For more than twenty years, film critic, teacher, activist, and fan Thomas Waugh has been writing about queer movies. As a member of the Jump Cut collective and contributor to the Toronto-based gay newspaper the Body Politic, he emerged in the late 1970s as a pioneer in gay film theory and criticism, and over the next two decades solidified his reputation as one of the most important and influential gay film critics. The Fruit Machine-a collection of Waugh’s reviews and articles originally published in gay community tabloids, academic journals, and anthologies-charts the emergence and maturation of Waugh’s critical sensibilities while lending an important historical perspective to the growth of film theory and criticism as well as queer moviemaking.
In this wide-ranging anthology Waugh touches on some of the great films of the gay canon, from Taxi zum Klo to Kiss of the Spider Woman. He also discusses obscure guilty pleasures like Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman, unexpectedly rich movies like Porky’s and Caligula, filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Eisenstein, and film personalities from Montgomery Clift to Patty Duke. Emerging from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, Waugh traverses crises from censorship to AIDS, tackling mainstream potboilers along with art movies, documentaries, and avant-garde erotic videos. In these personal perspectives on the evolving cinematic landscape, his words oscillate from anger and passion to wry wit and irony. With fifty-nine rare film stills and personal photographs and an introduction by celebrated gay filmmaker John Greyson, this volume demonstrates that the movie camera has been the fruit machine par excellence.
Foreword / John Greyson
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Films by Gays for Gays: A Very Natural Thing, Word Is Out, and The Naked Civil Servant (1977)
Gays, Straights, Film, and the Left: A Dialogue (with Chuck Kleinhans) (1977)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976–77)
A Fag-Spotter’s Guide to Eisenstein (1977)
Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1978)
Medical Thrillers: Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman (1978–79)
Murnau: The Films Behind the Man (1979)
An Unromantic Fiction: I’m Not from Here, by Harvey Marks (1979)
The Gay Nineties, the Gay Seventies: Samperi’s Ernesto and von Praunheim’s Army Of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts (1979)
Montgomery Clift Biographies: Stars and Sex (1979–80)
Gay Cinema, Slick vs. Real: Chant d’amour, Army of Lovers, We Were One Man (1980)
Nighthawks, by Ron Peck and Paul Hallam (1980)
A Saturday Night Surprise: Burin des Rozier’s Blue Jeans (1980)
Caligula (1980)
Taxis and Toilets: Ripploh and His Brothers (1981)
Bright Lights in the Night: Pasolini, Schroeter, and Others (1981)
Patty Duke and Tasteful Dykes (1982)
Two Strong Entries, One Dramatic Exit: Luc ou la part des choses, Another Way, and Querelle (1982)
Hollywood’s Change of Heart? (Porky’s and The Road Warrior) (1982)
Dreams, Cruises, and Cuddles in Tel Aviv: Amos Gutman’s Nagua (1983)
Hauling an Old Corpse Out of Hitchcock’s Trunk: Rope (1983)
Sex Beyond Neon: Third World Gay Films? (1985)
Fassbinder Fiction: A New Biography (1986)
Ashes and Diamonds in the Year of the Queer: Decline of the American Empire, Anne Trister, A Virus Knows No Morals, and Man of Ashes (1986)
The Kiss of the Maricon, or Gay Imagery in Latin American Cinema (1986–87)
Laws of Desire: Maurice, Law of Desire, and Vera (1987)
Two Great Gay Filmmakers: Hello and Good-bye (1988)
Beauty and the Beast, Take Two (1988)
Whipping Up a Cinema (1989)
Erotic Self-Images in the Gay Male AIDS Melodrama (1988, 1992)
In Memoriam: Vito Russo, 1946–1990 (1991)
We’re Talking, Vulva, or, My Body Is Not a Metaphor (1995, 1999)
Walking on Tippy Toes: Lesbian and Gay Liberation Documentary of the
Post-Stonewall Period 1969–1984 (1995–97)
Archeology and Censorship (1997)
Bibliography: Selected Additional Works
Index
