New Queer Cinema

From its inception, depiction of sexuality on screen outside of heteronormative behavior has consistently been met with censorship by the state and negative criticism from the media. Yet, beginning with mid 1960s and spanning latter decades, Turkish filmmakers have become far more open and daring in their depiction of the gay and lesbian relationships. It is the aim of this essay to outline a history of LGBT representations in Turkish cinema over the last fifty years, depictions progressing from lesbian to transsexual and finally to homosexual males during the period, 1962 to the present.

Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.

(1981-1995) targeted gay community greatly. While they were suffering from the disease, they were blamed for spreading it. Urgent action was needed to highlight this issue which was ignored by the US government for far too long. Gregg Araki, director, made The Living End in 1992 during the same period when this catastrophe occurred. Belonging to the New Queer Cinema movement, the movie raised the matter differently in comparison to its earlier cultural products. According to some critics (Hart, "Boldly"; Hart, Images; Mills), downgrading the role

Trazemos neste artigo discussão sobre a película tailandesa The Iron Ladies, que mostrou em sua história o caso real de uma equipe que na década de 1990 disputou a liga nacional de voleibol masculino na Tailândia, composto por atletas com performatizações de gênero não
normativas, que designamos no texto como masculinidades queer. Para tal, nos utilizamos dos estudos queer e operacionalizamos análise fílmica pela metodologia pós-estruturalista etnografia de tela. Reconhecemos que o longa-metragem tailandês problematizou importantes deslocamentos de sentidos sobre o masculino no esporte, através da performatização queer dos jogadores de voleibol, ponto principal da película que se utilizou de deboche e ironia como
alavanca para a ruptura.

Als B. Ruby Rich im März 1992 in der New Yorker Village Voice ein neues queeres Kino ausrief, brachte sie damit ein Phänomen auf den Punkt, das mit dem Toronto-Filmfestival ein Jahr zuvor begonnen und seit dem Sundance Film Festival die Fachpresse auf unterschiedlichste Weise beschäftigt hatte. Eine außergewöhnliche Fülle an Filmen hatte sich nicht (mehr) nur der Darstellung von LGBTQI-Charakteren verschrieben, sondern läutete die Queer New Wave mit einem radikalen formästhetischen Bruch, dem postmodernen Spiel mit Genres und Klischees und nicht zuletzt einer unverfrorenen Darstellung von nicht-heterosexuellem Begehren ein:

In this paper, I posit a theoretical intersection that may seem counterintuitive on the surface, but through my analysis and interrogations, I hope to illuminate how each school of theory seems made to fit into the other. I will disclose my theoretical base first before I establish the history, major postulates, and cinematic purpose for each theory separately and finally move into a section of synthesis in which I intend to reveal the ways that each theory informs the other, forging a new body of work over my theoretical base. Ultimately, I will propose and validate a new, hybrid school of theory that hopefully has incredible potential in application with film. I claim a mode of analysis engaged with the queer ecosemiotics of film. What I call a queer ecosemiotic theory draws on cognitivist, cultural, and semiotic approaches to film. I work from the bases established by New Queer Cinema and ecocinema, each bursting out of the 1990s, as well as the writings of thinkers like Richard Dyer, Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson, Christian Metz, Maureen Turim, and Nicole Seymour.

La ricerca di sé stessi e della propria identità, sia per quanto riguarda il piano fisico che per quanto riguarda il piano mentale, è sempre stata uno dei temi cardine di ogni forma narrativa.
Attraverso concetti come "Cross - dressing" e "Psycho - trans" analizzeremo brevemente il rapporto tra il corpo in transizione e il cinema, con le ovvie ricadute sociali che comporta.

