Queer Film Classics – serie

Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don't Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected. More than two decades after its original release, the film has become a lightning rod for contemporary debates about the representation of trans lives and deaths on screen.Representational possibilities for trans people have changed dramatically since 1999. Morgan Page and Chase Joynt approach the accumulated tension with a spirit of curiosity about the limits of these historical returns. They argue that new visibilities of transness on screen require us to re-engage earlier portrayals: Boys Don't Cry is central to conversations about casting, violence against gender non-conforming people, and the borders between butch and trans identities. Acknowledging a younger generation of queer and trans people who are straining against the images foisted upon them, including this film's egregious violence, and an older cohort for whom it remains a formative, if complicated, touchstone, Joynt and Page revisit the original contexts of production and distribution to unsettle the overdetermined ways the work has been understood and interpreted.Boys Don't Cry ultimately relocates the film in a way that attends to the story's violence and values, both on and off screen.

Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected. More than two decades after its original release, the film has become a lightning rod for contemporary debates about the representation of trans lives and deaths on screen.Representational possibilities for trans people have changed dramatically since 1999. Morgan Page and Chase Joynt approach the accumulated tension with a spirit of curiosity about the limits of these historical returns. They argue that new visibilities of transness on screen require us to re-engage earlier portrayals: Boys Don’t Cry is central to conversations about casting, violence against gender non-conforming people, and the borders between butch and trans identities. Acknowledging a younger generation of queer and trans people who are straining against the images foisted upon them, including this film’s egregious violence, and an older cohort for whom it remains a formative, if complicated, touchstone, Joynt and Page revisit the original contexts of production and distribution to unsettle the overdetermined ways the work has been understood and interpreted.Boys Don’t Cry ultimately relocates the film in a way that attends to the story’s violence and values, both on and off screen.

Drawn into the circuit of men cruising for sex in and around a train station, restless adolescent Henri begins a frenzied pursuit of a dangerously charismatic older man, with sometimes violent and ultimately tragic consequences. Premiering at Cannes in 1983, Patrice Chéreau's L'Homme blessé (The Wounded Man) was one of France's first major cinematic releases to depict homosexual desire and queer sexual cultures in an unapologetic and complex way. It is a film that continues to resonate to this day.L'Homme blessé generated controversy with its dark tone and its treatment of an adolescent's obsessive homoerotic desire, as well as Chéreau's denial that the film is about homosexuality. Robert Payne guides readers through the powerfully erotic underworld of L'Homme blessé, where the film sidesteps fixed identities and draws viewers into the ambiguous spaces of queer desire, and argues that its visual composition depicts queer ways of seeing and generates queer ways of feeling. A look into the production's historical and cultural backdrop uncovers a behind-the-scenes story of power and desire between its two screenwriters and the presence of HIV/AIDS hovering ominously and inevitably off screen. Original interviews trace the lives of L'Homme blessé across three continents and three decades and measure the film's enduring value beyond its prestigious debut.Payne cements L'Homme blessé in its rightful place within queer cultural history and introduces the film to a new generation of viewers.

Premiering at Sundance in 2014, Desiree Akhavan's acclaimed debut feature, Appropriate Behavior, introduced the indie film world to the deadpan, irreverent wit that had already won over fans of her trailblazing LGBTQ web series The Slope. The first volume in the Queer Film Classics series to spotlight a work by and about a bisexual woman of colour, this book explores Appropriate Behavior as an instant classic of US indie filmmaking in the 2010s, as a radical reappropriation of straight and gay film genres, as an artist's coming-of-age story, and as a model for feminist-queer creative collaboration. Less than a decade old, Appropriate Behavior captures an urban queer community imperilled by gentrification and homonormativity and serves as exemplar of an innovative wave of independent cinema not yet subsumed by the streaming economy. Maria San Filippo explores how filmmaker and film render a singular voice and story that queers not only its celebrated romcom predecessors but also the gay coming-out film and the lesbian romance alike. The book concludes with an interview with Akhavan.San Filippo pays special tribute to Akhavan's audacious sensibility and the "inbetweener" moxie that makes Appropriate Behavior an unparalleled portrayal of bisexuality.

