The Brooklyn Rail

As I’ve aged, childhood memories have felt increasingly like brief fragments of falling confetti—or hail, depending on the images excavated. I first remember reading about a “New Queer Cinema” probably in the mid-nineties on some ancient dial-up device like WebTV. There was a certain level of non-negotiable grittiness about the VHS titles I was renting as a teen millennial that felt newer than the glorious happy endings of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) or Maurice (1987)—titles that, although made during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, still observed that optimistic mindset that the Sexual Revolution ushered in. When Gen X got behind the cameras in the nineties, that spirit of expressionistic promise withered as the virus’s body count exploded thanks to conservative-minded political domination. But even with the passage of time and a million and one triumphs and tragedies, several titles in the nineties queer cinema canon still find ways to make tragic and mellow endings feel tonically nostalgic.

Throughout the first quarter of the twenty-first century, queer film slowly evolved to a more tranquil, less tragic narrative arc. For too long, the only reflection queer people saw on screen was one of inevitable tragedy. This tension reached a fever pitch with the mainstream success of 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, which brought the “doomed gay romance” to a massive global audience, solidifying both the power but also the pain of such stories. It’s easy to imagine a conservative ticket buyer in Bush 43’s America quipping, “See. Their lives always end in sadness and violence.” And while the contemporary push for more hopeful portrayals is a necessary evolution, to dilute the unique transgressions of nineties LGBTQ+ cinema in response would be the equivalent of taking an eraser to the messy, sometimes ugly, rough draft that sketched that path forward. Late twentieth-century queer cinema was filled with victims; however, their spirit was rarely ever that of a fool, but rather a shedding of centuries of powerlessness, reveling in a raw truth before peace.

Jon and Luke (Craig Gilmore and Mike Dytri) both live with the specter of death from AIDS in Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992). But the doomed duo resist falling into submissive surrender to the unfair cruelty of what their deck dealt out. With their youthful hormones still primed for sexual abandon before they start to physically deteriorate, they decide to go on a road trip to seemingly fuck an uncaring system with no lube. Film critic Jon’s reservations about vagabond Luke’s bipolar fusion of reckless abandon tinged with dominant allure likely resonated with many Bush 41 era closeted suburbanite gays who felt the need to belong to a system, even though it’s not necessarily what they need to thrive. Luke was the kind of back-of-the-bathhouse fantasy that gave the Jon’s of the era erections. Although aroused, and therefore emotionally engaged with the idea of a Luke, Jon—and those who connect with him—also needed to shit on renegade, I don’t give a fuck types. For Jon and the real-world critic cliques he represented, this institutionalized style of snobbery was a performance, displayed in cerebral, group-think circle jerks while babbling over stuff like François Truffaut’s didactic brilliance. Araki allowed Jon to evolve from this stereotype even as The Living End spirals toward ambivalent fragmentation. Under the pressure of a death sentence, Jon faces an existential question about why he should care about standing tall and fitting in with a social majority that expects him to fall and know his place.

The year before The Living End, stirrings of a more meditative, less visceral New Queer Cinema emanated from the Pacific Northwest with Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. If Araki’s rebels with a cause accelerated new methodologies for delivering LGBTQ+ stories on celluloid, River Phoenix’s gentle drifter named Mike Waters provided a more alluringly passive push for that primal energy. Mike battles narcolepsy, homelessness, unpredictable sex work, and achingly real feelings for Scott (Keanu Reeves), who, unlike The Living End’s Luke, is a wealthy poser merely experimenting with downward mobility before returning to his inheritance. Van Sant’s desolate imagery and quirky atmosphere give the film a drifting feeling, almost as if we are witnessing Mike sailing through his life. Phoenix plays the hustler with a knowing, yet unformed, intellectual curiosity and dismissal of human nature. The sex work scenes in the film are artistically staged to evoke the image of time-frozen mannequins, a hazy apparition where the feelings and emotional baggage are put on static display. Their plasticity blunts the rough realities of a hard life. But the film relishes in hopeful moments too, such as when Mike stumbles around confessing his passion for his slumming friend (Reeves’s Scott). Scott’s refrain that “two guys can’t love each other” hurts Mike’s sensitive heart. Mike seems to feel protective of Scott’s surprising and unpredictable moments of vulnerability. The scene engages with the fragile emotional architecture of queer viewers who have their own painful reminders of a Scott-type.