I´ve tried to make a genealogy of Appadurai´s transcultural landscapes including a Latin American perspective from Silviano Santiago´s inbetween space, Canclini´s interculturality among others so that I could read Wong Kar Wai´s Happy under a comparative perspective and outside a national perspective

Show Me Love is Sweden’s first and until recently only lesbian coming-
out story.4 It has become a cult film of modern European and
international gay cinema. Show Me Love is both a coming-of-age
and a coming-out story, simultaneously a Hollywood-inspired high school film and a serious feature that foregrounds lesbian romance.
It oscillates between convention and innovation, between the mundane
and the unusual, and between conformity and radicalism. The
film is a product of its time and place—small-town Sweden in the
late 1990s—yet its reach extends far beyond national borders. Its
complexity derives from the multiple levels of character portrayal,
genre references, aesthetics, allusions to Swedish film history, the
conditions of production, and divergent receptions by audiences and
reviewers in Sweden and all over the world—most notably its Teddy
Award for Best Gay and Lesbian Film at the Berlin Film Festival in
1999 and subsequent screenings at dozens of international gay and
lesbian film festivals. This chapter examines  what it is
in this multilayered mix that has made the film a classic.

Anna Westerstahl Stenport book about Lukas Moodysson presents the director to a broad audience. Known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), Moodysson debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar - the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards - including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actresses. A coming-of-age and coming out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town, Show Me Love is widely considered a youth film classic and was called a "masterpiece" by Ingmar Bergman.

This book includes discussions of the film's genre, aesthetics, and style, and situates the film in both contemporary Swedish cinema and broader Swedish culture. It includes sequence and dialogue analysis and discusses how and why this particular film became so important: its queer significance, its unusually realistic depiction of youth, and its critical reception. Anna Stenport conducted extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including several enlightening discussions with Moodysson himself. Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love offers an incisive introduction to Moodysson for readers interested in contemporary film, as well as a history and close analysis of changes in the Swedish film industry.

Im folgenden Überblick zu Queer Cinema Studies möchte ich nicht nur über Filme, ihre Inhalte und ihre Analyse mithilfe filmtheoretischer Begriffe sprechen, sondern auch auf die für Queer Cinema (Studies) relevanten Produktions-und Rezeptionskontexte eingehen. Zunächst lege ich jedoch mein Verständnis des Begriffs queer dar und gebe einen Überblick über verschiedene Definitionsansätze von Queer Cinema.

The research presented here shows the ways in which queer film festivals contribute to the production, exhibition and debate on genre films. Our study object to answer the initial question are the Queer Lisbon festival, held annually in Portugal, and the Exhibition New Queer Cinema in Brazil. After electing the research technique, the chosen festivals were analyzed by the hermeneutic or interpretation method. We apply this method to analyze and interpret the reports, catalogs, events websites and semi-structured interviews with the producers. We also present some important concepts for a better understanding of the subject, such as Queer Cinema, heteronormativity, sex, gender and sexuality. The research was divided into three chapters: 1 - Queer Theory - Brief Introduction, where a historical overview of the Queer Theory is presented; 2 - Cinema and Queer Theory, to introduce the concept, analyze it and identify the main features of these films; 3 - Brazil and Portugal in the route of Queer Cinema Festivals, in which the analysis of the two researched festivals is revealed.
 
Keywords

Queer Cinema; Queer Theory; Heteronormativity; Gender; Film Festivals.

The present article refers to the media-image and symbolic construction of
dissenting gender identities. Starting with sixty-five movies chosen along five years. Subsequently, a selection was made from each movie’s characters, finally leading to two movies, which will be analyzed in this article. Based on the concepts of social construction of gender presented by Butler and Young, as well as Edgar Morin’s projection-identification, this article intends to identify recurrent characteristics among the selected characters. The hypothesis is that the social construction of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual characters, commonly seen in these movies, frequently presents themes such as drugs, crime, homicide, diseases and sexual violence, as well as the hyper-sexualization of both bodies and practices. It is as if such individuals, when represented, were high-risk existences, always in danger, and as if this condition of risk was inherent to such sexual identities. It is possible that such recurrence is transformed into a device, used for conditioning and controlling the place and role of LGBTQIA+ individuals, keeping this part of the population on an eternal
exclusion cycle. Among the objectives of this article are: to indicate the
component aspects of the symbolic construction of gender that can interfere in individual gender identity; to identify on the characters of those narratives such characteristics and highlight the recurrent ones; to establish a connection between the symbolic construction of the analyzed characters and some of the sexual practices of the dissenting sexual identities; to review these recurrent narratives and envision possible alternatives. In addition to the bibliographic review, the selected movies were analyzed with a focus on the characters. Therefore, it was possible to examine the influence that this kind of product has over the construction of the collective imaginary regarding dissenting sexual identities and to approach new paths that contribute to the visibility and the effective participation of LGBT communities on the cultural and social-political processes.