Premiering at Sundance in 2014, Desiree Akhavan's acclaimed debut feature, Appropriate Behavior, introduced the indie film world to the deadpan, irreverent wit that had already won over fans of her trailblazing LGBTQ web series The Slope. The first volume in the Queer Film Classics series to spotlight a work by and about a bisexual woman of colour, this book explores Appropriate Behavior as an instant classic of US indie filmmaking in the 2010s, as a radical reappropriation of straight and gay film genres, as an artist's coming-of-age story, and as a model for feminist-queer creative collaboration. Less than a decade old, Appropriate Behavior captures an urban queer community imperilled by gentrification and homonormativity and serves as exemplar of an innovative wave of independent cinema not yet subsumed by the streaming economy. Maria San Filippo explores how filmmaker and film render a singular voice and story that queers not only its celebrated romcom predecessors but also the gay coming-out film and the lesbian romance alike. The book concludes with an interview with Akhavan.San Filippo pays special tribute to Akhavan's audacious sensibility and the "inbetweener" moxie that makes Appropriate Behavior an unparalleled portrayal of bisexuality.

A film that transcends time, Sally Potter’s Orlando follows its titular character through nearly four hundred years of British history. Orlando starts life as a young man in the 1600s and then, mid-film, becomes a woman in the 1800s. Plot, production, and performance have all contributed to the film becoming a touchstone for Tilda Swinton’s ethereal and gender-bending mode.A Russian-French-Dutch-American-Italian-British co-production, Orlando was hailed as a monumental work of international art house cinema upon its release in 1992. Some understood Potter’s film, a work of ruthless and ingenious adaptation, as moving away from the lesbian content of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Russell Sheaffer uses a detailed analysis of screenplay drafts and more than three decades of reception to argue that while the film moves away from a direct investment in same-sex relationships, Orlando’s articulations of embodiment, desire, and time have made the film continually more queer in the years since its release.Taking cues from adaptation theory and gender studies, this book meticulously charts the distinct shift from lesbian feminist text to queer film classic, arguing that the film is as much an adaptation of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as it is of its eponymous novel.

Midnight Cowboy – the story of a small-town stud’s attempt to make it big as a hustler on the streets of 1960s New York – is an indisputably iconic film. Though recognized in terms of its early adoption of Nouvelle Vague cinematography and editing techniques, and renowned for an Oscar win in spite of controversy over its X-rating, Midnight Cowboy has yet to be understood as a classic of queer cinema.Jon Towlson reclaims Midnight Cowboy as a queer text by addressing John Schlesinger as a gay author and filmmaker and providing a fresh perspective on the film’s relationship to the 1965 James Leo Herlihy novel from which it was adapted. Offering a nuanced and personal view of the film’s relevance to queer experience and queer friendship, Towlson also considers Midnight Cowboy’s production and reception and its place in Schlesinger’s filmography. Depictions of sixties New York counterculture and 42nd Street hustlers offer an opportunity for reassessment, particularly in the film's relationship to male prostitution, male relationships, and sexual identity.By shifting the perspective away from previous interpretations of Midnight Cowboy as homophobic and problematic, Towlson argues for a new interpretation of the film as a proto-queer buddy movie and a critical forerunner to films such as My Own Private Idaho and Brokeback Mountain.

Midnight Cowboy – the story of a small-town stud’s attempt to make it big as a hustler on the streets of 1960s New York – is an indisputably iconic film. Though recognized in terms of its early adoption of Nouvelle Vague cinematography and editing techniques, and renowned for an Oscar win in spite of controversy over its X-rating, Midnight Cowboy has yet to be understood as a classic of queer cinema.Jon Towlson reclaims Midnight Cowboy as a queer text by addressing John Schlesinger as a gay author and filmmaker and providing a fresh perspective on the film’s relationship to the 1965 James Leo Herlihy novel from which it was adapted. Offering a nuanced and personal view of the film’s relevance to queer experience and queer friendship, Towlson also considers Midnight Cowboy’s production and reception and its place in Schlesinger’s filmography. Depictions of sixties New York counterculture and 42nd Street hustlers offer an opportunity for reassessment, particularly in the film's relationship to male prostitution, male relationships, and sexual identity.By shifting the perspective away from previous interpretations of Midnight Cowboy as homophobic and problematic, Towlson argues for a new interpretation of the film as a proto-queer buddy movie and a critical forerunner to films such as My Own Private Idaho and Brokeback Mountain.

