New Queer Cinema by Malcolm Mackenzie
Illustration of The Doom Generation by Fernando Monroy
Malcolm Mackenzie is the founder of the greatest pop music magazine of the 21st Century, We Love Pop (2011-2017). Aside from writing books on lofty subjects as: K-Pop, Friends, and Ariana Grande, he is a regular contributor to the culture pages of The Guardian. He was one quarter of iconic electro band Belvedere Kane.
Growing up on Jersey was challenging enough for anyone with a flicker of rebellion, but being gay at a Catholic school on an island where homosexuality was point-blank illegal made discovering who I was an intensely frustrating and secretive business. I couldn’t wait to escape the rock and so catapulted myself to one of the more picturesque London university campuses in the autumn of 1991.
It took some time to find myself and my tribe and I didn’t come out for a year. We were fed a lot of fear in the 80s, fear of nuclear war, fear of AIDS, fear of being queer bashed – I didn’t go to gay bar when I came to London, I was too scared, what if someone saw me going in, and smashed my teeth down my larynx. I lived vicariously through the cinema and I would frequently make the trip ‘up west’. Lucky for me I emigrated across the channel at the perfect time, because although the term New Queer Cinema was coined in 1992, by B. Ruby Rich a US academic in Sight and Sound magazine, the revolution was well underway.
Up to that point, gay characters in film had largely been self-loathing closet cases, tragic figures to be pittied, or poshos in cricket whites. They were searching for sex in leather bars, longing for boys they could never have or staggering in stillies and big crusty wigs. Basically they weren’t very cool, something that’s incredibly important for a teenager grappling with their identity.
Malcolm’s 90s cinema ticket stubs
New Queer Cinema presented a startling array of troubled young men and I felt their pain acutely. NQC was confrontational, daring and challenging, its films told personal stories and gave representation to a vast array queer voices: punks, skinheads, soul boys, hustlers, prisoners, kings of England, gay dads, lesbian hippies, murderous teens, suicidal teens, vogue champions, gangster’s molls, geography teachers, children looking to escape, and managers of The Beatles. They stuck two fingers up to the formulaic narratives of straight cinema, and although they could be charmingly amateurish, they were admirably ambitious and there was a lot of black and white.
Nathan Bexton on the set of Nowhere. From the private collection of H&MU artist Jason T Rail
Buying a ticket to one of these films was an admission in more ways than one. Disappearing down the stairs at the Metro cinema on Rupert Street in the heart of gay Soho to see queer films by queer filmmakers felt thrillingly transgressive – we had never had anything like this in Jersey.
The first film I saw, on my first weekend in London was Poison by Todd Haynes, a genre-devouring triptych that confused as much as it beguiled. It was an allegorical monster movie, an eerie mock doc about a bullied boy and violent erotic drama rolled into one Sundance-winning piece of film, that skillfully described the worst horrors of the gay experience with visual poetry. It had a profound effect. Gay films weren’t usually this thought provoking. Haynes said half as much as he left unsaid and the experience lingered. I kept the ticket stub and I can tell you that it was £3.50 to see the 9.15pm showing on the 26th October 1991.
Debi Mazar and Rachel True on the set of Nowhere. From the private collection of H&MU artist Jason T Rail
Swoon was the slick retelling of the story behind Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, that of real life child killers, Leopold and Loeb. Trough the icy lens of Tom Kalin the Nietzschean pact made between lovers in 20s New York was as seductive as it was disturbing. Cold blooded murder shouldn’t be this stylish, should it?
My Own Private Idaho, not a perfect experiment of mashing up Shakespeare with low-life Americana, is nevertheless, thanks to the performance of River Phoenix and the conviction of Gus Van Sant a cinematic fever dream we are lucky to have. Van Sant is a master of intimate interior space, and open space, time and place. His images – a barn crashing onto an empty highway symbolising sexual release – are amongst the best in movie history. Idaho made $6 million at the US box office.
In the kinky and confrontational No Skin off My Ass Bruce La Bruce creates the New Queer alternative to Pretty Woman. A hairdresser picking a skinhead off a park bench taking home and giving him a bath was a gay wet dream and that was just the beginning. It was apparently Kurt Cobain’s favourite film – but then he didn’t live to see Showgirls.
