This multifaceted history of contemporary LGBTQ+ film-making is part celebration and part affirmation of its author’s own identity
At the beginning of Ryan Gilbey’s kaleidoscopic survey of recent LGBTQ+ cinema, Dirk Bogarde makes an appearance. It’s 1961 and Bogarde, a closeted gay man, is playing a closeted, blackmailed barrister in the campaigning film Victim. Despite not being out – homosexuality was still illegal then – the actor showed considerable courage in taking on the role; indeed, in making the film possible with his star power. Even so, he remained firmly in the closet, telling interviewer Russell Harty in 1986: “I’m certainly in the shell and you haven’t cracked it yet, honey.”
Bogarde is one of Gilbey’s totems: the effect of Victim was such that it fuelled the voices for a change in the law (homosexuality was partially decriminalised in England and Wales in the Sexual Offences Act of 1967).
He is one pole of this brave, dizzying book that matches the author’s own doubts about his sexuality and his place in the story that he wishes to tell: is he queer enough? Does the fact that he has been married to a woman disbar him from the topic? It is endearing that Gilbey does not present himself as cool and omniscient: rather, he bumbles through this world in a tortuous journey of self-discovery.
His intention is not conventional, as he makes clear: “I’ve made a rod for my own back because I want the structure of it to be queer somehow. I don’t want to do ‘50 films to see before you die’ or ‘10 great directors’. And I’m not arranging it chronologically.”
The result, nevertheless, is a structure of 26 clearly delineated chapters in which one character introduces another in a continuing dialogue. It has its own logic.
Landmark gay films are mentioned: Victim, Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo, Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, Ron Peck’s Nighthawks. But the main thrust of this book is queer cinema from the millennium. Here, Gilbey banishes the “traces of fear and shame” from his upbringing and celebrates the full diversity of LGBTQ+ culture, featuring films by lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans women and queers that cover a wide variety of scenarios and forms, most of which are intensely questioning – of everything.
What does queer mean here? Haynes has stated that “queerness, by definition, was a critique of mainstream culture. It wasn’t just a plea for a place at the table. It called into question the table itself.” Gilbey offers his own summary: “Queerness is a mechanism for disruption: it can reinvent structure and language as it goes along. In this way, it mirrors the experience of being queer in an intolerant world.”
One persistent theme is the hopelessness of the mainstream media to capture the diversity of queer lives – there are splendid critiques of Withnail and I, Brokeback Mountain and Bohemian Rhapsody. Almost all the directors he talks to are hostile to the idea of mere representation: as the black transgender writer-director Campbell X tells Gilbey: “What we see are blanched-out, blanded-out versions of ourselves. And then people are faced with the reality and they become hostile to us. I don’t recognise us. I see candy-coloured versions that are safe.”
Sylvia Syms and Dirk Bogarde, ‘one of Gilbey’s totems’, in Victim (1961)
X directed the celebrated 2012 feature Stud Life – a love story between a masc lesbian and a femme sex worker, with a gay best friend on the side: “The challenge of that film is that it’s got lesbians in it, bisexuals, queer and trans people, whereas the marketing was, like, ‘Two lesbians. The end.’”
X makes the point that the film is about “people carving out their own lives within a structure that has not made space for them”. This is a theme that is echoed throughout the book: how to survive and then take your revenge on an often hostile society.
Perhaps the best example of this is William E Jones’s 2007 film Tearoom, which simply shows the surveillance footage of sexual activity taken by police in a public toilet in Mansfield, Ohio, during 1962, which was used to send the “sex deviates” to the penitentiary. Ripped away from their original, viciously homophobic context and shown within a cinema or a museum, the blurry images of men from all classes and races become, as Gilbey writes, “a work of haunting beauty... a testament to the resilience of desire”.
In a similar twist on the material’s original intention, the trans director Elizabeth Purchell took the setups from dozens of gay porn films from the 1960s to the 1980s – those bits of “plot” that frame and shape the action – and edited them together into a 2019 feature called Ask Any Buddy. This told a social history of a time before Aids when sex was part of gay liberation. As Purchell states: “I think it’s a very trans film because it is literally about taking pieces of movies that are fantasies and trying to turn them into a new reality.”
Gilbey’s book sparks with ideas, humour and wit. A constant, however, is the issue that the author grapples with: the demon of LGBTQ+ is poor self-esteem, the internalisation of shame. He cites Georgia Oakley’s 2022 feature Blue Jean, which tells the story of a lesbian PE teacher in the late 80s. Isolated, she lives a double life and struggles to fit into an oppressive straight world. Oakley said that she “wanted to get inside what it feels like to be constantly assessing how other people might be viewing you. It’s a feeling that can be with you even in your own home.”
After an extraordinary accumulation of voices and viewpoints, the book ends on a positive note, with an imagined Bogarde as presiding spirit looking on from the past, amazed, if not envious. The films that Gilbey writes about encode possibilities that would have seemed impossible in 1961, but there is always a warning: of “homophobia and transphobia… flaring up... across the world”.
He adroitly makes the general personal and vice versa. Writing the book, for Gilbey, has been cathartic: “all my research into queer cinema”, he admits, “has begun to teach me how to be queer myself”.
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Photographs by Hollywood Archive/Alamy
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