Book Review: "The Queer Film Guide" and the Enduring Power of Queer Cinema
Kyle Turner's incisive and inclusive new book is a testament to the diversity and longevity of LGBTQ+ stories in film.
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
I’ve had Kyle Turner’s The Queer Film Guide on my to-be-read pile for quite a while now, but I just recently had the chance to dive in. I knew that I was going to enjoy it, given how much I have always relished reading his commentary on films, media, and culture. Indeed, from the moment that I sat down and started reading this book, I found myself falling completely under Turner’s spell, relishing this opportunity to spend time inside the mind of someone who loves queer cinema as much as I do.
It’s always a tough thing to pore through the entirety of queer film history and find just 100 films that are worthy of inclusion in a list designed to give the reader an introduction to the subject. Turner, however, soon shows that he is more than up to the task, and while he clearly knows his stuff to an extraordinary degree, he is also someone who wears his learning lightly. He doesn’t hide behind jargon and complicated syntax; instead, he wants his reader to emerge with the same enjoyment and appreciation of these films as he himself possesses. Each chapter focuses on a different film, offering a brief plot summary, some analyses, and a reflection on how important it is for queer representation, queer issues, and queer experience. Not every film in the book wears its queerness on its sleeve–as Turner himself points out, censorship apparatuses such as the Production Code meant for a very long time that queerness couldn’t even be explicitly seen on-screen–but it’s always there, lurking beneath the surface.
What’s particularly striking about Turner’s bite-sized analyses is just how subtle and finessed they are. It’s the rare film commentator who can manage to say a lot in roughly a hundred words or so (as I should know, having written numerous listicles over the past several years), but Turner pulls this off with aplomb. Even for someone who has watched and written about quite a few of queer films found here, I still found myself thinking about them in new and exciting ways. Turner’s prose is a pleasure in itself, and he makes you feel as if you are right there with him, having an enriching and entertaining conversation with someone who truly understands not just how film as a medium works but how queerness infuses so much of what we see. Additional snippets at the end of each chapter provide recommendations for further viewing and useful information about the film in question.
I was also pleased with how comprehensive Turner manages to be. This is no small feat, considering the plethora of queer films one could choose from. There are classics here, to be sure, like Bringing up Baby (who could ever forget the moment when Cary Grant’s Dr. David Huxley exclaims “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!”) and The Children’s Hour (a queer tragedy if there ever was one), and it’s clear that Turner has a very firm grasp of the entirety of queer film history. The Queer Film Guide is likewise diverse in its generic offerings. There are plenty of romantic comedies and hard-hitting dramas here, but there are also documentaries (including the heartbreaking and beautiful Tongues Untied) and pieces of experimental cinema (such as Jonathan Caouette’s masterpiece Tarnation).
It would have been very easy for Turner to focus just on either the US or Europe, both of which have produced a plethora of queer films, particularly throughout the past few decades. Some of the international gems included in the book are Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Taiwan), Farewell My Concubine (China), Happy Together (Hong Kong), Yossi and Jagger (Israel), and The Wound (2017). I’ll admit that I can be a bit parochial in my film tastes (though I do love Happy Together), and so I particularly appreciated Turner’s willingness to cast a wide net in terms of inclusion. I’m sure that his choices in this regard will be as revelatory to others as they were to me.
Visually the book is a feast for the eyes, with some gorgeous stylized illustrations by Andy Warren. However, I do have just one quibble when it comes to the book’s design: sometimes it can be difficult to read the print, given the contrast between the page and the type. At the same time, I did appreciate the ways in which the book’s design was in its own way a sort of queer act, filled with joy and spiky pleasure. Like the very best of the queer cinema, it asks us to just relish the visual image in all of its beauty.
In his acknowledgments, Turner remarks that queer film has given him new opportunities to think about and commune with the world and with his own identity as a queer man. That, I think, is the greatest joy of a book like this one. It reminds us that queer folks have always been in the movies, even when they had to exist at the margins or were referred to through subtext and innuendo. Moreover, it’s the type of book that invites us as readers to be active participants in the creation of a queer canon, and Turner wisely never talks down to his audience.
Overall, I found The Queer Film Guide to be a fascinating, informative, and provocative look at the best that queer cinema has had to offer. It’s the kind of book that you can open to pretty much any page and find something new and exciting to think about. This is very clearly Turner’s love letter to the movies that have shaped him as a queer critic, and we’re all very fortunate that he has invited us all to join him. While the book will be of particular interest to queer readers who want to get a better sense of how they have been depicted in film, I do hope that straight audiences will find much to enjoy, as well. After all, the world gets a little bit better every time it becomes a little bit queerer.