Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017

The extravagant opening sequence of the film Bent directed by Sean Mathias (1997) fabricates a promiscuous gay venue in the mythic 1930s Weimar Berlin. While Greta’s club is completely fictional, the megastar Mick Jagger’s drag show in this sequence queerly transcends spatiality and temporality. Greta/Jagger not only anticipates the persecution and annihilation of gay men in Nazi Germany but also elegizes modern queer subcultures and their often destructive self-indulgence. This sequence is a flamboyant return to the pastness of queer past that aesthetically represents a radically different queer contemporariness. The screening of queer nostalgia in this decadent opening sequence creates an allegorical space, a psychedelic modern Babylon or a sort of uncanny ‘thirdspace’, a physical and mental space at the same time. The fantastic venue is interrelated with displacement of cultural production, reinvention of collective memory, queer melancholy and, particularly, camp performativity and a new vision of nostalgia as drag show.

This article examines the role nostalgia plays in three versions of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: John le Carré’s original novel from 1974, John Irvin’s 1979 miniseries, and, especially, Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film. Within Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s complex, highly contrived and furtive masculine narrative – where affects are filtered, sublimated and repressed – appear significant forms of nostalgia. Moreover, in all versions of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy nostalgia is queered/queer at vital moments. Without queer forms of nostalgia, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy would be a different film – so too would be the original novel and its multiple adaptations.

This article discusses nostalgia and sensation in Carol (Haynes, 2015), a contemporary melodrama about a lesbian romance in the 1950s. While Carol returns its romance to a closeted past, it presents a nostalgic view of queer desire that is neither wistful nor tragic. Drawing on Tamara de Szegheo Lang’s theory of critical nostalgia and Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of longing, this article argues that Carol’s nostalgic form, particularly its use of framing, texture and colour, unsettles linear experiences of time associated with looking at the past. Carol’s conspicuous formalism intertwines the phenomena and immediacy of temporal experience with the multiple experiences of historical desire, and the film’s aesthetics productively complicate its compliance with a larger narrative of linear progress. The interaction of framing, texture and colour in Carol engage ways of seeing that are critically full, rather than indulgently melancholic, of female desire in the 1950s.

Rich in 1960s period detail, the television series Mad Men (2007–15, US: AMC) nevertheless disrupts escapist nostalgia by exploring the injustices underlying the American Dream. As part of this portrayal, Mad Men shows us the pain and possibility of queer life before Stonewall. First, Mad Men spotlights the period’s homophobia and the sadness of closeted life, prompting viewers to be critical of benighted attitudes, sympathetic to queer characters, but also distanced from the period’s bigotry. Second, Mad Men documents the richness of 1960s queer life, especially detailing the growing acceptance of queer people in advertising. However, the series projects the present onto the past through tropes of the ‘gay best friend’ (GBF) and ‘helper homosexual’. Lastly, in the unexpected Glen Bishop–Betty Draper ‘romance’, the series moves beyond models of queerness rooted in identity and identity politics into a more modern exploration of ‘queer’ as non-normative, even queering time itself to propose new future potentialities. Through these different forms of nostalgia, Mad Men functions as a site of negotiation for contemporary approaches to ‘queerness’, oscillating between anti-homophobic unmasking of past injustice, neo-liberal faith in identity politics that celebrates diversity and inclusion, and a more transgressive queer challenge to normativity itself.

This article considers the deployment of self-reflexive storytelling strategies by the titular protagonists in the LGBT biopics Milk (Van Sant, 2008) and Pedro (Oceano, 2008). Written by Dustin Lance Black, both films utilize the formal and narrative conventions as well as the historiographic features of the biopic genre to legitimize its subjects in contemporary culture. Furthermore, Harvey Milk and Pedro Zamora foreground the practice and political utility of storytelling as they assert control over their tragic yet ultimately hopeful legacies. Through a textual analysis of the films, the article examines how the films intersect with the LGBT biopic as a subgenre of the contemporary biographical film and as popular queer history.

At a moment marked by death and displacement, the 1994 documentary film ¡Viva 16! (Long Live 16! [Aguirre and Robles, 1994]) re-imagined the present by turning towards the past. The film followed the development and growth of a queer Latinx community on and around 16th street in the Mission district of San Francisco, CA at a time when the twin devastation of gentrification and AIDS threatened to erase the community from the landscape. Paying attention to the movements of both the narrators and the film itself, this article highlights the usage of active nostalgia and hopeful imagination to craft narratives of belonging. The article reads the film within its historical context to suggest the strategies of narration it employed are useful for utilizing the past to take action in the present.

Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture, Gilad Padva (2014) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 254 pp., ISBN: 9781137266330, h/bk, $95.00; ISBN: 9781349443178, P/bk, $90.00

Quo Vadis, Mervyn LeRoy (1951) USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Ghostbusters, Paul Feig (2016) USA: Columbia Pictures