Si la devise du Québec sombre parfois dans l’oubli, ce livre s’impose tel un véritable devoir de mémoire envers les pionniers du cinéma de fiction LGBTQ+ québécois : « Je me souviens » de ce premier et courageux aveu queer de Claude Jutra dans À tout prendre, ainsi que de l’exploration par André Brassard et Michel Tremblay dans Il était une fois dans l’Est d’une faune colorée affirmant son existence dans un quartier modeste de l’est de Montréal. Ce livre commémore et conjugue ces deux fleurons de la cinématographie québécoise qui mettent en scène des représentations gaies, lesbiennes et trans pionnières dans les années 1960 et 1970.Malgré une réception critique empreinte parfois d’homophobie au Québec et un relatif silence à l’intérieur d’un Canada majoritairement anglophone, ce cinéma francophone fera néanmoins entendre sa voix à l’international, en Europe comme aux États-Unis, impressionnant des cinéastes comme Truffaut et Cassavetes. Ces films passent ainsi à l’histoire. Sous la loupe de la sociologie, Julie Vaillancourt analyse ces films au rythme d’événements sociopolitiques marquants, de la Révolution tranquille à la révolution sexuelle, des mouvements de libération homosexuels à ceux des femmes, sans oublier la question identitaire nationale. L’ouvrage présente également un état des lieux plus de cinquante ans après la décriminalisation de l’homosexualité au Canada. Vu l’influence de ces cinéastes auprès de la jeune génération, dont Xavier Dolan, les legs sont nombreux et invitent les comparaisons réaffirmant le caractère novateur de ces deux films pionniers. Ce livre revisite À tout prendre et Il était une fois dans l’Est pour démontrer leur importance artistique et sociale au moment de leur création ainsi que leur héritage durable dans le contexte du cinéma queer mondial.

Si la devise du Québec sombre parfois dans l’oubli, ce livre s’impose tel un véritable devoir de mémoire envers les pionniers du cinéma de fiction LGBTQ+ québécois : « Je me souviens » de ce premier et courageux aveu queer de Claude Jutra dans À tout prendre, ainsi que de l’exploration par André Brassard et Michel Tremblay dans Il était une fois dans l’Est d’une faune colorée affirmant son existence dans un quartier modeste de l’est de Montréal. Ce livre commémore et conjugue ces deux fleurons de la cinématographie québécoise qui mettent en scène des représentations gaies, lesbiennes et trans pionnières dans les années 1960 et 1970.Malgré une réception critique empreinte parfois d’homophobie au Québec et un relatif silence à l’intérieur d’un Canada majoritairement anglophone, ce cinéma francophone fera néanmoins entendre sa voix à l’international, en Europe comme aux États-Unis, impressionnant des cinéastes comme Truffaut et Cassavetes. Ces films passent ainsi à l’histoire. Sous la loupe de la sociologie, Julie Vaillancourt analyse ces films au rythme d’événements sociopolitiques marquants, de la Révolution tranquille à la révolution sexuelle, des mouvements de libération homosexuels à ceux des femmes, sans oublier la question identitaire nationale. L’ouvrage présente également un état des lieux plus de cinquante ans après la décriminalisation de l’homosexualité au Canada. Vu l’influence de ces cinéastes auprès de la jeune génération, dont Xavier Dolan, les legs sont nombreux et invitent les comparaisons réaffirmant le caractère novateur de ces deux films pionniers. Ce livre revisite À tout prendre et Il était une fois dans l’Est pour démontrer leur importance artistique et sociale au moment de leur création ainsi que leur héritage durable dans le contexte du cinéma queer mondial.

Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today.Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Anders als die Andern is a remarkable artifact of cinema culture connected to the vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. The film makes a strong case for the normalization of homosexuality and for its decriminalization, but the central melodrama still finds its characters undone by their public outing. Ervin Malakaj sees the film’s portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates Anders als die Andern’s mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film’s melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle.Over a century after the film’s release, Anders als die Andern serves as a stark reminder of how hostile the world can be to queer people, but also as an object lesson in how to find sustenance and social connection in tragic narratives.

Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today.Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Anders als die Andern is a remarkable artifact of cinema culture connected to the vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. The film makes a strong case for the normalization of homosexuality and for its decriminalization, but the central melodrama still finds its characters undone by their public outing. Ervin Malakaj sees the film’s portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates Anders als die Andern’s mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film’s melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle.Over a century after the film’s release, Anders als die Andern serves as a stark reminder of how hostile the world can be to queer people, but also as an object lesson in how to find sustenance and social connection in tragic narratives.

