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LGBTQ Film Festivals

LGBTQ Film Festivals
Curating Queerness
Antoine Damiens
Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Still. History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself / Rien n’oblige à répéter l’histoire.
Directed by Stéphane Gérard (2014). Courtesy of Stéphane Gérard.
Cover design: Kok Korpershoek
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn 978 94 6372 840 9
e-isbn 978 90 4854 389 2
doi 10.5117/9789463728409
nur 670
© A. Damiens / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.

Table of Contents
Dedication 7
Acknowledgements 9
List of abbreviations 15
Introduction. Festivals, Uncut: Queering Film Festival Studies,
Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals 17
1. Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and
the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies 39
2. The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals, and
Queer Cinema’s Legs 77
3. Out of the Celluloid Closet, into the Theatres! Towards a
Genealogy of Queer Film Festivals and Gay and Lesbian Film
Studies 115
4. Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory and LGBTQ Festivals’ Te
mporality 157
5. Images+Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes185
Conclusion. The Impossibility of Festival Studies? On the
Temporalities of Field Intervention and the Queering of Festival Studies
233
Appendix 239
Bibliography 247
Filmography 279
About the Author 285
Index 287

Dedication
To Craig Burns Eberhardt and Sylvain Duguay.
Craig passed away in August 2018 at the age of 61. Craig was a healer, a
home builder, and a fixture of many queer communities. Above all, Craig
was a father to many chosen families. I have yet to meet anyone from his
vast circle who hasn’t been impacted by Craig’s courage, generosity, and
resilience. A true role model, Craig represents the best of who a queer person
can be: tremendously compassionate, eager to foster an intergenerational
solidarity, and resolutely unapologetic.
Sylvain, whose dissertation focused on filmic adaptations of Canadian
queer plays, passed away in 2017 at the age of 42. While I never met Sylvain,
his generosity, free spirit, and sheer sexiness are truly legendary. If this
book largely explores queer memory – the specific ways in which we pay
homage to our ancestors and create history outside of the structures of
heteropatriarchy, it is also an effort to create a dialogue with friends and
lovers I have never met.
I would like to pretend that, through archival/historical research, I stand
in a lineage of fierce gay men – sustaining relationships with ghosts and
traces, enacting a form of queer friendship that trumps death itself. As a
justice project, I can only hope this book will honour Sylvain and Craig’s
memory.

Acknowledgements
As such, academic writing is quite similar to festival organizing: this book
reflects my own networks of friends and colleagues – the ‘stakeholders’ and
‘networks’ without whom it wouldn’t exist.
I am particularly grateful for my mentors, for their encouragement to
persevere as well as for being role models I can look up to. In particular, I
cannot thank enough my PhD advisor, Thomas Waugh – someone whose
scholarship, activism, and generosity I admire; a colleague and a friend
whose feedback and nurturing in times of doubts made this book possible.
Be it at the baths, on the conference trail, or at Concordia, I wouldn’t trade
this transgressive academic romance for anything else: a better friend and
advisor is indeed something hard to imagine. Similarly, I cannot thank
enough Lucas Hilderbrand – for his dedication to helping me grow as a
queer man and reconnect with my history (despite my initial reluctance
toward archival research!), for his constant mentoring and support during
my year at the University of California, in Irvine, and above all for pushing
me to apply to Concordia. Lucas Hilderbrand’s scholarship is a source of
inspiration matched only by his generosity.
My co-supervisors, Kay Dickinson and Masha Salazkina, stepped in
and encouraged me throughout graduate school. Their enthusiasm gave
me much-needed confidence. I am particularly grateful for their always
abundant feedback – be it during the various steps and defenses of the PhD
programme or at academic conferences. Parts of this book were originally
drafted as final papers for their seminars.
At Concordia, I also want to thank Haidee Wasson, who kindly accepted
to sit on my thesis proposal defense and whose insightful comments truly
helped me think through some of this book’s theoretical frameworks, Luca
Caminati, Martin Lefebvre, Joshua Neves, Catherine Russel, Marc Steinberg,
May Chew, and Elena Razlogova. I am grateful to be currently working with
Rosanna Maule – a role model in feminist and festival scholarship – on
several research projects, including the preservation of queer and feminist
films and videos in the archives of the Cinémathèque Québécoise (financed
in part through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada Partnership Engage grant).
Several teachers shaped, unknowingly, this book. At the University of
California, in Riverside, Lan Duong is the reason why I betrayed the social
sciences: I will never forget her introduction to feminist film theory (my first
film course!), the list of books she made me read, and the encouragement

10 LGBTQ Film Festivals
she provided me with during our semi-regular coffee meetings. I blame
Keith Harris for encouraging me to be a bad queer, one that consciously
refuses a politics of respectability and takes pleasure in the incorrect praxis
of academic critique. Jane Ward tuned me in to feminist pedagogy and
philosophy, and above all explains my fascination with the resolutely queer
lives of straight people. Last but not least, Mike Atienza – at the time my
academic advisor, now a bright scholar – enabled me to compose my own
curriculum, lifting every prerequisite, perverting me with anything but
sociology.
At the University of California, in Irvine: Jennifer Terry is largely
responsible for the feminist epistemology and historiography this book
is infused with, and more globally for my fascination with the politics of
academic knowledge production. Tom Boellstorff’s graduate seminar in
post-colonial anthropology (a field and a discipline I knew nothing of!)
explains my focus on gay linguistics. Kristen Hatch guided me and help
me transition from sociology to film studies.
At ‘Sciences Po’ Lyon, I want to thank my two M.A. advisors, Max Sanier
and Sarah Cordonnier – the only teachers crazy enough to supervise me.
Thank you for letting me do the research I was interested in – even if it
did not fit neatly with Sciences Po’s politics – and for encouraging me to
pursue a PhD degree in the Humanities.
I was lucky enough to count on the constant care and support of various
cohorts of friends. At ‘Sciences Po’ Lyon, my partners in crime were Lionel
Cordier and Carole Kerduel. At UC Riverside: Jennifer Bird, Alexa Oliphant,
Janki Patel, Anna Zhu, Danica Lusser, and Han Phan. At UC Irvine: Valente
Ayala, Maxzene Alixandria, Mika Mori, Colin Cahill, Karen Jallatyan,
Sarah Kessler, Sarah Valdez, Annie Yaniga, Martabel Wasserman. Shane
Breitenstein is a constant source of inspiration, and someone I look forward
to collaborating with. At Concordia: Viviane Saglier, Papagena Robbins,
Dominic Leppla, Sophie Cook, Desiree de Jesus, Brandon Arroyo, Mao Lei,
Nikola Stepic, Sima Kokotovic, Jordan Arseneault, D.J. Fraser, Ian Bradley-
Perrin, Brad Warren, Teresa Lobos, Kristopher Woofter, Mara Forloine,
Clinton Glenn, Giampaolo Marzi, Andrée Lafontaine, Yuriy Zikratyy, Gregory
Rodriguez Jr, Svetla Turnin, Mark Barber, Patricia Ciccone, Masoumeh
Hashemi, Kyla Rose Smith, Joaquin Serpe, Dan Leberg, Rachel Webb Je-
kanowski, Meredith Slifkin, Fulvia Massimi, Lola Remy, Cho Rock-Park,
Gabriel Salamé-Pichette, Charlie Ellbé, Charlotte Orzel, Julia Huggins, Léa
Lavoie, Charles Lavoie, Frédérick Pelletier, Joshua Harold Wiebe, Ylenia
Olibet, and Emma Flavian. Special thanks to Ryan Conrad, Ezra Winton,
and Remy Attig – who, over the years, became friends and mentors (may

