Belonging, Onscreen
I want to begin, here, by looking backwards.
In adopting this retro-gaze, I am not searching for any one point in time, for a single origin, but rather scanning a multivalent historical horizon. Looking back, I see at once all the formative and foundational elements, no matter how big or small, that have laboured together to bring us to this very moment in queer history.
What I see is not a straight pathway, but looks similar to a nervous-system scan of a body. In this imaging there are many lines—both long and short, many travelling in different directions, others carrying from the bottom to the top, and some simply breaking off; whatever the case, they are all vital. If we remove the bounding body from this schema, we are left with a network of passageways that communicate with one another. They transmit feeling. They represent lifelines.
I want to say this image looks like a tree, but it doesn’t. A straight lifeline, on the other hand, does look like a tree. It has one beginning that branches out from a single spot. It has a straightforward and procreative logic—it progresses both uniformly and directionally, tracing a family in a phallocentric diagram.
If the scan I am describing, however, is like a tree, it is definitely a queer one. Unlike the heteronormative example, the queer tree has a multitude of starts and stops. It is an accretion of different routes that progress all at once, and outwards. Actually, this scan is nothing like a tree at all but is more like a bush. This different mode of generative relationality, this nervous tumble of pulsating feelings, aptly images and imagines a queer lifeline.
Multiplicity is similarly vital and formative when considering queerness. Irreverent to heterochronology, queerness accumulates multiple histories, energized by the feelings of queer predecessors, generating the life force that fuels queer futurity. With this in mind, I choose to break from this beginning, and start on a new line
of inquiry that stems from a pivotal work of queer theory before me, one that orients us towards queer futures by activating the unquantifiable energies of queer bodies past.
“This chapter has two beginnings,”¹ starts “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling” in José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009). Continuing, Muñoz describes two projects converging at the nexus of “queer evidence”:
Evidence of queerness has been used to penalize and discipline queer desires, connections, and acts. When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present, who will labor to invalidate the historical fact of queer lives—present, past, and future.²
Muñoz’s pathbreaking work itself builds out like a bush, discussing a myriad of projects—all moving in different directions and at different times—that together form a picture of the expansive nature of queer praxis. This framework, aiming at the validation of queer lives present, past, and future, is meant to counteract the historical and ongoing erasure of queer voices and embodiments in a future-bound gesture.
Queer Frontiers, my curatorial investigation into queer futurity programmed for the London Ontario Media Arts Association, stages a similar moment of tension between historical acts of repression and desires for queer expression. In parallel with Muñoz’s dual beginning, I’d like to set in motion the discussion of Queer Frontiers by moving between two places. The first, already introduced, is Cruising Utopia; the second is Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s limited Netflix series Hollywood (2020). By moving between these places, I mean to assert the radical potential of queer belonging realized through the connective power of anti-archival queer imaginaries, which disobey narrative conventions and spatio-temporal logic.
Queer Frontiers is a project originally slated to premiere in 2019, aligning with Canada’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the purported “decriminalization” of homosexuality in the country. To counter the pink-washed, highly visible and ostentatious state revelries—rainbow-painted crosswalks, celebrity-studded galas, a commemorative coin—I approached this anniversary through a different methodology. Over the course of 2021, LOMAA presented the work of artists and curators—Adrian Stimson, Jess MacCormack, Rin Vanderhaeghe and Lainh Hrafn, Gislina Patterson and Dasha Plett, James Knott, Steve Reinke, Aaditya Aggarwal in collaboration with Ali Kazimi, John Greyson, and Richard Fung, and Serena Lee, Daniella Sanader, and Fan Wu—whose careers span across queer praxis and temporalities, but collectively share an origin: all established their practices in the decades after the “decriminalization” legislation of 1969.
This project centres queer narratives and praxis as a means to interrogate historical representation, and would not exist without the dedicated labour of queer academics, activists, and artists past. Queer Frontiers is deeply indebted to and rooted in the committed research of the Anti-69 Network, who worked tirelessly to renounce the fiftieth-anniversary celebration and to draw attention to the “mythologies of the 1969 criminal code reform.”3 Their collective research emphasizes that homosexuality was not actually decriminalized, that Canada’s antiquated and homophobic laws were not repealed under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, but merely and meagerly “reformed.”