Maurice, James Ivory’s 1987 adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel, follows an Edwardian man’s journey from the awakening of his desire for and love of men to self-acceptance. One of the most politically resistant films of the 1980s, Maurice dared to depict a young man’s coming-out story and a happy ending for its lovers, Maurice and Alec.James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, a couple whose cinema is synonymous with period film adaptation, released Maurice during the first AIDS decade, a time of flagrant transatlantic homophobia. Criticism following its release described Ivory as a superficial and staid director, while the film was received as a regression to the uncinematic and overly faithful style that characterized the early adaptations by Merchant Ivory Productions. Offering a close reading of Forster’s novel and an analysis of Ivory’s distinctive visual style, Richard Robbins’s indelible score, and the performances of James Wilby, Hugh Grant, and Rupert Graves, David Greven argues that the film is a model of sympathetic adaptation. This study champions the film as the finest of the Merchant Ivory works, making a case for Ivory’s underappreciated talents as a director of great subtlety and intelligence, and for the film as one worth recuperating from its detractors.Understanding Maurice as a fully realized work of art and adaptation, this volume offers insight into how a stunning novel of gay love became a classic of queer film.

Maurice, James Ivory’s 1987 adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel, follows an Edwardian man’s journey from the awakening of his desire for and love of men to self-acceptance. One of the most politically resistant films of the 1980s, Maurice dared to depict a young man’s coming-out story and a happy ending for its lovers, Maurice and Alec.James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, a couple whose cinema is synonymous with period film adaptation, released Maurice during the first AIDS decade, a time of flagrant transatlantic homophobia. Criticism following its release described Ivory as a superficial and staid director, while the film was received as a regression to the uncinematic and overly faithful style that characterized the early adaptations by Merchant Ivory Productions. Offering a close reading of Forster’s novel and an analysis of Ivory’s distinctive visual style, Richard Robbins’s indelible score, and the performances of James Wilby, Hugh Grant, and Rupert Graves, David Greven argues that the film is a model of sympathetic adaptation. This study champions the film as the finest of the Merchant Ivory works, making a case for Ivory’s underappreciated talents as a director of great subtlety and intelligence, and for the film as one worth recuperating from its detractors.Understanding Maurice as a fully realized work of art and adaptation, this volume offers insight into how a stunning novel of gay love became a classic of queer film.

Widely considered to be English Canada’s first queer film, Winter Kept Us Warm explores a romance between two young men at the University of Toronto in the early 1960s, a moment when homosexuality was still a crime in Canada.A true student film, Winter was written and directed by David Secter, a twenty-two-year-old English major, shot with amateur actors and a volunteer crew, and completed on a budget of only $8,000. Against the odds, the film was a huge success. Lauded by critics at home and abroad, it was selected to open the Commonwealth Film Festival, played art house cinemas across the United States and Europe, and became the first Anglo-Canadian fiction feature to screen at Cannes. Influential film journals including Sight and Sound and Cahiers du cinéma covered it, as did mainstream publications such as Variety and the New York Times. David Cronenberg has cited it as influential on his own work. Despite this acclaim, the film has largely vanished from the cultural consciousness and few queer people today have even heard of it, let alone seen it.With this new addition to the Queer Film Classics series, Chris Dupuis looks at the disconnect between the film’s historical importance and its subsequent disappearance, examining how the story of Winter Kept Us Warm can serve as a starting point for intergenerational queer dialogue.

Widely considered to be English Canada's first queer film, Winter Kept Us Warm explores a romance between two young men at the University of Toronto in the early 1960s, a moment when homosexuality was still a crime in Canada.A true student film, Winter was written and directed by David Secter, a twenty-two-year-old English major, shot with amateur actors and a volunteer crew, and completed on a budget of only $8,000. Against the odds, the film was a huge success. Lauded by critics at home and abroad, it was selected to open the Commonwealth Film Festival, played art house cinemas across the United States and Europe, and became the first Anglo-Canadian fiction feature to screen at Cannes. Influential film journals including Sight and Sound and Cahiers du cinéma covered it, as did mainstream publications such as Variety and the New York Times. David Cronenberg has cited it as influential on his own work. Despite this acclaim, the film has largely vanished from the cultural consciousness and few queer people today have even heard of it, let alone seen it.With this new addition to the Queer Film Classics series, Chris Dupuis looks at the disconnect between the film's historical importance and its subsequent disappearance, examining how the story of Winter Kept Us Warm can serve as a starting point for intergenerational queer dialogue.