Acknowledgements 11
we survive immigration and academic precarity!) and to my students, who
made me realize that teaching was a privilege.
I recently joined McGill University as a Fonds de recherche Québec société
et culture (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Department of
English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF).
My deepest gratitude to the granting agency for seeing the value of my
scholarship and enabling me to be a (precarious but) professional scholar.
I am honoured to be working with Alanna Thain and Bobby Benedicto: I
am constantly inspired by the ways in which Alanna and Bobby articulate
academic practice and activism, by their constant effort to build coalitions
and their willingness to navigate, queer, and survive the academic institu-
tion. I also want to thank Brian Lewis, Miranda Hickman, Michael David
Miller, Kim Reany, and Andrew Folco. I cannot wait to participate in the
life of the Department and to build upon our common research interests.
This book reflects many conversations held as part of the Film Festival
Research Network, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies
(NECS), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and Visible
Evidence. My colleagues not only encouraged me but also were kind enough
to argue against me when I truly needed it. I was lucky enough to present my
research for the first time at NECS Milan. Despite it being on a 9am panel, I
met my academic heroes (now dear friends): Skadi Loist, Marijke de Valck,
and Ger Zielinski. I hope this book will do justice to our shared interests
and conversations. I had the privilege of serving as graduate representative
and co-chair for the Film and Media Festivals Scholarly Interest Group
within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies: my colleagues (Beth
Tsai, Jon Petrychyn, Tamara Falicov, and Michael Talbott) truly inspired me
and helped me become a better scholar. I am looking forward to continu-
ing this transnational dialogue within the Feminist and Queer Research
Workgroup (NECS), a group I recently co-created with Anamarija Horvat
and Inmaculada Sanchez-Garcia.
On the conference circuit, several colleagues and friends shaped this
book: Dina Iordanova, David Richler, Stuart Richards, Dorota Ostrowska,
Patricia Caill
é, Olivier Thevenin, Kirsten Stevens, Jaap Kooijman, Brendan
Kredell, Katherine Laurie Van de Ven, Harry Karahalios, Malte Hagener,
Leanne Dawson, Laura Horak, Sarah Atkinson, Dagmar Brunow, Aida
Vallejo, Diane Burgess, Patricia Zimmerman, Claudia Sicondolfo, Theresa
Heath, Daniel Kulle, Tessa Dwyer, Jennifer O’Meara, Rosalind Galt, Monia
Acciari, Lydia Papadimitriou, Ran Ma, David Archibald, Cindy Wong, Maria
Paz-Peirano, Sasha Crawford-Holland, Tess Van Hemert, Caroline Moine,
Nanna Heidenreich, Katharina Lindner (may you rest in peace), Katharina

12 LGBTQ Film Festivals
Kamleitner, Melis Behlil, Eren Odabasi, Lesley-Ann Dickson, Sonia M.
Tascón, Dunja Jelenkovic, Philippe Meers, Ann Breidenbach, Konstantinos
Tzouflas, Frederik Dhaenens, Aleksandra Milovanovic, Denis Provencher,
John Lessard, Kristine Kotecki, Aimée Mitchell, Brian Hu, Kyler Chittick,
Heshen Xie, Clarissa Jacob, Tilottama Karlekar, and Michelle Latimer.
This book examines the precarious labour performed by scholars and
festival organizers. To some extent, it reflects my personal experience: as
a junior scholar, I do not hold a tenure-track appointment. Several scholars
and friends helped me face job insecurity, doubts, and anxiety – during
job interviews, between panels, in airport waiting rooms, or at gay bars:
Robin Curtis, Karl Schoonover, Janine Marchesseault, Susan Lord, Brenda
Longfellow, Julianne Pidduck, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Patrick Keilty, Liz Czach,
Michael Brynntrup, Wayne Yung, Liz Miller, John Greyson, Marc Siegel,
and Jane Gaines.
This book wouldn’t exist without the advice of many people met on the
festival circuit. As a film professional liaison officer for Cannes’s Queer Palm,
I worked with the following filmmakers, curators, producers, distributors,
and critics: Franck Finance-Madureira, Christopher Landais, Ava Cahen,
Bruce LaBruce, Anna Margarita Albelo, Philippe Tasca, Désirée Akhavan,
Ricky Mastro, Richard Wolff, Alex Schmidt, Angelo Acerbi, Flavio Armone,
Arshad Khan, Olivier Bachelard, Olivier Leculier, Thomas Oudin, Benoit
Arnulf, Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, Isabelle Mouveaux, Daniel
Chabannes, David Ninh, Patrick Cardon, Marc Smolowitz, Daniel Van
Hoogstraten, M-Appeal, Michael Shoel, Anna Feder, Yvonne Andreas, George
Dare, Nicolas Gilson, Yves Le Franc, Adam Kersh, Nicolas Maille, Arnaud
Jalbert, Jack Benjamin Toye, Nigel M. Smith, Todd Verow, Ailton Franco,
Tom Abell, Loke Kahloon, and Jason Ishikawa. At Écrans Mixtes Lyon: Ivan
Mitifiot, Olivier Leculier, and Philippe Grandjean; at the Lesbisch Schwule
Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival: Katja Briesemeister,
Simon Schultz, Maik Hoppe, Joachim Post, Michael Dreier, and Missy Lopes;
at Image+Nation: Katharine Setzer and Charlie Boudreau; in Paris: Didier
Roth-Bettoni and Anne Delabre; at Queer Lisboa: João Ferreira; at MIX New
York: Stephen Kent, Jim Hubbard, and all of the resolutely sexy attendees/
friends who constantly make New York feel like home.
Various archivists stepped me and enabled me to complete this research:
in Montreal, Ross Higgins (Archives gaies du Qu
ébec); in New York, Brent
Phillips (Fales), Rich Wandels (LGBT Center Historical Archives), and the
more than lovely staff at the NYPL (in particular the archivist who lent me
his handkerchief; the Vito Russo Collection made me cry!).