This so-called reform sought to update and address two specific acts punishable under the Criminal Code—buggery and gross indecency—by henceforth “allowing” them to take place, but only under strict circumstances controlled by the law. It should be noted that, by and large, these acts were attributed to deviant—read queer—sexual activity. Anti-69 brings the farcical nature of this legislation to the forefront, emphasizing that the new laws merely protected the public from witnessing queer desire by restricting it to the private space of the bedroom.4
The unremitting closeting of queer lives, achieved through this strict policing, suppressed public comportments and maintained queer erasure. Muñoz writes: “The key to queering evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. . . . Ephemera are the remains that are often embedded in queer acts, in both stories we tell one another and communicative physical gestures.”5 Despite the inability to perform within the wider social context, these intracommunity gestures—moments that refused omittance—did extend queer lifelines. Queer ephemera, in this context, are life-affirming. Yet the desire for something beyond—moving queer ephemera from the sheets and into the streets—remained a collective wish. The liberties touted by the 1969 legislation seemingly uncovered the potential of freedom, revealing what could be possible—or, in the terms Muñoz lays out through philosopher Giorgio Agamben, what previously existed as hopes might finally materialize in the realm of the real.6 Unstitching queerness from ephemera would allow for new becomings, and embed queerness permanently into the fabric of the greater collective’s present and future. Queer futures could have been cultivated through the performance of queer public acts. However, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the state surreptitiously halted all world-making possibilities, furthering the regulation of queer bodies. As a matter of fact, charges for public displays of queer sex acts increased post-legislation,7 ensuring that liberation would remain only in the heads and beds of those who dreamed of a better future.
Queer liberation was still a dreamland in the years following this reform. It was a utopia. In Cruising Utopia, published four decades after the legislation, Muñoz wrote:
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.8
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Hollywood similarly fantasizes about a queer utopia, but retroactively. The series conjures a surreal dreamscape, shifting between the harsh social realities of the US in the 1940s—including racism, sexism, and homophobia—that manifest in Hollywood motion picture production, and the reveries of potential that exist beyond these lived experiences of oppression. While the show oscillates between real and imagined history, the fictional plotline concerns the production of Peg, a screenplay that chronicles the life of downtrodden actress Peg Entwistle, who can’t seem to catch a break, and eventually dies by jumping from the Hollywood sign. Developed by a young, Black, gay aspiring writer, Archie Coleman, Peg is chosen for production by emerging director Raymond Ainsley, a half-Filipino character who aims to diversify film production and representation. In an early meeting between the two, Raymond asks why Archie wants to tell this story; Archie explains that he sees his own struggle for representation reflected in Peg’s continued lack of casting. To this Raymond responds, “I’m gonna make sure that people like us aren’t on the outside looking in anymore,”9 and the two form a connection, holding this shared dream in their sights.
Another moment of interest occurs in the intersecting storyline of real-life star Rock Hudson, first presented onscreen as Roy Fitzgerald, an emerging performer and closeted gay man within the series’s diegesis. A shy Roy is introduced to the audience
as he cruises up to the Golden Tip, a sex-work hub operating under the guise of a gas station, providing discreet fantasy fulfillment to those unable to realize satisfaction in their everyday lives. Working at the station, Archie approaches Roy’s car, and Roy nervously fumbles with the secret code to initiate their sexual encounter, finally coming to the familiar request: he wants to go to “dreamland.”10
In the series, socially deviant sexual encounters are hidden in unobtrusive solicitation. Forcibly exiled, queer sex is first disguised as an everyday transaction, then moves into the private sphere where fantasies can finally play out. Yet, sexual desire is not the only yearning on the horizon. After their second encounter, Roy inquires about his relationship status with Archie, endearingly presuming they are “boyfriends.” Archie chuckles: “Can folks like you and me even have a boyfriend?” Confused and taken aback, Roy responds, “I don’t know. I hope so.” Without skipping a beat, Archie calmly returns:
Well I haven’t seen it. A boyfriend’s somebody you take out on the town, show him off on your arm. You and I can’t do that. In a Molly house, maybe sure, a couple queens clucking to each other, hanging off the bar. Whee! But are they boyfriends? I wouldn’t call it that. Boyfriend. That just ain’t our destiny.