Based on a play by Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1961) was the first mainstream commercial American film to feature a lesbian character in a leading role. It centres on a teacher at a girls’ school (Shirley MacLaine) who is accused of harbouring feelings for her co-worker (Audrey Hepburn) and depicts the intense moral panic that ensues. Produced in the social climate of the Lavender Scare, the film reveals deep insights into the politics of sexuality and censorship in midcentury America, only a few years before more visible struggles for queer liberation.The director, William Wyler, lobbied hard to get the film made after an earlier straight-washed version in 1936. The tense road to production included debates about whether to eliminate mentions of lesbianism from the script and how implicitly queer subject matter might conflict with the Production Code, by then weakened but still in force. Julia Erhart’s reading of the film’s conception, production, and reception advances a nuanced case of censorship as a productive force. While contests between Hellman and Wyler suppressed scenes of overt affection between main characters Karen and Martha, reception was comparatively fixated on the characters’ lesbianism: it threatened middlebrow movie critics in the mainstream press and resonated with queer audiences. Erhart’s attentive interpretation of both the script and the sonic landscape yields a detailed analysis of the soundtrack as an original pro-lesbian element.As issues of queer censorship continue to permeate life and culture more than fifty years later, Erhart demonstrates that The Children’s Hour is as salient to social and political tensions around gender and sexuality today as it was in the 1960s.

Based on a play by Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1961) was the first mainstream commercial American film to feature a lesbian character in a leading role. It centres on a teacher at a girls’ school (Shirley MacLaine) who is accused of harbouring feelings for her co-worker (Audrey Hepburn) and depicts the intense moral panic that ensues. Produced in the social climate of the Lavender Scare, the film reveals deep insights into the politics of sexuality and censorship in midcentury America, only a few years before more visible struggles for queer liberation.The director, William Wyler, lobbied hard to get the film made after an earlier straight-washed version in 1936. The tense road to production included debates about whether to eliminate mentions of lesbianism from the script and how implicitly queer subject matter might conflict with the Production Code, by then weakened but still in force. Julia Erhart’s reading of the film’s conception, production, and reception advances a nuanced case of censorship as a productive force. While contests between Hellman and Wyler suppressed scenes of overt affection between main characters Karen and Martha, reception was comparatively fixated on the characters’ lesbianism: it threatened middlebrow movie critics in the mainstream press and resonated with queer audiences. Erhart’s attentive interpretation of both the script and the sonic landscape yields a detailed analysis of the soundtrack as an original pro-lesbian element.As issues of queer censorship continue to permeate life and culture more than fifty years later, Erhart demonstrates that The Children’s Hour is as salient to social and political tensions around gender and sexuality today as it was in the 1960s.

Céline Sciamma’s 2011 film Tomboy is the central work in the French filmmaker’s coming-of-age trilogy. Bracketed between La Naissance des pieuvres / Waterlilies (2007), an examination of girlhood and teenage desire, and the 2014 film Bande de filles / Girlhood, about the lives of a group of Black girls in their late teens living in the Paris suburbs, Tomboy is a quiet, understated examination of gender and queer selfhood amidst the shifting sands of late childhood and early adolescence.Tomboy is an intimate and luminous film, tender but stark, and never sentimental. Written, cast, and filmed in a matter of months, it follows the experiences and burgeoning friendships of a ten-year-old child who moves to a new town during the summer holidays. First introducing themself as Mikaël, they are, we later learn, Laure to their parents and younger sister. Sciamma’s film is not interested in why the character is passing but in how. Cristina Johnston focuses on specific elements of Mikaël/Laure’s haptic and spatial experience, showing how the filmmaker’s signature engagement with surfaces and textures allows queer potentialities to unfold organically.While Johnston centres her analysis on Tomboy, she also connects the film to broader themes within Sciamma’s trilogy, public reception of the films, and the significance of Sciamma’s identity as a queer director. Ultimately the book offers insight into a film that deserves to be watched and appreciated for its nuanced portrayal of childhood, queerness, and passing as experience rather than ideology.