Acknowledgements 13
My chosen family was kind enough to take me out for drinks when I
most needed it and listened to my complaints on a quasi-daily basis. In
Montréal: Paul, Raffaella, Oliver, Umah, Rodrigo, Jean-François, Gabriel,
Lucas, Brian, Louis, José, Dan, Bruno, Guillaume, Nadège, Hubert, Santiago,
Mathilde, Miguel, Mike, Laurence, Derek, Merk, Keko, Laurent, Costas,
Stephen, Vincent, Philip, Darke, Noé, Hugo, Alejandro, Autumn, Hugues,
Jonathan, J-P, Armel, Ryan, Habbib, Nadim, Honoré, Kaustav, Sean, – and
everyone at the baths. In Toronto: Peter, Daniel, Darren, Kevin. In France:
Antoine, Roméo, Paul, Elisa, Lucie, Maxime, Olivier, Clément. In the rest of
Europe: Jost, Christoph, Tait, Didine. In California: Brian, Chris, Amanda,
Mark, Nua. In New York: Sam, Erik, Jeff, Scott, Ace, Blew, Kyle, Chris, and
Julian. Elsewhere: Marc. Deepest gratitude to my biological family (Nathalie,
Sylvain, and Marie) – a constant source of inspiration.
I am particularly grateful to publish this book with Amsterdam University
Press, one of my favourite publisher! Maryse Elliott and Thomas Elsaesser
provided me with much needed feedback. Their patience was truly remark-
able. For their assistance in clearing copyrights: Thomas Waugh; Joshua
Grannell; Brian Benson; Pau de la Sierra; Fuel Agency; João Ferreira; Ana
Grillo, Christina Magdalinou, Silvia Torneden; Aye Aye Production; Charlie
Boudreau; Katharine Setzer; and Stéphane Gérard (a brilliant filmmaker!).
My deepest gratitude to my blind reviewers for their insightful feedback.
Last but not least, to my partner, Ferrin. This book reflects our story; it
would simply not be possible without you. I have thousands of reasons to
thank you – for your patience, for your dorky smiles in the mornings, and
above all for helping me grow and making me look forward to the future.
A preliminary version of Chapter 2 has been published as ‘The queer film
ecosystem: symbolic economy, festivals, and queer cinema’s legs’ in Studies
in European Cinema 15, no.1 (2018). It has been significantly reworked in the
context of this book, thanks to the precious advice and support of editors
Leanne Dawson and Skadi Loist, as well as to the feedback provided by their
very perceptive blind reviewers.
This research was partly financed through a Fond de recherche du Québec
société et culture postdoctoral fellowship.

List of abbreviations
AIVF Association for Independent Video and Film
G
AA
Gay Activists Alliance
GAU Gay Academic Union
IGLHRC International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
LSF Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival
NALGF National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers
NEA National Endowment for the Arts
NGLTF National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce
NQC New Queer Cinema
NYL
GEFF
New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival
NYPL New York Public Library
NYSCA New York State Council for the Arts
NYU New York University

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut:
Qu
eering Film Festival Studies,
Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals
‘Fearless, Shameless, Timeless.’
1
This book is born out of a paradox: while scholars have increasingly le-
gitimated festivals as a semi-independent field of research within film
and media studies, critics and arts organizers have long questioned the
cultural relevancy of LGBTQ festivals. As early as 1982, Thomas Waugh
wondered why (and whether) a new gay and lesbian film festival should
be organized in Montreal.
2
Similarly, B. Ruby Rich famously observed that
queer festivals have simultaneously been ‘outlasting their mandate and
invited to cease and desist’.
3
In focusing on LGBTQ festivals’ conflicted
temporalities and historiography, this book examines the disciplinary
assumptions that structure festival studies: it questions the theoretical and
political narratives implied in current festival scholarship.
In particular, this book is concerned with festival studies’ quest for
legitimacy: as a relatively recent field of academic research, festival studies
has been burdened with justifying its object of research. Symptomatically,
most books and dissertations on the topic start with a numbered description
of the festival phenomenon. It is customary to highlight that thousands
and thousands of festivals are organized each year.
4
LGBTQ festivals are
1
Inside Out (Toronto, 1991-ongoing), 2011 tagline.
2 Waugh, ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’.
3 Rich, ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’, 620.
4
While it is almost impossible to estimate the number of festivals being organized each
year, the festival submission platform Withoutabox claims it serves over 5,000 festivals. See:
Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 18n7. In France alone, between 350 and 600 festivals are alleged to
have been organized in 2006. See: Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook I , 1; Taillibert,
Tribulations festivalières, 10.
Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2020
doi 10.5117/9789463728409_intro

18 LGBTQ Film Festivals
not an exception: for instance, Ger Zielinski asserts that queer festivals
are ‘often second largest only to the IFF [International Film Festivals] in
their respective city’.
5
Similarly, Skadi Loist argues that ‘the LGBT/Q film
festival scene has grown exponentially, covering most regions of the globe
with about 230 active events on the circuit today’.
6
The tendency to rely on
statistics and to map out what has been coined as the festival circuit can
difficultly be avoided: it justifies the relevancy of festival scholarship and
is symptomatic of an academic climate in which scholars are constantly
asked to evaluate the social impact of their research. It does, however, encode
a set of assumptions about which festivals matter, take hard numbers as
self-evident, and foreclose an examination of what constitutes a festival.
Instead of participating in this collective effort to describe and justify the
festival phenomenon, this book is concerned with analyzing the effects of
festival studies’ theoretical and methodological frameworks – frameworks
that tacitly structure our scholarship but are never fully acknowledged.
To that end, it is guided by the belief that festival studies is currently at
an impasse: as a self-referential field, it not only constantly reproduces a
particular type of scholarship, but also drastically limits our understanding
of what festivals are and thus of what their uses can be within film studies.
Pre-screening: constituting festival studies
‘Where films come out.’
7
Festival studies largely draws on the historical and theoretical framework
established by Marijke de Valck.
8
According to her, film festivals started out
as a European phenomenon: Venice (1932), Cannes (1946), and Berlin (1951)
5 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 116. Scholars generally argue that around 280 yearly
events would be dedicated to the screening of queer cinema. They systematically reference
‘The Big Queer Film Festival List’ (http://www.queerfilmfestivals.org/). The number of LGBTQ
festivals being organized each year is probably underestimated: as this book argues, scholars
often rely on a strict definition of what a festival is, thereby ignoring events which are ephemeral
by design, which do not name themselves ‘festivals’, or which adopt a slightly different format.
6 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 12.
7 New Fest (New York City, 1988-ongoing), 2011 tagline.
8 de Valck, Film Festivals. Marijke de Valck is not the first scholar focusing on film festivals.
She is, however, the first to publish a monograph on the topic. Earlier articles and theses, such
as Julian Stringer’s 2003 PhD dissertation, have largely been (re)discovered after the publication
of de Valck’s foundational opus.

