Film series: Queer Visions

image from Paris is Burning

“The activist stance of ‘queer’ was developed as a mode of resistance to the oppression and erasure of sexual minorities…It signals a defiance to the mainstream and an embrace of difference, uniqueness and self-determination.” (David J. Getsy, QUEER) Queer works of art stand in opposition to the strictures of ‘normalcy,’ and the films in this series all present visions that are defiantly queer. From the prototypical queer film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (screening on October 26 with a costume party!), to the documentary of Harlem drag balls in the 1980s, Paris is Burning, to the budding lesbian attraction in the Vietnamese period drama The Third Wife, these films depict queerness in all its forms. Some of the more outré affairs in the series are Diamantino, in which a dunderheaded beefcake’s secret to soccer greatness is imagining his opponents as gigantic Pekingese puppies traipsing about in a sea of pink candy floss, and The Wild Boys, which imagines a verdant island prison that transforms unruly young men into model citizens via the gender-bending hormones offered up in the phallic island fruits. Also screening in this series: Olivia Wilde’s teen comedy Booksmart, the Elton John biopic Rocketman, and Sean Baker’s marvelous slice of trans life, Tangerine, which will be screening for Transgender Day of Remembrance. Cosponsored with the LGBT Resource Center and LGBT Studies.