Este trabalho apresenta, de modo
geral, a estruturação do cinema brasileiro
contemporâneo de temáticas LGBT em torno das
suas diferenças estéticas e políticas. À luz dos
estudos de gênero, sexualidades e Teorias queer, é
possível agrupar este cinema em diversas filiações
estéticas e narrativas. No entanto, há aquela
que se sobressai em função de inquirir um tom
fortemente político que se utiliza de estratégias
assimilacionistas. São os filmes que se dispõe a
apresentar uma estética palatável, de resistência
e de combate aos estereótipos e discriminações,
aproximando-se da agenda política do ativismo LGBT brasileiro. Logo, também são filmes sobre
sujeitos que exigem reconhecimento dentro
de uma ordem reinante: sexuada, generificada
e heteronormativa. Do outro lado, há um
conjunto de filmes que estão mais dispostos
a incomodar do que se acomodar aos níveis
de inteligibilidade cultural e que, desse modo,
podem ser identificados como cinemas queer. Sua
discursividade, forma e conteúdo passam pelo
camp, artificialismo, exagero, dandismo, orgulho
a marginalidade e, também, pelos documentários
performáticos, poéticos e reflexivos. Podem,
assim, serem encarados como um conjunto de
filmes que partilham de uma contradisciplina
(ou contratecnologia) cinematográfica e de sexo/
gênero. Por fim, a relevância desse trabalho não
é constatar qual seria a melhor ou a pior filiação
estética. Ambas são legitimas e o interesse está,
apenas, em apontar as diferentes potencialidades
e limitações dessas obras para, em outro
momento, investir com mais ênfase na sua
análise.

This essay, taken from my upcoming book A Gossip of Images (Duke University Press), considers the intimate and indiscreet circulation of images beyond the context of individual films and the moment of spectatorship. Referring specifically to the mobilization and transformation of Hollywood star images in queer counterpublics, the essay argues for the necessity of an expanded definition of gossip, not merely as a means of oral communication, but as a mode of image circulation.

This article argues that we are currently experiencing a renaissance of New Queer Cinema (NQC). The original NQC occurred in the early 1990s, which saw a wave of queer films that were successful on the mainstream international film festival circuit, at venues such as Cannes and Sundance. Queer film scholars, such as Michele Aaron and B. Ruby Rich, have argued that films like Paris is Burning (Livingston, 1991), Poison (Haynes, 1991) and Swoon (Kalin, 1992) were united by their sense of defiance. They represented the marginalized within the contemporary LGBT communities. This article looks at recent films such as Weekend (Haigh, 2011), Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie, 2013), Appropriate Behaviour (Akhavan, 2014), Pariah (Rees, 2011) and the work of Xavier Dolan as being successful queer-themed films that meet the criteria outlined by scholars of NQC. Their success will be determined by their representation in both queer and non-queer film festival circuits and beyond. They respond to the state of contemporary independent cinema and utilize film form to allow for the accessibility of their queer characters. In their own way, they are defiant against mainstream queer representations and demonstrate a resurgence of films that service a community that is in need of queer intellectual stimulation.