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 19
simultaneously attempted to energize a European film industry damaged by
two world wars, increasingly suffering from Hollywood’s competition, and
to expand their country’s influence in the context of the Cold War. Cannes,
for instance, was founded on a joint French and American initiative as a way
of countering the influence of Mussolini’s Mostra. Significantly, festivals
did not select films: cultural embassies were responsible for submitting a
national entry. Thomas Elsaesser thus argues that festivals served as a sort
of ‘parliament of national cinemas’, at once promoting films which were
supposed to reflect the character of a nation and replaying or pacifying
conflicts through celluloid.
9
In the 1960s, new cinemas and social movements forced international
festivals to adapt their organizational structure. Confronted with the crea-
tion of new political festivals (such as Pesaro in 1964), international festivals
started curating films. According to de Valck, this area corresponds to the
‘age of the programmers’, best symbolized by the creation of side-sections
for innovative and political films (Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight and Berlin’s
International Forum of New Cinema). The 1960s also mark a shift from film
as instrument of cultural diplomacy to a discourse in terms of cinema as
art. With the popularization of the festival format in the 1970s, festivals
increasingly searched to distinguish themselves from one another, notably
through the discovery of new talents. It was the ‘age of the directors’, a shift
accompanied by a new focus on film markets. With the apparition of video
and a boom in independent filmmaking, festivals became legitimized as
key nodes in the circulation of films by the 1990s.
10
In that context, de Valck’s opus is largely concerned with festivals’ role as
tastemakers and cultural gatekeepers. Mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural
capital and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, de Valck analyzes the role
played by festivals in legitimizing and circulating art cinema. Her description
of festivals as a network composed of ‘sites and rites of passages’ relies on
three inter-related arguments: 1. that international festivals constitute a
network through which films circulate (an alternative circuit of exhibition),
2. that festivals, through their selections and awards, add a certain amount
of cultural capital which may then be transformed into profit, and 3. that
festivals structure the economy of film.
11
Julian Stringer similarly argues that festivals constitute a ‘multi-functional
phenomenon’ that cannot be reduced to film exhibition.

They mark the
9 Elsaesser, ‘Film Festivals Networks’, 88.
10 de Valck, Film Festivals.
11 Ibid., 36-37; See also: de Valck and Soeteman, ‘“And the Winner is…”“.

20 LGBTQ Film Festivals
coming together of various stakeholders whose agendas diverge from one
another. Journalists, filmmakers, producers, lawyers, buyers, distributors,
tourists, curators, audience members, and policymakers do not have the
same investment in a festival. Film festivals both rely on and are realized
through an assemblage of sometimes competing performances.
12
Since de Valck’s foundational opus, scholarship has largely been dedicated
to determining the shape taken by the ‘festival network’. Some festivals
matter more than others, both economically and culturally: Stringer’s
definition of the circuit as ‘a socially produced space unto itself, a unique
cultural arena that acts as a contact zone for the working through of unevenly
differentiated power relationships’ and Dina Iordanova’s description of
the network as a ‘two-tiered system’ effectively capture this inequality.
13

While some festivals add cultural capital, others are mostly concerned with
exhibition: they merely re-screen films (therefore paying rental fees). For
these reasons, the term network, which implies unity and circulation, has
been seen as too monolithic by festival scholars. Festivals are varied and
cannot be reduced to a single entity. As Iordanova puts it:
There is a strict task division between festivals; a small number of major
festivals have leading positions as marketplace and media event and the
remaining majority may perform a variety of tasks ranging from launching
young talent to supporting identity groups.
14
In that context, festival scholars have sought to conceptualize various
forms of circuits, coexisting and largely overlapping. This often results in an
ever-growing typological impulse in a scholarship body that distinguishes
A-list festivals from identity-based ones, thematic from generalist, buyers
from players.
15
Significantly, Iordanova’s Film Festival Yearbook series
focused successively on the notion of a circuit, films festivals in Asia, activist
12 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 9. See also: Rhyne, ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakehold-
ers’. A similar argument is made by: Dayan, ‘Looking for Sundance’. The discrepancies between
Stringer’s use of Howard S. Becker’s ‘art world theory’ and de Valck’s emphasis on ‘cultural
capital’ typically reflect different conceptions of the relationship between the cultural and the
economic. On the one hand, Becker’s ‘art world theory’ insists on the cultural as composed of
a network of people whose connections shape artistic discourses: the cultural is marked and
regulated by a cooperative logic. On the other hand, Bourdieu conceptualizes the cultural as a
‘field of struggle’: the meanings we ascribe to work of arts emerge from competing definitions
of ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ capital.
13
Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 109; Iordanova, ‘Film Festivals and Dissent’, 17.
14 Iordanova, ‘The Film Festival Circuit’, 29.
15 Among others: Wong, Film Festivals ; Cheung, ‘Funding Models of Themed Film Festivals’.

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 21
or archival festivals, and festivals in the Middle East.
16
Similarly, de Valck’s
Framing Festivals series covered Australian, Chinese, and queer festivals.
17
This separation between various types of festivals may at times have
unintended consequences: it forces scholars to present themselves as working
on ‘queer film festivals’ or ‘diasporic film festivals’ as if one’s object of study
was more important than the theoretical arguments or methods used in
our analyses. Furthermore, festivals with a similar curatorial focus are
often understood to belong to a single circuit and to be fundamentally
alike. In that context, festival studies’ typological impulse emphasizes the
differences among various circuits, conceptualized through theoretical
tools and historical narratives devised for A-list events: it may foreclose a
critical examination of the diversity of the festival phenomenon.
Here, I do not aim to discount the knowledge gained through festival
studies’ typological impulse but rather to draw attention to the institutional
and disciplinary logics that condition and shape our work as scholars. As
such, festival studies’ reliance on typologies is partly a consequence of
the mechanisms through which academic knowledge is produced and
disseminated: it enables scholars to be legible and to speak to colleagues
working on a similar historical period, identity, or geographic area outside of
festival studies. Furthermore, the field’s typological impulse often refracts
festival studies’ complex institutional location – between the Humanities
and Social Sciences, film and media studies. Significantly, scholars analyzing
general international festivals and those writing on thematic or identity-
based ones often build upon different disciplinary traditions. While the
former generally draw from media industry studies, the latter rely mainly
on cultural studies and ethnographic observations – focusing on festivals’
role in community-building and identity politics.
The literature on LGBTQ film festivals is here particularly instructive.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several articles and dossiers on LGBTQ
festivals were published in Jump Cut and GLQ. They not only predate festival
studies proper but also provide us with an alternative theoretical framework.
For instance, Patricia White’s 1999 GLQ dossier centres on a tension between
the ‘real, truly live place’ of festivals and the idea of festivals as a theoretical
tool. According to her, LGBTQ festivals simultaneously entail a collective
16 Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook I ; I ordanova and Cheung, Film Festival Yearbook
3; Iordanova and Torchin, Film Festival Yearbook 4 ; Marlow-Mann, Film Festival Yearbook 5 ;
Iordanova and Van de Peer, Film Festival Yearbook 6 . For a non-festival studies analysis of festivals
as they intersect (or do not intersect) with Arab cinema, see: Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels .
17 Stevens, Au stralian Film Festivals; Berry, Chinese Film Festivals; Richards, The Queer Film
Festival.

