Queer Nostalgia and Queer Histories in Uncertain Times

qsmpc 2 (2) pp. 161–165 Intellect Limited 2017

Editorial

Bridget Kies University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Thomas J. West III Syracuse University

Queer nostalgia and queer histories in uncertain times

This began as a very different issue. In recent years, a rash of historical 1. In keeping true to fictional television series and films featuring queer characters received popu- the differences in nomenclature and lar and critical attention. In series like The Tudors (2007–10, USA: Showtime), identity in the 1980s, Spartacus (2010–13, Starz) and Downton Abbey (2010–15, UK: ITV), the plight when the film is set, the fictional character of the queer subject during a period less tolerant of homosexuality is used to Rayon is never clearly prove the narrative’s commitment to historical accuracy. Films like Kill Your identified as a trans Darlings (Krokidas, 2013), Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée, 2013) and The Imitation woman, and at times other characters Game (Tyldum, 2014) drew attention to the willingness of straight actors to use ‘he’ pronouns portray queer characters. For his role as Rayon, a trans woman with HIV in in reference to her. Dallas Buyers Club, Jared Leto was even given an Academy Award.1 Most We have elected to identify Rayon as contentiously, the firestorm of criticism ignited by the whitewashing of the a trans woman, a riots in Roland Emmerich’s 2015 Stonewall, coupled with Emmerich’s own retroactive application of history that reflects claims that the film was not intended for queer audiences, led us to wonder how Leto prepared why popular media was so eager to turn to the past to tell stories about queer for the role (by people and for whom these stories were being told. As Michael Warner has meeting transgender people) and identified posited, ‘queers do not have the institution for common memory and genera- her, see Anderson- tional transmission’ (1999: 51). Was it merely the case that the spate of histor- Minshall (2013). ical fiction was being made by hetero-mainstream media industries for the newly sympathetic liberal audience to engage with a past they had previously

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2. We are grateful to neglected? Or, perhaps, given the dominance of white and cisgender iden- Sarah Panuska for reviewing Pavda’s tities within these films and television series, was historical fiction a genre work Queer Nostalgia that permitted the depoliticized homonormative subject to engage with politi- in Cinema and Pop cized queer identities – albeit white, cis ones – from the past? In the wake Culture in this issue. of many recent social and legislative changes, perhaps best exemplified by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges on 26 June 2015, were we becoming nostalgic for a less tolerant, more dangerous past? On 9 November 2016, we, like many queer scholars, recognized that nostalgia had taken on a new tenour. The election of Donald Trump and other Republicans, the rise of the ‘alt-right’ and legislation like North Carolina’s ‘bathroom bill’ were a clear retaliation against Obergefell and the various protections the Obama administration had granted to queer citizens. Rather than nostalgia for the distant past, we now simply long for last year. History, too, had become more tenuous. During Pride Month in 2016, President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn as a national monument, the first dedi- cated to the LGBTQ rights movement. This designation simultaneously legit- imated LGBTQ history and effectively neutered it by folding the history of LGBTQ people’s uprising into the heterosexist system responsible for their oppression. But comparatively, this move brought attention to the continu- ing struggle for equality rights that, with a new administration in the White House, is no longer guaranteed. Under a very different climate than it began, this issue attempts to examine how history grapples with an unmanageable but persistent queerness and how queerness highlights the folly of nostos (return home) and alia (longing). The temporal logics of history are disrupted by J. Halberstam’s notion of ‘queer time’, in which queer subjects ‘believe that their futures can be imag- ined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (2005: 2). Since queer subjects have historically been likely to be cast from home, queer nostalgia especially conveys the way nostalgia is beyond a simple longing, but, as Svetlana Boym argues, a ‘romance of one’s own fantasy’ in which the home and past being longed for never existed (2007: 7). It is interesting that both Boym and Halberstam see the individual’s ability to imagine as critical to the disruption of memory and history. Gilad Pavda builds on this centrality of imagination to suggest that queer nostalgia operates through collective fanta- sizing and fantasy, which are essential parts of queer communities (2014: 8). For Pavda the power of queer nostalgia lies in its ability to serve as a ‘thera- peutic process of coming to terms with who we are, what we want to be, and what we can be’ (2014: 11).2 Thus, queer nostalgia, with its disruption of real- ity and time, offers possibilities for longing for a more perfect future. The articles in this issue engage with a number of pressing questions about the nature of nostalgia and the telling of history. From Weimar Berlin to Cold War London, film narratives offer accounts that cast aside historical accuracy for what Boym calls ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia: the former proposing to ‘rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps’ and the latter dwelling in ‘the imperfect process of remembrance’ (2001: 41). Gilad Pavda and Randal Rogers both consider how historical fiction films engage with restorative and reflective nostalgia. Pavda begins the issue by examining Mick Jagger’s performance at a decadent nightclub in Weimar Berlin in the film Bent (Mathias, 1997). Drawing upon the work of French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, Pavda finds the nightclub to serve as a ‘thirdspace’ wherein the physical and mental spaces collide. Situating the scene within Mick