Queer Film Culture has a long history, which directly links queer film with its specific aesthetics and politics and the film festival as a setting characteristic for its audience and community experience. The oldest LGBT/Q film festival started in San Francisco in 1977. In the early years, LGBT/Q film festivals served as safe havens for queers. They offered a counterpublic space to come together to celebrate and discuss LGBT/Q representation and art when no, or only negative, images were available in the mainstream. Since then LGBT/Q film festivals have proliferated. The 1980s saw a first wave of festivals starting up predominantly in North America and Western Europe. The late 1980s brought about many changes: the AIDS crisis spurred queer activism, the fall of the Berlin wall marked global political change with the crumbling of the Soviet bloc. In this time, the New Queer Cinema was emerging. Since then LGBT/Q film and media representation has come a long way. The cross-over success of New Queer Cinema paved the way for auteur careers and the development of a niche market. In the 1990s and 2000s the queer film festival scene has grown exponentially, covering most regions of the globe with about 200 active events on the queer film festival circuit today. LGBT/Q representation seems to be ubiquitous now – at least in the West – reaching mainstream audiences via multiplex cinemas, streaming platforms, cable network series, etc.

The queer film and festival landscape has seen vast changes in the last 25 years. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival we want to assess the status of queer film culture in the form of queer cinema and film festivals today. Considering the availability of queer images, are queer film festivals still necessary? The vast number of active festivals suggests they are. Then, what are the tasks and functions that queer film festivals serve for today’s queer film culture? What is shown at these events? The buzz of recent arthouse releases such as Weekend and Blue Is the Warmest Color beckons the question: What is queer cinema today? Have we reached a post-gay era of global art cinema or has a the New Wave Queer Cinema arrived?

This two-day international conference hosted by the University of Hamburg, taking place during and in conjunction with the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival will bring together film and festival studies scholars, critics and festival programmers to discuss these issues. Two keynotes delivered by Prof. B. Ruby Rich (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Dr. Marijke de Valck (University of Amsterdam) will frame the conference and bring together the fields of film festival studies and queer cinema. In three panels we will approach Queer Film Culture from various angles. In a first panel, festival scholars will present current research on LGBT/Q film festivals. In a second panel, festival programmers will discuss the current tasks and challenges of LGBT/Q film festivals. In a third panel, film scholars will assess the current trends in queer cinema.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski have redefined the technically and topically possible while joyfully defying audience expectations. Visionary films like The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas have made them the world's most influential transgender media producers, and their coming out retroactively put trans* aesthetics at the very center of popular American culture. Cáel M. Keegan views the Wachowskis films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn "to sense beyond the limits of the given world." Keegan reveals how the filmmakers take up the relationship between identity and coding (be it computers or genes), inheritance and belonging, and how transgender becoming connects to a utopian vision of a post-racial order. Along the way, he theorizes a trans* aesthetic that explores the plasticity of cinema to create new social worlds, new temporalities, and new sensory inputs and outputs. Film comes to disrupt, rearrange, and evolve the cinematic exchange with the senses in the same manner that trans* disrupts, rearranges, and evolves discrete genders and sexes.

Dans la foulée du séminaire "Sociologie des homosexualités" (1998-2004) dirigé par Françoise Gaspard et Didier Éribon, une nouvelle génération de chercheuses et chercheurs s'est engagée avec résolution sur le voie des études gays et lesbiennes. Par son choix de l'homosexualité, elle confronte les sciences humaines et sociales à leurs impensés catégoriels et plaide pour "une autre dimension de connaissance" (Monique Wittig). Aux côtés de quelques-uns des meilleurs spécialistes français et étrangers, ces jeunes universitaires donnent ainsi l'occasion de découvrir des terrains aussi divers que fascinants : de l'amitié chrétienne médiévale au lesbianisme dans le mouvement des Femmes en noir en Israël, du cinéma militant des années soixante-dix au vécu des familles homoparentales, des catégories sexuelles antiques à la géographie commerciale parisienne, des comportements sexuels masculins dans le contexte du VIH aux modalités d'enregistrement du PACS, etc.

This photo essay argues that Rituparno Ghosh’s phenomenal stardom as a queer icon in Bengal can be appreciated by analysing his influence on the Bengali stage in terms of queering it. It examines a few plays produced in the years following Ghosh’s sudden demise in May 2013 and tries to trace in them Ghosh’s politics and aesthetics, particularly the influence of two of his celebrated queer films, Arekti Premer Golpo (2010) and Chitrangada: a crowning wish (2012). Both these films had extensively deployed theatrical techniques and tropes, which, as I argue, in turn inspired several plays that followed, underlining an exchange between two popular art forms and their engagement with same-sex desires and divergent sexual identities. Based on interviews with playwrights, actors, filmmakers, theatre critics, and images, sourced from persons and organizations who had been associated with the filmmaker, the article seeks to establish the uniqueness of Ghosh’s iconism which has shaped and inspired queer lives and art in Bengal.