Ever the dreamer, Roy replies, “Yeah, but wouldn’t it be nice?”11
The realities of queer romantic and sexual repression are no more evident than in episode 3, “Outlaws,” in which characters are invited, in different capacities, to an industry dinner–cum–bacchanal party. Sex labourers from the Golden Tip are hired to work the event, where closeted gay men come to joyously “kick back, be themselves for the night” and not “spend their whole lives in hiding,” in the words of Ernie West, the proprietor of the gas bar.12 Throughout the episode, threats of job loss and social reprobation loom over the queer characters, underlining the need to keep a straight face. When Ernie tells his employees of the party job, a hetero actor and gas station employee, Jack Castello, expresses his distaste. Ernie casually asks him if he likes women—“Yes,” Jack replies. Ernie explains the party’s necessity: “Well, let’s say you’re not allowed to like girls. You get caught kissing a girl in a bar. You’re lucky if they throw you in jail, ’cause somebody could easily beat you to death instead. You’re treated like an outlaw, and there’s nothing you can do about it, except hide.” While compulsory heterosexuality forces identity concealment elsewhere in episode 3, actors and Hollywood industry players are given a semblance of freedom as they perform their real identities within the safety of this private affair. Although this hiding, or what Peg producer Dick Samuels refers to as “lurk[ing] in the shadows,” does allow for the production of a mitigated “queer ephemera,” a shared kinship that Muñoz relates to a form of gossip circulated in the queer community, the outlawing of public expression ultimately makes queer lives short-lived.
Hollywood is saturated with moments that reflect the struggle for minoritarian representation, as well as the power of imagining. Both within the series and in its production in general, the screen acts as a place for dream realization, where hopes and fantasies are performed. However, the hyper-real, illusory, sumptuous utopia we see onscreen is not a mirror, but a wishing well where those identities normally pushed to the background take centre stage, and bracketed narratives embody the fantastical potential the series itself hopes to reveal.
The ability to manifest change against restrictive forces is central to Hollywood. The series’s irreverent recasting of history (re)imagines the past in a utopic effort to highlight inequalities and engender a revolutionary futurity. The production of Peg metaphorically realizes this—in episode 3, as Peg transforms into Meg, and becomes not a biographical but an allegorical narrative about “how Hollywood treats an outsider.”13 In the final film, director Raymond Ainsley revises the story, casting his girlfriend Camille Washington—a young Black woman—in the leading role while also rerouting the conclusion. This rewriting is imbued with potential; it demonstrates the power of artistic imagination attuned to future possibilities.
History is further recast in the storyline of Roy Fitzgerald/Rock Hudson, a real-life closeted gay man unable to be publicly queer. At the close of episode 3, Rock sees Archie dancing with another man and takes action. No longer able to hide his identity despite continued warning, Rock proclaims his love for Archie and the two embrace, dancing unabashedly in the centre of the party for all to witness. The utopic fantasy of living a publicly queer life in the 1940s is realized as Meg sweeps the Academy Award nominations and Rock and Archie attend the ceremony as a couple. Such an act was unimaginable at the time; again the series reinscribes possibilities. Archie wins Best Original Screenplay, kisses Rock, and then, onstage, before an audience filled with countless others who are unable to live their own identities, he thanks his “boyfriend.” From the ceremony we cut to scenes of people tuning in via radio, people whose marginalized identities mirror the embodiments presented through Meg—an Asian family, a Black family, and a single Black man. In collective and connective celebration, the dream of inclusion seems to materialize on the horizon. This unsettling of representation is energizing. The series closes, buzzing with possibility, with the introduction of a new film—the first onscreen queer romance, starring Rock Hudson, and written by his partner, Archie Coleman.14
Cruising Utopia’s chapter “Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative” begins with the question: “How does one stage utopia? Which is to say, how do we enact utopia?”15 Hollywood’s stages—both the stages depicted onscreen and those of the series production itself—act as sites for dreams to be envisioned and enacted against the harsh backdrop of reality. Muñoz reminds us of the ways queer lives have been continually written out of history: “Heteronormative culture makes queers think that both the past and the future do not belong to them. All we are allowed to imagine is barely surviving the present.”16 By activating the past in our present—whether through practices that seek to unearth narratives, to rewrite insufficient archives, or to decidedly forget prescribed realities—as well as by unequivocally writing ourselves into the here and now, we collectively resist heterochronology and suture queer lives, not to ephemera, but to a reproductivity seemingly unimaginable in past actualities.