22 LGBTQ Film Festivals
experience of queer cinema and constitute an ideal site for reconceptualizing
LGBTQ people’s relationship to film.
18
They ‘manufacture’ queerness and/
or authenticate what counts as queer.
19
Waugh and Straayer’s GLQ dossiers, although conceived as follow-ups to
White’s, adopt the format of the roundtable.
20
In creating a virtual conversa-
tion between festival organizers, curators, and filmmakers, they simultane-
ously emphasize the diversity of the LGBTQ festival phenomenon, nuancing
and even questioning the idea of a unified circuit, and point to the interplay
between curation and academic knowledge production. Significantly, these
dossiers have tended to be interpreted as documentation of LGBTQ festivals
in the early 2000s. Seeing as they do not adopt familiar academic lingo, they
are not immediately legible as important acts of scholarship.
Most of the festival studies scholarship on LGBTQ film festivals is in
the form of unpublished dissertations. Written and/or defended over a
decade ago, they could not have anticipated major developments in queer
filmmaking and cultural organizing. Crucially, these dissertations also
correspond to the beginning of festival studies, understood here as an
independent field of academic research. As such, they both built upon
festival studies’ foundational concepts and helped define new methodologi-
cal and theoretical approaches. My choice to rely on these dissertations
thus reflects their centrality in the historical development of the field:
although they have not been published, they shaped the political project
of festival studies.
Scholars focusing on LGBTQ film festivals generally examine the relation-
ships between festival organizing and queer film cultures. Rhyne analyzes
major shifts in the organizational structures of a few US-based LGBTQ
festivals as symptomatic of the advent of a ‘pink dollar’ economy.
21
Zielinski
theorizes LGBTQ festivals’ relationship to identity and community politics
through Foucault’s heterotopia.
22
Loist argues that LGBTQ festivals enact
and crystallize a ‘queer film culture’: they reflect and participate in the
evolution of queer cinema.
23
In the only monograph on LGBTQ festivals,
Richards defines queer film festivals as social enterprises that both reflect
the rationality of the creative industry and constantly renegotiate their
18
White, ‘Introduction: On Exhibitionism’, 73.
19 Clark, ‘Queer Publicity at the Limits of Inclusion’.
20
Waugh and Straayer, eds., ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One’; ‘Queer Film
and Video Festival Forum, Take Two’; ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three’.
21 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’.
22 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’.
23 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’.

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 23
relationship to community organizing.
24
All of these pioneering texts rely on
a few case studies: as their focus is on the emergence of a transnational queer
film culture, they analyze some of the largest, oldest, and most important
international LGBTQ film festivals.
In contrast, this book examines forgotten, minor LGBTQ film fes-
tivals. In so doing, it echoes a growing number of scholars who argue
that festival studies’ conceptual apparatus does not adequately apply to
the vast majority of festivals: its theoretical and methodological tools,
devised for international festivals, do not necessarily account for smaller
events. For instance, Papagena Robbins and Viviane Saglier call for a
critical examination of ‘“other” film festival networks, […] driven not
only by curiosity and the need to always look further, but also by the
very desire to stretch what counts as being part of the festival networks
in order to open its branches and reveal its porosity’.
25
Similarly, Lindiwe
Dovey, Joshua McNamara, and Federico Olivieri note that the Slum Film
Festival (Nairobi) ‘does not attract widespread global attention; it is not
a glittering showcase for films and people; it is not a vital node for global
film industries, businesses, institutions, and information’. Consequently,
they argue that there is a
danger in assuming that the channels through which films circulate – such
as film festivals, and other ‘media events’ – are in themselves coher-
ent entities that can be easily understood and unpacked by individual
scholars. While we welcome the new field of film festival studies as a
major advance in film studies, we feel that this field will benefit from
an openness of approach that remains attuned to alternative definitions
of ‘film festivals’.
26
Several scholars have explored how festival studies’ theoretical concepts
presuppose a particular type of festival. For instance, Ezra Winton’s critiques
of festival studies aim at correcting the field’s bias toward fiction films,
thereby insisting on the specificities of documentary film festivals.
27

Similarly, Tasc
ón and Wils develop a theory of activist film festivals.
28
In
questioning and/or deconstructing some of festival studies’ main theoretical
24 R The Queer Film Festival.
25 Robbins and Saglier, ‘Introduction’, 4.
26
Dovey, McNamara, and Olivieri, ‘“From, By, For” Nairobi’s Slum Film Festival, Film Festival
Studies, and the Practices of Development’.
27 Winton, ‘Good for the Heart and Soul, Good for Business’, 32-33.
28 Tascón, ‘Opening Thoughts’, 3.

