If you’ve ever watched a beloved queer couple on television only to see one of them killed off before the season finale, you’ve witnessed the bury your gays trope in action. Across more than a decade of fandom conversations and academic study, this pattern has become impossible to ignore. From Tara on Buffy the Vampire … Read more
How the Hays Code shaped the way queer characters were written is one of the most important questions in film history. For nearly four decades, the Motion Picture Production Code dictated what Hollywood could show on screen, and LGBTQ+ characters were among its most heavily restricted subjects. From 1930 to 1968, filmmakers could not depict … Read more
If you grew up watching Disney movies, you probably noticed something about the villains. They moved differently than the heroes. They had a certain flourish, a theatricality, an eye makeup situation that the princesses never rocked. Maybe you felt drawn to them without knowing why. I know I did. The question of why so many … Read more
New Queer Cinema is a term coined by critic B. Ruby Rich in 1992 to describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking that erupted in the early 1990s. In the pages of Sight and Sound, Rich named a wave of low-budget, politically urgent films that refused to apologize for their sexuality and refused to play … Read more
In the early 1990s, a wave of independent films by LGBTQ directors seemed to announce a new era of queer visibility on screen. The critic B. Ruby Rich gave that wave a name at the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival, calling it New Queer Cinema, and the label stuck. But behind the celebration of defiance … Read more