The importance of cinema for gay and lesbian audiences

1. The importance of cinema for gay and lesbian audiences • As a medium of communication and self-identification: community building. • Fashioning a form of alternative spectatorship and creating a subculture. • Cinema and performance: • The importance of expressing gay identity through nongay representations as an important strategy of subverting and contesting a sexually repressive culture.

2. Gay and lesbian film theory • Critique of stereotypes. • Defining an independent film culture. • Institutional films. • Confrontational films. • Affirmation films. • Queer cinema as counter-cinema. • Defining the activity of the queer spectator.

3. Defining an independent film culture • Institutional films. • Linked to the establishment of gay cultural and political institutions. • In dit teken (Netherlands, 1949), COC. • Activist documents. • Confrontational films. • “Zapping” and symbolic terrorism. • Nicht der Homosexuelle is pervers, sondern die Situations in der er lebt (Rosa von Praunheim). • Taxi zum Klo (Frank Ripploh). • Affirmation films. • Positive image films: Word is Out (1977). • Coming out films. • Queer cinema.

4. Defining the activityof queer spectatorship • Emphasizing the difference and creative activity of spectatorship. • Richard Dyer: ”[The expression of gayness through non-gay representations is an important strategy of subversion for gays in relation to the cinema. This subversion may be in the films and/or in our response to them; the gay sensibility may be at work at the point of production ('encoding') and/or at the point of consumption ('decoding'). Either way it goes against the grain of the film and the culture. . . ." • Spectatorship as an active and creative reappropriation of film for new positions of identity, meaning, and desire.

5. Theories of queer spectatorship • Critiquing heterosexist assumptions in psychoanalytic film theory, including feminist theory. • Challenging the formalism of theories of narrative, apparatus, and identification. • Defining spectatorship as a performative and creative activity. • Appropriation and camp. • Camp as a critical practice. • Queer theory.

6. Camp as a critical practice • An assertion of identity or self-integrity: a temporary means of accommodation with society where art becomes both an intense mode of individualism and a form of protest. • Through performance, making something positive from a discredited social identity. • A way of expressing the idea that all sexual identity is masquerade and performance or sexual theatricality.

7. The stakes of “queer” theory • Appropriation of homophobic approbation. • Theory as a detoured and detouring space: critique and subversion of repressive sexual definitions. • Gay/lesbian is not a binary grouping, but a complex spectrum of practiced sexualities and lived identities. • “Queer” posed as the range of identities and potentialities of desire that elude the binary norms of presumptive heterosexuality.