24 LGBTQ Film Festivals
concepts, these scholars often adopt a reparative practice that both relies
on and aims at recognizing an understudied type of festival, sometimes
inadvertently replaying the field’s typological impulse. In contrast, this
book builds upon festival studies’ main theoretical contributions: instead of
arguing for the specificity of LGBTQ festivals, it seeks to uncut, or expand,
festival studies’ concepts and methods.
To that end, I do not aim to criticize my colleagues for their insightful
and foundational work. My focus is not on individual texts or scholars but
on the institutional production of knowledge and its effects on festival
scholarship. Similarly, this book does not aim at providing the reader with
an exhaustive survey of the literature on film festivals. As with any scholarly
project, this book is a partial, ‘curated’ intervention. If my framing of ‘film
festival studies’ may at times seem a bit too monolithic, it is done so with the
intention of mapping the constitution of an academic field of research – that
is, to identify festival studies’ key debates and methodological frameworks
and to present an alternative approach.
In particular, this monograph does not account for the development
of a new set of literature on festivals that do not screen films (ranging
from international exhibitions to music festivals to anime conventions).
This new literature, published among others in the new Journal of Festive
Studies, is curiously disconnected from film festival scholarship: as such,
the two fields operate independently, largely ignoring each other. While
future research will benefit from connecting these two independent fields,
my analysis is limited to the emergence and institutional location of film
festival studies. Throughout this book, I thus use ‘festival studies’ as a
shorthand for the development of a field of research concerned with film
and media festivals.
Queering festival studies: critical (film) festival studies and the
festival as a method
This book attempts to navigate the fine line between being about LGBTQ
festivals and queering festival studies. In theorizing LGBTQ festivals, I aim
to reveal the political project and axiological coordinates of festival studies.
As White’s and Waugh and Straayer’s dossiers suggest, LGBTQ festivals offer
a productive framework for reconceptualizing festivals because and in spite of
identity: LGBTQ festivals’ focus on identity makes visible the power dynamics

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 25
at the heart of both festival organizing and academic knowledge production.
29

In ‘queering festival studies’, this book attends to both the knowledge created by
festivals (queering festivals ) and the ways in which scholars create knowledge
of and on festivals (queering festival studies ).
While the lexicon ‘uncut’ clearly points to my own position and biases
as a gay man – the gendered imbalance this book suffers from as well as
the desires, fantasies, and imagined encounters it is born out of – this
project is informed by feminist historiographies and epistemologies.
30

My use of Women’s Studies might seem anachronistic as the discipline (if
it ever cohesively existed) has been incorporated (both figuratively and
administratively) within gender studies and queer theory departments. In
recuperating some of Women’s Studies’ theoretical debates, in particular as
it relates to the regimes that regulate academic knowledge production, this
book hopes to, as Elizabeth Freeman elegantly states, ‘min[e] the present
for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’.
31
In particular, feminist historiography attempts to counter the erasure of
women from archives/academia and to account for the absence of ontology
of the entity known as women. Schematically, scholars such as Denise Riley
and Joan Wallach Scott seek to simultaneously question the disciplinary
assumptions underlying the writing of linear (some would say heteronorma-
tive) history and resist trans-historical essentializing narratives.
32
In this
book, I use feminist historiography both as a method for examining the
political project of festival scholarship and as a model for thinking about
queer subjects throughout history. Feminist historiography urges us to
simultaneously attend to the politics of history-writing and find productive
29
To that end, I am not interested in countering the widespread and problematic assumption
according to which gay and lesbian festivals would be of a lesser quality because of identity.
Taking LGBTQ festivals as symptomatic of festivals’ role in knowledge production, my inquiry
seeks to bypass the question of legitimacy altogether.
30
While this book strives not to participate in the erasure of lesbians from queer film history,
it certainly reflects both my own position as a gay man and the gender imbalance at the heart
of queer film history. As I will argue in Chapters 2 and 3, this erasure is partly an effect of
the uneasy positioning of lesbian filmmaking / scholarship between feminist and LGBTQ
movements. Similarly, trans filmmaking is relatively recent – and can be seen as being at times
erased by the type of historiographical narrative I propose. Future research will address the
complex relationships between trans and gay and lesbian cinemas at festivals, as well as the
recent development of trans film festivals. 31
Freeman, Time Binds, 16.
32
Riley, ‘Does a Sex Have a History? “Women” and Feminism’, 122; Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’;
Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History.

26 LGBTQ Film Festivals
ways of accounting for the similitudes and differences among queer subjects
separated in time and space.
To that end, my use of Women’s Studies echoes recent discussions on
queer temporalities. Drawing on Michel Foucault, scholars have argued that
the notion ‘gays and lesbians’ is a relatively recent (Western) construct.
33
In
that framework, queerness entails a particular relationship to time: LGBTQ
people have been simultaneously erased from official histories and archives
and positioned outside of the linear temporality of heterosexuality.
34
In that
context, scholars have tried to find ways of accounting for the separation
of queer subjects in time, attempting to negotiate the fine line between the
historical specificity of LGBTQ identities and the transhistorical constant
of same-sex desire.
35
Film offers here a productive framework for understanding LGBTQ history
and identities. As Richard Dyer rightly notes in what may be considered as
the first academic book on homosexuality and film, ‘gays have had a special
relationship to the cinema’.
36
Indeed, photographs and films played a major
role in the constitution of gay and lesbian subjectivities: the development
of imaging technologies parallels Foucault’s description of the proliferation
of a modern discourse on (homo)sexuality in the 19
th
century.
37
In that
context, photographs and films constitute what Waugh calls a ‘communal
currency’
38
as they ‘manage not only to resemble the living flesh of everyday
sexual experience (iconic) but also to testify to the existence of that flesh
(indexical)’.
39
LGBTQ festivals refract the temporalities of the cinematic
apparatus: in curating a wide assortment of gay and lesbian films, they fun-
damentally join queer subjects in and through time, visualize (or evidence)
queerness, and entail a specific relationship to temporality.
In addition to feminist historiography, this book is inspired by the debates
over the shift from Women’s Studies to Gender and Sexuality Studies in the
1990s. This period provoked a definitional crisis, forcing scholars to describe
33
Halperin, ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’, 257.
3
4
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Edelman, No Future .
35
See among others: Carolyn Dinshaw et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable
Discussion’, 178. This debate is largely indebted to 1980s feminist historiography.
36 Dyer, Gays and Film, 2nd edition. Dyer’s use of the word ‘gays’ includes lesbians.
37
Fo Histoire de la sexualité, vol.1 : La volonté de savoir. For an analysis of the role
played by these new imaging technologies in shaping medical and scientific discourses on the queer body, see: Terry, ‘The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity’; Terry, ‘Lesbians under the Medical Gaze’. These imaging technologies were also are the core of Hirschfeld’s scientific treatises. See: Dyer, Now You See It, 1
st
edition, 34.
38 Waugh, ‘Cultivated Colonies’.
39 Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 21. [Emphasis in the original]