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Jagger’s larger body of work as rock and roll star and the genre of New Queer Cinema, Pavda argues that Bent serves as an example of ‘historical nostalgia’ in which we collectively conjure up and mythologize the sexual inhibitions of Weimar Berlin in accordance with queer sexualities of the present. Randal Rogers examines the adaptations of John le Carré’s 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as a miniseries for the BBC in 1979 and a feature film directed by Tomas Alfredson in 2011 to observe how the effects of more open attitudes towards homosexuality in 2011 shape the film’s willingness to explore queerness within its characters. Additionally, Rogers finds that the spy genre of the film parallels a historical queerness in the necessity of secrecy and hiding, but the film’s restorative nostalgia is ultimately broken down by the requirements of the genre. The pre-Stonewall period, especially the 1950s and 1960s, is fetishized in popular media for its glamorous fashion and the power that conservative attitudes towards sex and gender had on queer subjects. Both Allain Daigle and David Hennessee have concentrated on how the maintenance of glamour constrains and is constrained by queerness. Daigle is interested in how Carol (Haynes, 2015), a film with a conventional narrative about women’s inhibited sexual desires, became the centrepiece of many ‘best of’ lists as a result of Haynes’ directing style, which Daigle terms ‘conspicuous formalism’. Through an analysis of Haynes’ mise-en-scène and manipulation of time and space, Daigle argues that the film offers an account of queerness disrupting linear time to luxuriate in artifice. David Hennessee sees the repeated silencing of explicitly queer characters in Mad Men (2007–15, US: AMC) as permitting the contemporary audience to congratulate themselves on how far Americans have progressed with regard to LGBTQ rights. By contrast, Hennessee finds the greatest queer potential in the series through the relationship between the disgruntled housewife Betty and the precocious neighbour child Glen. Through the juxtaposition of its problematized LGBTQ characters and its allowance of the more transgressive adult–child relationship, Hennessee sees Mad Men as an example of how queer history is told through the contemporary lens of the tensions between the drive for normativity and the desire for radical queerness. Our final contributions examine non-fictional films to think about how histories of queer people are told to contemporary audiences. Jonathan Lupo examines the queer biopic, using Dustin Lance Black’s screenwriting for Milk (Van Sant, 2008) and Pedro (Oceano, 2008). Lupo finds both films partici- pate in a loose retelling of historical struggles that enables the contemporary audience to feel uplifted. Nevertheless, the centrality of openly gay-identified subjects in these films, as well as Black’s use of voice-over to enable the subject to tell his own story, demonstrates how the queer biopic might offer a useful account of previously underrepresented histories. Andrew Shaffer investigates how the rich history of San Francisco’s Mission district has evolved into a common tale of gentrification and how the short documen- tary ¡Viva 16! (Aguirre and Robles, 1994) retells that history. While Harvey Milk’s Castro had begun to emerge in the 1970s as the locus of queer nightlife in San Francisco, it was a neighbourhood that did not always welcome people of colour. Shaffer sees the history of the Mission district presented in ¡Viva 16! as one that celebrates, and at times eroticizes, the Latinx experience. Drawing upon José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of disidentification (1994), Shaffer argues that ¡Viva 16! participates in what he terms ‘active nostalgia’, a longing for the past that also offers hope for the future.

