What the fuck happened to queer cinema? A film tradition that has once given us Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Hammer and other iconoclasts is nowadays keen to assimilate with Hollywoodian banality and lukewarm romcoms. Ridiculous coming-of-age stories about provincial gays fitting in small town mentalities are all we see nowadays in endless, repetitive, unimportant LGBT film festivals around the world and especially the so called ‘west’. Is this a symptom of a broader decline of queer politics? Has pinkwashing and homonationalism fully taken over?
I refuse to accept that the netflixisation of queer narratives has signalled the death of queer cinema. The potential for queer films to challenge, enlighten and shock is still out there; we just need to go back to the basics. Back to the de(con)struction of cinematic languages, back to a full-frontal attack on hyper-capitalist 4K image clarity, the aesthetics of lookist body fascism and the supposed morality of happy gay families. Your assimilation has brought us nothing but misery and a nauseating gay and lesbian alt-right. We say no to the politics of homonormative visibility.
We are here to reclaim a cinema that is fragmented, disorienting, explosive, perverse, hysterical, contradictory, dirty, self-referential. A cinema made by actual communities of freaks and avant-garde weirdos. A cinema that dares to dream and scream.