Top 20 New Queer Cinema
The Hours and Times, Christopher Munch (1991)
Poison, Todd Haynes (1991)
Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston, (1991)
My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant (1991)
No Skin Off My Ass, Bruce LaBruce (1991)
Edward II, Derek Jarman (1991)
Young Soul Rebels, Isaac Julien (1991)
Strip Jack Naked (Nighthawks II) Ron Peck (1991)
The Living End, Gregg Araki (1992)
The Long Day Closes, Terrence Davies (1992)
Swoon, Tom Kalin (1992)
The Lost Language of The Cranes, Nigel Finch (1992)
Les Nuits Fauves, Cyril Collard (1992)
Grief, Richard Glatzer (1993)
Totally Fucked Up, Gregg Araki (1993)
Love and Human Remains, Denys Arcand (1993)
Go Fish, Rose Troche (1994)
Postcards From America, Steve McLean (1994)
The Doom Generation, Gregg Araki (1995)
Bound, The Wachowskis (1996)
Greg Araki never quite made it big like Van Sant and Haynes. His movies veered towards nihilistic navel-gazing teen nightmares, that were never wholly satisfying. Yet he was doing something no one else was, decades before shows like Euphoria, 13 Reasons Why and Sex Education. He created a world of fluid sexuality filled with relatable drop-outs, stoner slackers and beautiful intellectuals. His Teen Apocalypse trilogy: Totally F**ed Up, Doom Generation, and Nowhere spoke to queer outsiders that wanted to listen to The Pixies and Hole and not Take That and the Spice Girls, and even though Todd Haynes is one of the greatest living film directors – period, Araki holds a special place, because he spoke directly and pointedly to the teenagers that grew up on John Hughes movies: Breakfast Club with an hot beef injection of Brett Easton Ellis – disappear here.
Producer Christina Vachon was as an important player as the any director. She met Todd Haynes at college and became his lifelong producer, but she didn’t stop with Haynes. Vachon was – is, the leading champion of the queer alternative producing a ridiculous amount of movies that became touchstones for an entire generation – namely Gen X – mine. She produced Larry Clark’s Kids, Hedwig and The Angry Inch, Boys Don’t Cry, Party Monster, I Shot Andy Warhol, the original Stonewall movie, and let’s not forget, Haynes’s own masterpieces Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven and Carol - what a legacy.
From the private collection of H&MU artist Jason T Rail
New Queer Cinema was largely an American export, but I still managed to brush shoulders with it IRL. Besotted by Poison, I went to the first screening of Haynes’ follow up Safe at the 1995 London Film Festival or was it the gay film festival? Anyway, it was not an explicitly queer story – but one with themes of alienation that we can all relate to. It was an excruciating experience of transportive mental anguish and when a member of the audience decided to bollock Haynes for using such a shitty actress as Julianne Moore, who was starring in Assassins with Sylvester Stallone, I was compelled to tell him to shut his trap, declaring Moore a revelation, exactly as she’d been in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts the previous year.
In the bar after the screening, Todd Haynes came and thanked me for sticking up for his movie, we chatted a while and my boyfriend Stephen and I invited him to join us on the rest of our night out. I’m not sure if he came that night, but we met up again a few times, at louche Regent Street haunt Smashing, neighbouring indie disco, Popstarz and a one-off event hosted by Duckie at The New Connaught Rooms where noted comedy genius and performance terrorist The Divine David was performing. We went backstage afterwards and I remember watching the two meet, eyes ablaze, each quite delighted with the other. Two years later David Hoyle was starring in Haynes’ ‘glitter movie’ Velvet Goldmine.
James Duval, Rose McGowan and Jonathan Schaech from The Doom Generation. From the private collection of H&MU artist Jason T Rail
The same year I met Haynes I was at a screening for NQC also-ran, the evocative Postcards From America by Steve McLean based on the work of David Wojnarowicz – another movie produced by Saint Vachon. We happened to meet the director afterwards and his friend a lively American called John, we talked about film, moved on somewhere else and bounced around the usual haunts for a weekend, and this being the 90s, swapped mixtapes – HA! Mine was packed with Brit Pop bangers, his a lot of old punk and indie The Rezillos, The Undertones, Eno, Mick Ronson solo stuff and one of his own songs, Wicked Little Town. Five years later I saw Hedwig and The Angry Inch in the West End and had a jaw drop moment, this was the man from the tape. John Cameron Mitchell had made it.
As a kid I wasn’t thinking of the political implications of New Queer Cinema, I simply devoured the vibrant and varied representation of gay people, gaying about living their complicated gay lives. It showed me was that I wasn’t alone, that gay people were everywhere and we didn’t have to be just like normal straight society, we could be weird and arty, clever and difficult and sexy as fuck. Suddenly for the first time, being gay was cool. This was who I wanted to be. I’d found my people.
Fernando Monroy is a Mexican illustrator currently studying in México city. His work references pop culture, reflecting the work of photographers, designers and fashion. Out Magazine named him one of twenty young queer artists to watch.