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Shaffer’s notion of active nostalgia is a fitting conclusion to this collection of articles, which seek to redirect the present by investigating the effects of queerness on history and nostalgia. The dominance of whiteness and maleness in this volume, in terms of authorship and subjects studied, has troubled us. We believe there is especially ripe material in considering the three-pronged intersection of nostalgia, queerness and blackness in the age of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Jeffrey McCune claims, the frequency with which black death is seen in the news and in fictional media is itself queer – out of normal time (2015: 173). The telling of black histories in many recent films or the television series Underground (2016–present, WGN) invites an explora- tion of these connections. Furthermore, if American culture has entered what Time magazine dubbed the ‘transgender tipping point’ in June of 2014, we would like to see more investigations of the kinds of trans histories being told. A roundtable on television’s recent representations of trans characters at the Flow television conference and forthcoming issue of Spectator on trans media are starting points. We also believe there is work to be done examining how older media might complicate the popular notion that trans identities have only just exploded onto our screens. While there is room for further scholar- ship on queer nostalgia and queer histories, the issue we present here is a starting contribution. We address the ways nostalgia has complicated queer media and the past it depicts. In what feels at this moment like a culture increasingly hostile towards queer identities, we offer these examinations of the past as encouragement to fortify ourselves for the future.

References Aguirre, Valentin and Robles, Augie (1994), ¡Viva 16!, USA: Independent. Alfredson, Tomas (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, UK: StudioCanal. Anderson-Minshall, Diane (2013), ‘Jared Leto says trans kids inspired his role in Dallas Buyers Club’, The Advocate, 1 November, http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/film/2013/11/01/jared-leto-says-trans-kids- inspired-his-role-dallas-buyers-club. Accessed 15 March 2016. Boym, Svetlana (2001), The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. —— (2007), ‘Nostalgia and its discontents’, The Hedgehog Review, 9: 2, pp. 7–18. Carré, John le (1974), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Emmerich, Roland (2015), Stonewall, USA: Roadside Attractions. Halberstam, Judith (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press. Haynes, Todd (2015), Carol, USA and UK: The Weinstein Company/StudioCanal. Krokidas, John (2013), Kill Your Darlings, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Mathias, Sean (1997), Bent, UK and Japan: Channel Four Films. McCune, Jeffrey Q. Jr (2015), ‘The queerness of blackness’, QED, 2: 2, pp. 173–76. Muñoz, José Esteban (1994), Disidentifications, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oceano, Nick (2008), Pedro, USA: Wolfe Video. Pavda, Gilad (2014), Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tyldum, Morten (2014), The Imitation Game, USA: The Weinstein Company. Vallée, Jean-Marc (2013), Dallas Buyers Club, USA: Focus Features.

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Van Sant, Gus (2008), Milk, USA: Focus Features. Warner, Michael (1999), The Trouble with Normal, New York: Free Press.

Contributor details Bridget Kies is a Ph.D. candidate in media, cinema and digital studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her research looks at masculinity in television, film and fan communities. She has previously published in Transformative Works and Cultures, Journal of Popular Romance Studies and Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media. Contact: Film Studies Program, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Thomas J. West III is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses on film, popular culture, race and gender. His research examines the representation of antiquity in film, television and other forms of popular culture. He has published an essay on Starz’s series Spartacus and queer masculinity, and has a forthcoming essay on the HBO series Rome and its representation of the golden age of Augustus. Contact: 401 Hall of Languages, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Bridget Kies and Thomas J. West III have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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