In nineties queer cinema, one recurring theme examines how fragmented identities collide with coping mechanisms and evoke a sense of sadness or restlessness. Whereas the 2020s tend to feature a less apocalyptic reliance on “bury your gays” portrayals, nineties LGBTQ+ cinema came from filmmakers grappling with a stringent, suffocating social structure. In the nineties, homophobic or fundamentalist slogans, such as “gay Teletubbies” and “God Hates Fags,” defined media narratives. If art allows a reflection of an artist’s inner and outer worldviews to collide, then it makes sense that nineties queer films favored authenticity as much as they dealt with seemingly universal themes of cultural upheaval, political turmoil, and deeply ingrained homophobia. Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993) blurred the lines between those grim realities and the importance of artistic expression. Cheng (Leslie Cheung) and Duan’s (Zhang Fengyi) years-long friendship mirrors that of Mike and Scott in Van Sant’s film. Unlike Mike’s ambiguous ending in My Own Private Idaho, Cheng’s suicide on stage, while in character, tore hearts apart in the era. In the mid-2020s, it reads more like an artistic rebuke of the Chinese Politburo’s fervent anti-gay stance.

Farewell My Concubine follows the New Queer Cinema trend of attempting (and succeeding) in excavating the importance of being seen both as an artist and a vessel for the potential consequences of unrequited love. Would it have been better for Duan to have at least lied to Cheng and allowed him to feel that his love was returnable? Kaige positions Cheng’s ending of his own life not only as a tragedy but also as a release of artistic energy that will outlive Mao Zedong’s unimaginative social constraints. Cheng quietly conveys that his story is over and that he needs no permission from another to climax. He gives himself to art instead of languishing in Duan’s and the Politburo’s passionless lens.

Devastation could have easily become a running cliché in the decade’s queer cinema, but these emotional catastrophes felt earned and lived-in as the twentieth century raced toward its end. 1998’s High Art and 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry offered raw, drearily ghostlike canvases for directors Lisa Cholodenko and Kimberly Peirce, respectively, to depict beautiful love stories that are destroyed by drugs and internalized homophobia.

High Art is a film about the contrasts between art and smack, co-dependence and new horizons, an inability to move past toxic crutches because retraining the brain takes a lot of effort once middle age beckons. Ally Sheedy plays Lucy Berliner, a once-famed New York City photographer whose work resembles the very best of Nan Goldin’s dreamy urban eroticism. She exists in a vacuum of rinse-and-repeat highs and lows with her partner, an out-of-work German actress named Greta (Patricia Clarkson). Heroin has become the key to survival within their relationship, combined with a bohemian lifestyle filled with hangers-on. When Syd offers to reintroduce Lucy to the art world, we sense Lucy’s ambivalence to the system—she wants her lifestyle to change, not to reemerge or repeat the emotional trauma that caused her to retreat. Lucy sees not just sexiness and raw ambition in Syd but also the glowing allure of a future she wants but is too exhausted to grasp.

Drugs have long bridged the gaps of boredom and emotional blunting that creep in when the plowing rat race of career-climbing and completing a life checklist concludes. Greta was likely once a vibrant component of Lucy’s life. Maybe white powder wasn’t always the parasite in their dynamic, but any dreams they may have shared about growing old with one another likely withered in the face of addiction struggles. “Heroin chic” in the fashion world was at its height in ’98. If you’re not familiar, it was a look defined by anorexic female bodies dressed in designer clothes with globs of makeup on sallow-looking faces. Cholodenko transfers this weak-kneed, starving style of self-important euphoria to the screen with a slow-moving lens situated in an ethereal tragedy. Lucy overdoses at the end after her brief romance with Syd and her failed attempt to get clean. The thematic takeaway is, for once, not rooted in bigotry, but instead, it’s about the failure of the self, regardless of societal pressures or narrow-minded transgressions.