This thesis was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Film Studies at UNSW. ABSTRACT: The increased acceptance of the LGBT+ community has seen a proliferation of queer media in the 21st century. But as the LGBT+ has entered the mainstream, many of these representations are confined to normalised "acceptable" or "positive" depictions that fail to accurately portray the diversity of queer experiences. While the horror genre has historically been a site that both encourages representations of "counter-cultural drives" while ultimately punishing the Other, this thesis seeks to examine how the horror genre has recently been renegotiated by queer narratives by critically positing Julia Ducournau's debut film Raw (2016) as radically redefining queer representation.

This paper focuses on the first queer film from Tollywood, featuring Rituparno Ghosh as a transvestite filmmaker, who had by that time emerged as a cultural icon in Bengal.

The paper deals with the politics of representation of the 'queer' vis-a-vis class and access to consumerist lifestyle. The paper pits the modern day transvestite filmmaker against the yesteryear female impersonator of Bengali folk theatre, Chapal Rani (who plays himself in the film), to delineate the trajectory of sexual identity politics in Bengal, and how it has been largely hegemonized by city-centric neo-liberal discourses of sexual identities, which have, unwittingly, established a power hierarchy within the LGBTQ community: the neo-liberal gay man and his local counterpart, who might not even identify with imported terms labeling sexually deviant individuals.

The last segment of the paper turns its attention to the social and political implications of casting Rituparno Ghosh as protagonist. While it was indeed iconoclastic on part of Ghosh to agree to essay the role, it is undeniable that this casting ended up generating a "queer" stereotype in the Bengali middle-class cultural domain. Because of the absence of any other queer icon, Rituparno Ghosh and parallel sexual identities have almost become synonymous within the consciousness of the less-informed middle class Bengalis. This has led to an extremely essentialized notions of queerness, which is hard to dispel.

This chapter focuses on Velvet Goldmine (1998) and argues that Todd Haynes represents Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona as a series of phantoms in the Derridean sense. That is, figures that are both absent and present, material and immaterial— figures that affirm that no identity can ever be quite complete since the markers of identity are always enmeshed in a network of differences that can be continually re-coded. Haynes' original script contained several Bowie songs, which he was forced to replace when Bowie refused to give him permission to use the music (Bowie claimed he intended to make his own film about his Ziggy Stardust period). Undeterred, Haynes produced a movie that made no direct reference to Bowie by name, yet recoded Bowie's multiple personas and characters in a parallel cinematic world.  Haynes' film invites the spectator to re-think Identity in terms of 'contamination' and 'inauthenticity'. He also establishes a genealogical connection between Oscar Wilde (one of the film's many spectres) and Bowie by making several allusions to the parallels between 19th century aestheticism and Glam Rock. In short, I argue that Haynes' film facilitates a critique of the idea that Bowie's shifting identity is merely a question of aesthetic choice, or an expression of any kind of cultural logic. Rather, I argue that the figure of the Derridean phantom offers a new way to read Velvet Goldmine, and to identify the cultural work performed by Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona.

In this chapter, published in
"Styling South Asian Youth Cultures
Fashion, Media & Society" (I B Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2018) we examine Rituparno Ghosh, a queer filmmaker from Bengal, India, who left an indelible mark on the public consciousness and sartorial identity of young Bengali queer men in contemporary India. Since emerging onto the public stage with his first film Hirer Angti (The Diamond Ring) in 1992, and even before formally ‘coming out’ with visible sartorial markers, Rituparno experimented with his wardrobe through pushing male fashion to its androgynous limits. His evolving style was a manifestation of the abstract notion of an androgynous artist which he attributed to his cultural mentor, the Nobel laureate and national poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) . In a number of newspaper and magazine articles which came out following Ghosh’s death on 30 May 2013, considerable space was devoted to recollecting his androgynous approach towards fashion and style.

