best Actor race. Felicity Huffman was up for Best Actress for playing an MTF in Transamerica. And at the previous day's Independent Spirit Awards, pioneering queer filmmaker Gregg Araki was basking in multiple nominations for Mysterious Skin, a film considered to be a high watermark in an already remarkable career.

GLBT stories had made it to the grown-up's table. More importantly, they'd made it to the multiplex where they were enjoying both good reviews and impressive box-office tallies. The terrain was changing.

So what happened?

Yes, the success of Brokeback lifted long-gestating projects like The Mayor of Castro Street, The Front Runner, Stone Butch Blues, and The Dreyfus Affair out of development limbo, but as of today none of them have a firm shooting date set. And independent cinema, where queer voices have been breaking the rules of cinema and exciting audiences with new possibilities for at least the past few decades, seems content to make one toothless genre picture (lesbian romantic comedies! gay thrillers!) after another.

“There is so much interest in genre films. Which to me is just not that interesting,” notes Jenni Olson, film historian and Wolfe Video's Director of E-Commerce. “I vastly prefer the innovation and style of less conventional filmmaking. I don't think it is that different now though, than at other times in our brief cinema history. The smart, visionary films are always few and far between.”

Critic B. Ruby Rich agrees that things have changed since she coined the term “New Queer Cinema” to describe bold, paradigm-shifting early '90s films like Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning, Todd Haynes's Poison, and Gregg Araki's The Living End. “Today, like the rest of the movie biz, most people are making films and videos and digital docs because they want a career, they want fame and fortune, or they just want some attention. There's a glut, and not enough of it is exceptional.”

“There seems to be such a lack of interesting GLBT talent today,” laments Marcus Hu, co-president of Strand Releasing, one of the leading distributors of queer titles in North America. “Where is the new generation of Gregg Arakis, Todd Hayneses, Rose Troches, Jennie Livingstons, Tom Kalins, Christine Vachons?”

The original ones, of course, haven't gone away, but they're either having a hard time finding work – Livingston's difficulty in launching a feature after the success of Paris is Burning remains an appalling example of the industry putting up a wall to keep great GLBT filmmakers down – or they've abandoned queer cinema as a genre.

“Filmmakers like Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, or Tom Kalin [Swoon] don't come along every day,” says critic David Ehrenstein. “Gus did several mainstream films [Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester] with no gay content whatsoever. Now he's back to the avant-garde [Elephant, Last Days], with complex conceptual works and plenty of boys smooching. Todd was always too cool for school; I await his Bob Dylan fandango I'm Not There with great anticipation. As for Tom, it's taken all this time for him to get his second feature, Savage Grace, made.”

Olson thinks there's a new generation of fascinating directors out there, but they haven't gotten the breaks that their antecedents did.

“There are so many talented and interesting filmmakers working today. They just don't get as much attention, and their work doesn't rise to the top in the commercial marketplace. As a filmmaker myself, I want to tell original stories in original ways. And masses of people are not spending wads of cash buying tickets to these kinds of films. So, although I'm frustrated with the flood of conventional filmmaking, I do soothe myself with the knowledge that there are great films out there. It's just sad, and the nature of the Hollywood beast, that so many of our most talented cinematic geniuses are not being supported in creating those great films. For every Todd Haynes – who, fortunately, continues to bring his innovative vision to the screen – there are 20 Jennie Livingstons.”

Industry observers say that the Brokeback phenomenon – Olson describes it as “not so much a blip as a solar eclipse; we get one every ten years” – was never necessarily going to change the game for queer movies in the marketplace.

“There have been some moderate, small gay films that studio specialty divisions have been taking out to a good deal of success, like Notes on a Scandal and The History Boys,” observes Hu. “But Brokeback was still a low budget – $14 million – film that was still developed and distributed by a [Universal Studios] specialty division. The fact that it struck a chord with audiences globally doesn't mean it's going to create shockwaves with the studios hurrying to create the next gay blockbuster.”