With the execution of Matthew Shepard a few months after High Art’s release, the last year of history’s most culturally transformative century contained a wave of LGBTQ+ releases with sorrowful endings tinged with hope. I was seventeen when I first watched Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry. I remember researching Brandon Teena’s story and reading reviews of the film while awaiting the DVD release (this was never going to play in a Mobile, Alabama, theater, where I was living/growing up at the time). When I finally watched it in early 2000, I experienced an awakening of courage inside of an inescapable tragedy. The kind of energy that lingers in spirit even after being snuffed out in brutality. Brandon’s story, as portrayed by Hilary Swank, plays like a Greek tragedy inside of a gritty modern western. Peirce and her cinematographer, Jim Denault, frame and light a Nebraska town that feels mapless—so isolated and featureless that it offers no direction and no escape. They use shadows with neo-realist shots, such as a slowly dimming fluorescent convenience store light engulfed in shrouds of Marlboro cigarette smoke.

The inner lives of the characters exist in garish trailers where first dates are nothing more than conversations outside the local 7-Eleven or a reckless ride spent holding onto the bumper of a moving vehicle. The relationship between Brandon and Lana (Chloë Sevigny) is a queer love story that is refreshingly non-cosmopolitan. Nebraska’s Falls City becomes a character as the myopic brains of John (Peter Sarsgaard) and Tom (Brendan Sexton III), the two ex-convicts who befriend and later brutalize Brandon, and even Lana’s mother, Linda (Jeannetta Arnette), are allowed to fester in its near-nomadic desolation. It is a land filled with shift work, unerotic procreation, substance abuse, and Jesus chic.

The frank way Peirce films Lana’s orgasmic awakening from Brandon’s skills is an indictment of the town’s stifling of alternativeness. Before Brandon, Lana had never experienced sexual pleasure outside of missionary position boredom. The only memorable sexual memories for her were likely some guy’s bad breath, grunting in her face. For John and Tom, the pleasure principle is assuredly one-sided and far too liberating to be anything other than “fag shit” that makes them uncomfortable. Falls City bred this homophobic attitude, same as Laramie, Wyoming, and countless other towns that refuse to allow free-ranging thought. When John and Tom rape and later murder Brandon in scenes of dehumanizing cruelty, Peirce wants us to absorb the pain, not turn away from it. We so desperately want Brandon to fight back, to at least spit in their faces. But the power of his story lies not in a physical victory, but in a spirit so defiant that it could not be extinguished by their brutality. Brandon’s story continues to inspire today, while John and Tom and thousands more like them languish in irrelevance.

But those hateful characters’ insignificance doesn’t apply to the New Queer Cinema movement, which ended in the late nineties as a wave of queer teen love stories helped temper some of the necessary darkness of High Art and Boys Don’t Cry. Titles like Election, But I’m a Cheerleader, Get Real, and Edge of Seventeen—all released in the last two years of the nineties—showcased love stories with varying layers of coming-of-age tenderness long before Love, Simon (2018) absorbed these aesthetics for mainstream acceptability. Even a modern touchstone like the HBO show Euphoria, which mixes elements of all these films, feels not quite as renegade when considering what the Clinton era brought to this genre. Call Me by Your Name is beautiful to behold, but Edge of Seventeen’s fuzzy lens capturing midwest love-sick nostalgia is equally effective in evoking that mood. In an era of increasing emotional distance in favor of synthetic fantasies, getting lost in an ecstasy-fueled rave of raw queer storytelling from the nineties is refreshingly regenerative.