1. Multiculturalism and Its Monsters
2. Fleshed Out: On Meat and Excess
3. Performing the (Non)Human
4. Bodies, Boundaries, and the Death Drive
5. Desiring Bodies and the Vicissitudes of Transgression
6. The Pornography of Bare Life
7. Queer Epidemics

Regardless of one’s sexual orientation, according to Anat Pick, the spectator can be queered by a film. Thus this essay will serve to analyse how Peirce’s film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) queers the spectator. In order to do so, I will provide nuanced definitions of terms such as queer theory and queer cinema. In the second part of the essay, I will depend on filmic analysis to unpack how the queering mechanisms, that Peirce uses, queer the spectator. The final part of the essay will consider the naming procedures and their importance.

British television since 2000 has been rich with television films and mini-series that specifically deal with queer women’s issues that fall under the heritage genre. Nevertheless, scholarship on British heritage dramas has often remained focused on demonstrating or challenging the presumption that heritage is a nostalgic and conservative paradigm that often expresses an escapist desire to return to a lost colonial past. (Craig [1991] 2001: 3; Vincendeau 2001: xix; Higson [1993] 2006: 104-105). Consequently, despite the recent array of heritage dramas representing queer women, scholars have overlooked queer interventions into heritage productions, such as the crucial use of heritage aesthetics to reconstruct historical queer desire and a queer past.

This chapter departs from previous discussions of heritage dramas in relation to concepts of colonialism and the nostalgic or conservative gaze and, instead, investigates the genre’s role in queer activism. I demonstrate how these biopics of two women in British history are attempts to reclaim a queer heritage in a similar way to educational projects like LGBT History Month. Secondly, by examining the role of looking in these dramas, I aim to show how historical queer desire is portrayed. I demonstrate that these dramas portray queer desire through a combination of camera techniques and voiceover and also through the heritage aesthetics present in the mise-en-scène.

Elsewhere, I have proposed a new, hybrid school of theory that hopefully has incredible potential in application with film, and this essay will apply praxis to theory. I claim a mode of analysis engaged with the queer ecosemiotics of film, and this essay will rework the foundations of that mode as well as relate it to three films from class this semester: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989), and Avatar (2009).

This article explores how a reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code
and the emergence of identitarian discourses have variously effectuated the representation
of queer characters in Bombay cinema. It offers close analysis of film texts,
both prior to as well as after the reading down of Article 377, in order to map a
larger network of change towards a neo-liberal inclusion of the ‘gay’ citizen subject.
A study of representation of queer characters in these films points towards how the
‘queer’ becomes a discursive category, open to appropriation, and also shows how
earlier traditions/tropes of representation are either reworked or subverted to fit into
a globalized discourse of identity politics.

This paper attempts at understanding the representation of the otherized identity of homosexual men suffering from HIV/AIDS in Hollywood movies. Through an analysis of movies such as Parting Glances (1986), Longtime Companion (1989), and The Normal Heart (2014), this paper enquires into how the agency of the cinematic medium has been utilized in order to portray the socio-political liabilities of those who struggled with HIV/AIDS in the U.S.A. in the 1980s. The movies present how the crisis had been inadequately handled by the Ronald Reagan administration in addition to the contemporary social ramifications of those times which had aided in the stigmatization. The movies also portray the broader prejudiced concerns regarding AIDS, due to its initially exclusive association with the homosexual risk group, portraying an example of what Susan Sontag terms ‘AIDS as a metaphor’ - viewing it as a plague and thus as a judgement on the individuals who suffer from it as a punishment for deviant sexual behaviour. While considering the ways in which such movies function as a form of awareness for the public, the paper also enquires into how the efforts by the homosexual community towards combating AIDS and improving the sexual health of gay men in the dark 80s have been politically translated onscreen. The progressive ‘looking back’ trope present in the movies, and the differences amongst them, vis-à-vis the 1980s AIDS health crisis could assist in a study of how the lives of the affected gay men have been ‘re-membered’ in the context of LGBTQ sexualities, health and rights.