Queer artistic imaginaries awaken the plasticity of spatial and temporal possibilities. This future-in-the-making labour, done in part through past re-makings, performs the dream-work that fosters queer multiplicities. Branching from this, Muñoz pictures his own identity forming, onstage: “This mapping of hope and affect on a white wall brings me back to the various shows where I rehearsed and planned a future self, one that is not quite here but always in process, always becoming, emerging in difference.”17 This modality of subjectivization, the continued process of becoming, is reflected in the non-linearity of queer lifelines that don’t appear as a teleological map, a path towards a final destination, but as an open space on which one can move freely. If the stage is the open site, then praxis is the tool that propagates these experiments which realize subjectivity, shape representation, and allow for queer desire to play out.
Reflexively, Queer Frontiers is itself a stage, a platform that uplifts queer praxis, built from a strong foundation of relationality and kinship that supports fellow artists rehearsing their own becomings. The dream of staging queerness, shared by Muñoz, is spotlit in this program. From the audience we witness the potentiality enlivened by queer praxis and the myriad of possibilities sprouting from these practitioners whose collective gaze moves beyond the here and now, oriented towards the horizon of queer futurity. The stage takes a different appearance in this program, which over the course of the global pandemic has shifted its presentation format. For Queer Frontiers, the screen has become a stage. This place of reproduction is reflected in Hollywood’s denouement—the closing film production is a regenerative mimesis, playing back the onscreen queer love story of Rock and Archie in a meta re representation literalizing the desire to both see oneself and be seen by another. While Muñoz points to a white wall as the place to map out his queer futures, both Hollywood and Queer Frontiers see the screen, here a digital black plane, as the stage to bring queer futurity to life.
The infinite depth of the screen is the ultimate horizon, a pure utopia. This seemingly flat boundary opens up, revealing endless connective possibilities across space-time frontiers, which break down as we link together. This linking—initiated by the innocuous action of turning on a computer and logging into a shared digital space—switches the blank screen into an energetic life force whose soft glow, the warm illumination of queerness on the horizon, is a support system that bolsters queer belonging. It is here, onscreen, where we can see ourselves reflected, in the histories represented, in the future possibilities, and in the monitor, watching back as we reproduce, future-bound, in innumerable directions . . .
Notes
1 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 65.
2 Ibid., 65.
3 “The Anti-69 Network,” Anti-69, accessed October 12, 2021, https://anti-69.ca.
4 “Anti-69 FAQ,” Anti-69, accessed October 12, 2021, https://anti-69.ca/faq.
5 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65.
6 Ibid., 99.
7 “Anti-69 FAQ.”
8 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
9 Hollywood, episode 2, “Hooray for Hollywood: Part 2,” directed by Daniel Minahan, aired May 1, 2020, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81088617.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Hollywood, episode 3, “Outlaws,” directed by Michael Uppendahl, aired May 1, 2020, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81088617.
13 Ibid.
14 Hollywood, episode 7, “A Hollywood Ending,” directed by Jessica Yu, aired May 1, 2020, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81088617.
15 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 97.
16 Ibid., 112.
17 Ibid., 112.
Christine Negus is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and recipient of the NFB’sBest Emerging Canadian Video/Filmmaker award. Negus’ work examines the potential of feminist, queer, and disability praxis through dis/embodied modes of resistance. Moving between installation and media projects, community programming, grassroots pedagogy, and critical writing, her practice embodies the generative possibilities of disobedience performed through minoritarian action