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 27
the differences between the interdisciplinary discipline Women’s Studies,
the political project of Women’s Studies as a field committed to social
justice, and the constitution of Women’s Studies as a method of research
slowly adopted in various non-identity-based departments and disciplines
(including film studies).
40
My use of these debates is (1) historical, as they
are emblematic of the advent of neoliberal universities and the evolution of
identity politics, and (2) epistemological, for what they offer is an analytics
of the power dynamics at the heart of academic knowledge production (one
particularly tuned in to how our attachments to our objects of study shape
the scholarship we write).
These debates are consequently refracted in the two theoretical concepts
around which this book is organized: ‘critical festival studies’ and ‘the festival
as a method’.
41
‘Critical festival studies’ operates as an epistemological cri-
tique, an analysis of the methodological conundrums and political projects
that structure the field of film festival studies. It reveals the assumptions
built into festival studies – how our quest for academic legitimacy orients
our research toward particular ‘festivals that matter’. Conversely, ‘the festival
as a method’ mobilizes festivals not solely as objects of research but as ideal
sites for understanding cinematic cultures. ‘The festival as a method’ tunes
us in to the regimes of knowledge production presupposed in the festival
format itself. As curated juxtapositions of moving images, festivals exemplify
many of film studies’ theoretical conundrums, such as spectatorship, film
cultures, and representational queries. To that end, LGBTQ Film Festivals
operates simultaneously as a critique (or queering) of festival studies and
as a method for expanding – or uncutting – the field.
Labour of love: desiring scholars/festivals
‘Love! Drama! Sex! Politics!’
42
As it will become clear, this book foregrounds my own positionality and
draws a parallel between the act of doing queer academic research and that
40
Among others: Boxer, ‘For and About Women’; Brown, ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’;
Scott, ‘Women’s Studies on the Edge’; Stacey, ‘Is Academic Feminism an Oxymoron?’; Wiegman,
ed., Women’s Studies on Its Own; Wiegman, Object Lessons.
41 I borrow the concept ‘critical festival studies’ from Ezra Winton, see: Robbins, Saglier, and
Winton, ‘Interview with Ezra Winton, Director of Programming at Cinema Politica’.
42 Inside Out Toronto, 2009 tagline.

28 LGBTQ Film Festivals
of festival organizing. It is animated by the belief that festival organizing
and academic writing are not antithetical. Both of these activities offer a
framework for understanding the stakes and material realities of knowledge
production. To that end, LGBTQ Film Festivals refuses to separate, or cut, the
author from both its object of study and the people it pays homage to. This
book is, as festival organizers put it, ‘a labour of love’ – one that is offered
to the reader yet that cannot be disentangled from my own experiences.
While the insider/outsider binary (which I deconstruct in Chapters 1 and
3) has structured the field of festival studies, I cannot claim the objective
position of the scholar-as-observer – doing research on rather than with and
at festivals. As such, LGBTQ Film Festivals reflects my own ‘circuits’ and
‘networks’. This book is the result of numerous conversations and arguments.
I draw inspiration and knowledge from my experiences, as a volunteer and
curator at Écrans Mixtes Lyon, MIX NYC, and Image+Nation Montréal, a
film professional liaison officer at Cannes’s Queer Palm, a festival liaison
officer at the Queer Media Database Canada/Québec, and above all as an
avid festival-goer. I do not pretend full authorship and cannot separate
myself from the events this book focuses on and/or the people who have
frequented them – some of whom I have loved.
My tendency to adopt the personal will not surprise queer scholars:
early gay and lesbian film studies notoriously refused to separate academic
labour and community-based politics. From crying in the New York Public
Library archives, especially while reading the last letters sent to Vito Russo,
to sustaining friendships through historical research, my positionality as
researcher and my scholarship refract the role of queer sociality within
academic knowledge production.
43
As Foucault famously argues:
The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather,
to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relation-
ships. And, no doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a
form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at
becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.
43 I consulted the Vito Russo Archives exactly 25 years after Russo’s death – and was thus the
first scholar able to access several boxes of personal letters and documents which were previously
restricted. I was overwhelmed by Russo’s love letters to his long-term partner Jeffrey Sevcik, as
well as by the farewell notes sent by his students at the University of California, in Santa Cruz.
I am forever grateful to the New York Public Library staff who, despite asking me to leave the
room, offered me their moral support (and handkerchief!).

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 29
The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is
the one of friendship.
44
Some readers will, between the lines, notice sticky strings and traces of
past and present encounters – my own as well as those of the friends and
colleagues this book analyzes. Friendship and fucking, be it in an academic
context or at festivals, structure artistic and intellectual productions. The
separation of the personal from the intellectual, often held as a cornerstone
of so-called objective research, erases not only how queer people sustain
communities but also how our artistic and scholarly endeavours are
always the result of collaborations and chosen networks of friends.
45
In
the context of this book, I do not want to pretend I have not gained (literal
and figurative) insider knowledge, for instance, in living with someone
who has volunteered at and curated for one of the festivals I examine.
Similarly, this book would not be possible without my PhD advisor, Thomas
Waugh, someone whose scholarship and curatorial practices are analyzed
in various chapters.
Friendship/fucking, gossip, and ‘insider’ knowledge structure both queer
scholars’ and festival organizers’ experiences. To that end, LGBTQ Film
Festivals is fully aligned with B. Ruby Rich’s use of the retrospective gaze of
the autobiography as a method: her book Chick Flicks, which has curiously
been overlooked by festival scholars, may be the only full-length monograph
on sustaining friendships, collaborations, and sexual encounters at and
through festivals / academic conferences. As Rich eloquently puts it,
Knowledge can be acquired and exhibited in a variety of ways. To read
and then to write: that’s the standard intellectual route. In the years of
my own formation, though, there were many other options. Journals and
journeys, conferences and conversations, partying and politicking, going
to movies and going to bed.
46
44 Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’; originally published as: Foucault, ‘De l’amitié comme
mode de vie’.
45 The title of this introduction was inspired by John Greyson’s 1997 Un©ut , a f ilm about
intellectual property, censorship, and queer collaborations. In addition to featuring some of
the people this book pays homage to, Un©ut is an exercise in artistic collaborations through
networks of friendship. On this film, see: Zeilinger and Coombe, ‘Three Peters and an Obsession
with Pierre’. On the role played by festivals in sustaining friendships: Damiens, ‘Incestuous
Festivals’.
46 R Chick Flicks, 3. While B. Ruby Rich’s writings on queer cinema are abundantly quoted
by festival scholars, her earlier articles on feminist filmmaking (and women’s film festivals!) have

