About the Book
A collection of reviews and articles by film critic Thomas Waugh, written over a period of 20 years and originally published in gay community tabloids, academic journals, and anthologies. Waugh touches on some of the great films of the gay film canon, from "Taxi zum Klo" to "Kiss of the Spider Woman". He also discusses obscure guilty pleasures like "Born A Man...Let Me Die A Woman", filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Eisenstein, and film personalities from Montgomery Clift to Patty Duke. Emerging from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, Waugh traverses crises from censorship to AIDS, tackling mainstream pot-boilers along with art movies, documentaries, and avant-garde erotic videos. His words oscillate from anger and passion to wry wit and irony.
Table of Contents:
Foreword / John Greyson
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Films by Gays for Gays: A Very Natural Thing, Word Is Out, and The Naked Civil Servant (1977)
Gays, Straights, Film, and the Left: A Dialogue (with Chuck Kleinhans) (1977)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976–77)
A Fag-Spotter’s Guide to Eisenstein (1977)
Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1978)
Medical Thrillers: Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman (1978–79)
Murnau: The Films Behind the Man (1979)
An Unromantic Fiction: I’m Not from Here, by Harvey Marks (1979)
The Gay Nineties, the Gay Seventies: Samperi’s Ernesto and von Praunheim’s Army Of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts (1979)
Montgomery Clift Biographies: Stars and Sex (1979–80)
Gay Cinema, Slick vs. Real: Chant d’amour, Army of Lovers, We Were One Man (1980)
Nighthawks, by Ron Peck and Paul Hallam (1980)
A Saturday Night Surprise: Burin des Rozier’s Blue Jeans (1980)
Caligula (1980)
Taxis and Toilets: Ripploh and His Brothers (1981)
Bright Lights in the Night: Pasolini, Schroeter, and Others (1981)
Patty Duke and Tasteful Dykes (1982)
Two Strong Entries, One Dramatic Exit: Luc ou la part des choses, Another Way, and Querelle (1982)
Hollywood’s Change of Heart? (Porky’s and The Road Warrior) (1982)
Dreams, Cruises, and Cuddles in Tel Aviv: Amos Gutman’s Nagua (1983)
Hauling an Old Corpse Out of Hitchcock’s Trunk: Rope (1983)
Sex Beyond Neon: Third World Gay Films? (1985)
Fassbinder Fiction: A New Biography (1986)
Ashes and Diamonds in the Year of the Queer: Decline of the American Empire, Anne Trister, A Virus Knows No Morals, and Man of Ashes (1986)
The Kiss of the Maricon, or Gay Imagery in Latin American Cinema (1986–87)
Laws of Desire: Maurice, Law of Desire, and Vera (1987)
Two Great Gay Filmmakers: Hello and Good-bye (1988)
Beauty and the Beast, Take Two (1988)
Whipping Up a Cinema (1989)
Erotic Self-Images in the Gay Male AIDS Melodrama (1988, 1992)
In Memoriam: Vito Russo, 1946–1990 (1991)
We’re Talking, Vulva, or, My Body Is Not a Metaphor (1995, 1999)
Walking on Tippy Toes: Lesbian and Gay Liberation Documentary of the
Post-Stonewall Period 1969–1984 (1995–97)
Archeology and Censorship (1997)
Bibliography: Selected Additional Works
Index
About the Author :
Thomas Waugh is Professor of Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. In addition to his many published articles and reviews, he is the author of Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall.
John Greyson is a prizewinning filmmaker whose work includes the features Urinal, Zero Patience, Lilies, and Uncut, as well as numerous short videos.
Review :
"This is an enthralling book about a topic at once life-affectingly important and extraordinarily complex: how gay people--or anyone else--are seen and see themselves and how the movies help shape that. The excitement of the book is that it so deftly combines the white heat of political engagement with the rigor and nuance of scholarship. Tom Waugh shows us in exemplary fashion that you can combine personal passion and political engagement with the highest standards of intellectual discipline, while taking us on a delicious trip through the vagaries of queer film images."--Richard Dyer, University of Warwick "Tom Waugh was thinking queerly about the movies for decades before the New Queer Cinema was a market niche, but without his careful thinking and charming interventions, it's hard to imagine the present cultural moment. Back when being gay was anything but fashionable, Waugh taught and fought, proselytized and organized, so that queer films and queer audiences would be taken seriously." - B. Ruby Rich"For more than twenty years Thomas Waugh has been writing about gay movies and gays in cinema in Canada. Waugh's career has covered the underground gay cinema of the late 70s, gay cinema during the early Aids epidemic in the 80s and the Queer New Wave of the 90s. Witty, ironic and always passionate, Waugh--whose work has been collected in a book, The Fruit Machine--was an early champion and practioner of queer cultural and cinematic criticism, an inspiration to countless would-be gay film journalists and an invaluable study source for queer film buffs."--Gay Times, August 2000
