Sustaining Life During the AIDS Crisis: New Queer Cinema and the Biopic

This dissertation examines the discourses of health, crisis, and personal narrative that coalesced during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and that shaped the responses of queer artists and activists to the pandemic. More specifically, the sexual politics and biopolitical discourses of that moment explain why queer filmmakers would turn to such a conservative film genre as the biopic as viable terrain. Because film scholars have almost uniformly positioned the biopic as a genre reinscribing Western subject formation, it makes sense that critics like B. Ruby Rich might fail to apprehend queer filmmakers’ biographical films as biopics. Since the biopic has such an enduring history from the early studio era to the present, including queer biographical films as part of the genre precludes the separation of queer filmmakers from dominant film history and cinematic conventions established during studio era Hollywood. The cost of this quarantine is a history in which queer films existed and continue to exist independently from a long line of films that inscribe personhood and personal history. However, the biopic’s interest in recording personal histories made it a particularly salient choice for queer filmmakers during the AIDS crisis when they sought to tell stories of damaged lives lost and lived. Chapter One explores how queer filmmakers John Greyson, Todd Haynes, and Bruce LaBruce responded to the AIDS crisis as precisely a crisis of queer visibility. The case studies of Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007) guide the next chapter’s return to cinema’s biomedical history, as well as psychoanalytic models of suturing, to excavate queer filmmakers’ disruption of normative models of spectatorship. Chapter Three reads Matthew Mishory’s Delphinium (2009) as a new point of entry into Derek Jarman’s cinema in order to understand both filmmakers as part of a queer genealogy. The fourth chapter investigates Elisabeth Subrin’s and Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell the stories of feminisms—via particular feminists—past. The final chapter discusses the queer biopic’s relationship to People With AIDS (PWA) photography, looking finally to contemporary media practices to reflect upon the current AIDS media landscape.