Céline Sciamma’s 2011 film Tomboy is the central work in the French filmmaker’s coming-of-age trilogy. Bracketed between La Naissance des pieuvres / Waterlilies (2007), an examination of girlhood and teenage desire, and the 2014 film Bande de filles / Girlhood, about the lives of a group of Black girls in their late teens living in the Paris suburbs, Tomboy is a quiet, understated examination of gender and queer selfhood amidst the shifting sands of late childhood and early adolescence.Tomboy is an intimate and luminous film, tender but stark, and never sentimental. Written, cast, and filmed in a matter of months, it follows the experiences and burgeoning friendships of a ten-year-old child who moves to a new town during the summer holidays. First introducing themself as Mikaël, they are, we later learn, Laure to their parents and younger sister. Sciamma’s film is not interested in why the character is passing but in how. Cristina Johnston focuses on specific elements of Mikaël/Laure’s haptic and spatial experience, showing how the filmmaker’s signature engagement with surfaces and textures allows queer potentialities to unfold organically.While Johnston centres her analysis on Tomboy, she also connects the film to broader themes within Sciamma’s trilogy, public reception of the films, and the significance of Sciamma’s identity as a queer director. Ultimately the book offers insight into a film that deserves to be watched and appreciated for its nuanced portrayal of childhood, queerness, and passing as experience rather than ideology.

A classic of New Mexican Cinema, Y Tu Mamá También courted controversy with its explicit depictions of teenage sexuality and its forthright perspective on the country’s inequality. The cinematic sensation gained international accolades for its mixing of genres and film styles and inspired a wide body of writing from both critics and scholars. The multimedia lives of Y Tu Mamá También (especially in music, music videos, and social media) have kept the film relevant for audiences too young to have seen it when it debuted.Juan Llamas-Rodriguez revisits Y Tu Mamá También after more than two decades of social, industrial, and technological change to show how it astutely captures a particular moment in Mexican history and film production. The film was a turning point for Mexican stardom on the world stage, and the performances and celebrity of its stars, Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, reframed millennial Mexican masculinities. The eclectic and popular bilingual soundtrack is a focal point, read as engendering a queer listening and as an integral aspect of the film’s queering of time. Rather than being legibly classified as gay or bisexual, Y Tu Mamá También flouts sexual mores and national stereotypes and continues to spur new forms of longing and desire among audiences today.Moving beyond heavily debated questions of identity and representation, Llamas-Rodriguez explores the waves of reception, scholarship, celebrity culture, and social media content around Y Tu Mamá También that have shaped its queer legacy, and the circuits of influence that enliven global cinema across media and national borders.

A classic of New Mexican Cinema, Y Tu Mamá También courted controversy with its explicit depictions of teenage sexuality and its forthright perspective on the country’s inequality. The cinematic sensation gained international accolades for its mixing of genres and film styles and inspired a wide body of writing from both critics and scholars. The multimedia lives of Y Tu Mamá También (especially in music, music videos, and social media) have kept the film relevant for audiences too young to have seen it when it debuted.Juan Llamas-Rodriguez revisits Y Tu Mamá También after more than two decades of social, industrial, and technological change to show how it astutely captures a particular moment in Mexican history and film production. The film was a turning point for Mexican stardom on the world stage, and the performances and celebrity of its stars, Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, reframed millennial Mexican masculinities. The eclectic and popular bilingual soundtrack is a focal point, read as engendering a queer listening and as an integral aspect of the film’s queering of time. Rather than being legibly classified as gay or bisexual, Y Tu Mamá También flouts sexual mores and national stereotypes and continues to spur new forms of longing and desire among audiences today.Moving beyond heavily debated questions of identity and representation, Llamas-Rodriguez explores the waves of reception, scholarship, celebrity culture, and social media content around Y Tu Mamá También that have shaped its queer legacy, and the circuits of influence that enliven global cinema across media and national borders.

Written in less than ten days in 1994, The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert became a cultural phenomenon that fundamentally altered mainstream ideas about queer identity worldwide.The iconic imagery of Priscilla still resonates as a symbol of global queer pride and liberation in spite of a critical reception that has varied since its release. Renée Middlemost provides valuable insight into the key debates surrounding the film through an overview of its production, initial reception, and legacy – adaptation into a stage musical, theme for an Olympic float, and inspiration for reality television programs. The evolution of Priscilla’s reputation also offers insight into ever-changing cultural attitudes: wild praise upon release, academic and critical backlash, and finally a nuanced but warm welcome into the history of Australian cinema. Equal parts road movie, musical, and comedy, Priscilla moved between genres, pulling off a radical centring of queer lives for mainstream consumption in the mid-1990s.Passing its thirtieth anniversary, The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert endures as cult object and cultural touchstone, adored by devoted audiences while serving as a reminder of progress made and the work still needed for acceptance. As Middlemost says of her first viewing in a suburban Sydney multiplex in 1994: “It was rude, it was sparkly, it shocked the family members who had begrudgingly taken me; I loved it.”