Barbed Wire Kisses Panel: The Birthplace of New Queer Cinema

On January 25, 1992, the Sundance Film Festival, in its fifteenth year of operation, hosted a collection of prominent LGBTQIA+ artists, directors, and critics to a panel by the name of Barbed Wire Kisses. Among the panelists was the veteran filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman, accompanied by an array of young directors, all of whom had groundbreaking queer films screened at the festival: Jennie Livingstone (Paris is Burning), Todd Haynes (Poison), Isaac Julien (Young Soul Rebels), Tom Kalin (Swoon), and Gregg Araki (The Living End). Film critic B. Ruby Rich moderated the panel and single-handedly coined the term “New Queer Cinema” to designate the significant wave of independent LGBT movies that swept the film festival circuit that year, characterized by a shared rejection of heteronormativity and feelings of estrangement as a community. 

The factors behind New Queer Cinema’s emergence in the early nineties include the concurrent rise of queer theory in academia, as well as a general democratization of film technology that led to the production of more independent and avant-garde cinema. However, the movement is most often positioned historically as a reaction to, or symptom of, the outrage, devastation, and estrangement of queer communities in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. The hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the virus brought gay people into an intimate relationship with death at the time, with many losing multiple friends and partners. Support for victims was far from universal. Calls for help were met with silence from conservatives in power, and blame for their own predicament by homophobes and religious fanatics. 

It is difficult to unify the queer art made in response to the epidemic into one unified canon. Some works, motivated by the overwhelming feeling of grief, emphasized notions of loss. Derek Jarman’s heart-wrenching film Blue (1993) features narration depicting the real and metaphysical gay struggle over a single static shot of blue, reflecting the complications from AIDS rendered Jarman partially blind. Collective artworks like the AIDS memorial quilt, featuring thousands of victims’ names became iconic showpieces of the movement. Other protest art was driven instead by an outrage towards the status quo’s neglect of the crisis, exemplified by the famous Silence = Death slogan popularized by activist artists like Keith Haring and Rosa von Praunheim. While New Queer Cinema was also not uniform in its perspectives, this same indignation acted as an ideological throughline for many of the movement’s most landmark pieces. With a reality shattered by an excess of death and neglect, New Queer Cinema, in the spirit of New Wave cinema, was characterized by a strategic and intentional subversion of cinematic and cultural norms – specifically, heteronormative ones. Though, unlike the realism and neorealism of French and Italian New Wave cinema, New Queer Cinema was driven primarily by formalism, rebelling just as much through technical aspects of filmmaking as narrative.

A common manifestation of this kind of rebellion was the reversal of straight-washing in historical films, exemplified by the work of two panelists that year: Derek Jarman’s Edward II and Tom Kalin’s Swoon. Jarman was no newcomer to the practice – his catalog, stretching back to the 1970s, included explicitly homoerotic historical dramas ranging from Ancient Roman soldiers to Baroque Italian painters. Edward II portrays the English king’s relationship with a nobleman who had, at the time, been ambiguously labeled by historians as a “favourite” of the royal. Allowing no room for conventional doubt about the subject, Jarman brings the king’s sexuality to the center of the film’s plot and form. The anachronistic production design and score call attention to the timeless nature of Edward II’s situation. The film even ends with a beautiful serenade performed by Annie Lennox and written by closeted 1940s singer Cole Porter. 

In contrast to Edward II, Swoon took anti-straight-washing to criminal history. Tom Kalin’s directorial debut centered around a 1924 murder case, about which many films had already been made, though none dared to focus explicitly on the sexuality of the killers. It was an important divergence from the queer film of previous decades, which, under understandable cultural pressure, primarily focused on representing the marginalized group in an almost fantastically positive light. While the 1992 Sundance panel continued to discuss the awful LGBT portrayal in straight film of the day (such as the trans serial killer trope in Silence of the Lambs, which was about to sweep the Oscars), multiple members of the panel also used their own films to treat the queer-as-criminal theme from a newer, and more importantly, queer perspective.

In The Living End, director and fellow panelist Gregg Araki appropriated this theme of insubordination in a bold subversion of the American road genre. His film follows two HIV-positive men who hit the road after killing a homophobic cop, embracing the same nihilistic outlaw dream present embodied by the rebel characters of Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise. Araki’s ironic stylistic adherence to these Hollywood road classics is intentionally exaggerated, almost to levels of parody. Plot-wise, the characters’ HIV status plays no bigger role than a trigger for the characters’ new life. As a hopeful counter to the grief that saturated queer film during the epidemic, the rebellious absurdity of The Living End attempted to bring an air of liberation and empowerment to a wounded community. 

Araki would go on to make other landmark New Queer Cinema films throughout the 1990s, developing a signature style that melded teenage angst, punk rock, science fiction, and postmodernism. Landmark films of the movement also continued to be produced later in the decade, such as the cult classics Go Fish (1994) and The Watermelon Woman (1996). However, the urgency and aggravation that determined the films of the original 1992 panelists slowly decelerated. Months after releasing Blue, Derek Jarman would succumb to an AIDS-related illness. Gradually, the revolutionary nature of the movement transitioned into the commercial Queer Eye era of the early 2000s. Still, evidenced by the success of modern films like Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name, it’s apparent that the original radical nature of New Queer Cinema continues to influence indie and mainstream film today.