30 LGBTQ Film Festivals
In foregrounding my own experience at LGBTQ festivals, I do not mean to
replay the stereotypes that ‘queer people would be obsessed with sexuality’
and that ‘people attending LGBTQ festivals would not care about film’.
47
If
this book runs the risk of being too personal, it reveals how my attachments
to festivals (and the boys who frequent them) have shaped this research.
The cut: a note on methodology
As I implied earlier, festival studies has largely relied on case studies. In
analyzing particular festivals, scholars may inadvertently replay festivals
studies’ quest for legitimacy: as such, scholars are asked to simultaneously
justify why a particular festival matters and to cast this event as emblematic
of the festival phenomenon as a whole. Put another way, case studies entail
paradigmatic readings.
48
They encode particular assumptions about what
festivals are and refract the disciplinary assumptions embedded in the
field. This book attempts to resist the imperative of case studies. It adopts
an eclectic corpus composed of established festivals, ephemeral events that
only exist as traces in archival collections, and festivals which are generally
ignored in our scholarship.
My analysis is, however, limited to LGBTQ festivals in Western Europe,
the US, and Canada. While I run the risk of replaying a Western-centred
description of the festival phenomenon, this book cannot account for
forms of same-sex sexualities that do not fit with American or European
gayness. As Foucault reminds us, ‘sexuality’ is a relatively recent concept,
tied to and emerging through particular discursive regimes.
49
There is
little evidence that ‘homosexuality’ adequately describes non-Western
same-sex subjectivities. Any consideration of non-Western festivals requires
both a deep ethnographic knowledge of the country in which an event is
organized and an understanding of foreign languages. Applying the same
been relatively ignored. As such this conundrum illustrates quite well the uneasy positioning
of lesbians within ‘gay and lesbian cinema’.
47
Queer scholars are constantly asked to justify their focus on queer cinema as cinema. My
experience at the 2015 NECS Conference is here quite instructive: as I was presenting on the
parts of Chapter 1 that pay homage to festival-goers I have known and loved, someone accused me of insisting too much on the festival as a space of sociality – of prioritizing queerness over cinema. 48
Wiegman, Object Lessons, 32.
49 Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol.1.; Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité; vol.2 : L’Usage des
plaisirs.

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 31
monolithic frame of analysis might submerge these subjectivities under the
umbrella of a global gayness, thus replaying the imperialism of Western
frameworks. Although my focus in on LGBTQ festivals organized in the
West, I do not want to suggest that ‘homosexuality’ and ‘queer cinema’ are
concepts that can be applied unilaterally to describe the realities of LGBTQ
people in various European countries, Canada, and the US. In resituating
festivals within the larger context of geographically specific understandings
of queerness, I partly aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of
the West – one that does not take US identity politics as the only way of
expressing same-sex desire.
Curating the book
As this book suggests, LGBTQ festivals’ curatorial practices oftentimes
operate through a juxtaposition of films, a collage that encompasses very
different films (in terms of format, temporality, and geographic origin)
yet creates the illusion of a whole. Festivals produce knowledge through a
sedimentation of discourses and representations. The organization of this
book reflects the act of curation. Each chapter pays attention to a specific
theoretical conundrum. Taken together, these five chapters illustrate both
the regimes of knowledge production at the heart of the festival phenomenon
and the epistemological conundrums of festival studies.
Chapter 1, ‘Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and
the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies’ explores the historiographical and
political project of festival studies. In considering both queer film festivals’
investment in preserving their own history (or lack thereof) and the state of
various French, Canadian, and American archives, I am interested in two
inter-related issues. 1. How do institutional settings, professionalization, and
sexual politics shape festivals’ archival practices and/or the very existence
of archives on film festivals? 2. How might we understand the gaps in the
archives, the presence of documents that attest to the existence of yet do
not describe ephemeral festivals? In rescuing or recovering festivals which
have been erased from traditional histories, Chapter 1 operates a critique
of festival studies’ disciplinary unconscious. It reveals the set of theoretical
and axiological coordinates which have conditioned the development of
the field: as such, festival studies is a project dedicated to making (some)
festivals matter within film studies. In uncovering ephemeral festivals, I
thus advocate for a ‘critical festival studies’.

32 LGBTQ Film Festivals
Centring on some of festival studies’ theoretical conundrums, Chapter 2
and 3 expand on what a ‘critical festival studies’ could entail. In analyzing
the regimes of taste and films cultures that condition the circulation and
cultural currency of queer cinemas, Chapter 2, ‘The Queer Film Ecosystem’,
aims to reconceptualize the notion of festival circuits. It locates queer
cinema at the intersection of two regimes of cultural value – identity and
cinephilia. Through a Bourdieusian approach to taste-making and cultural
production, I highlight how both festivals and scholars negotiate these
conflicting cultural values. Film traffic relies on a symbolic economy
that is based on and fosters differentiated cultural discourses on queer
cinema. In analyzing the strategies of both European and American film
distributors, I underscore how this interplay between queerness and
cinephilia is strategically mobilized so as to assert a film’s legitimacy
and authenticity.
Chapter 3, ‘Out of the Celluloid Closet, Into the Theatres!’ revisits tradi-
tional historical accounts of the development of both gay and lesbian cinema
and festivals. In particular, I trace the emergence and mutation of the concept
‘gay and lesbian cinema(s)’ – a relatively recent notion shaped through an
interplay between film criticism, festival organizing, and scholarship. I
detail the careers and works of various critics and scholars as they intersect
with LGBTQ festival organizing. In highlighting the networks of friend-
ship, fucking, and collaboration that informed the development of LGBTQ
cinema, I nuance the divide between scholars, critics, and practitioners
that has been instrumental in asserting the legitimacy of festival studies
and describe various uses of the festival format as a praxis of academic
knowledge production.
Chapters 4 and 5 shift the focus from ‘critical festival studies’ to ‘the
festival as a method’. Chapter 4, ‘Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory
and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality’ pays attention to LGBTQ festivals’
visual productions and curatorial practices. As events dedicated to the
screening of sexual images, LGBTQ festivals are enmeshed with the
accumulation of temporalities and affects. As such, their film selec-
tion is akin to a collage or a juxtaposition of films, each with a peculiar
relationship to history. Through their selections and visual productions,
festivals make time ‘matter’: they constitute a virtual archive and entail
a particular type of relationship with gay and lesbian visual history. In
positing that festivals constitute an ideal space for theorizing gay and
lesbian spectatorship, Chapter 4 argues that LGBTQ festivals exemplify
some of the modalities through which we access, visually, gay and lesbian
cultural memory.

Introduction. Festivals, Uncut 33
Chapter 5, ‘Images + Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Ho-
moscapes’ focuses on the geographic imaginaries embedded in festival
programming. In screening films from various countries, festivals participate
in the circulation of various geographically specific representations of
queerness. I argue that festivals provide us with a model for thinking
through the globalization of queerness. Borrowing from gay linguists’ focus
on the interplay between geography and subjectivities, I pay attention to
the language used to describe various films and contend that catalogues
perform the task of cultural translation. They reinterpret films from a
foreign context for a nationally situated audience. As institutions screening
films from all around the world, they simultaneously localize films from
other geographical contexts and provide us with various discourses on the
globalization of queerness.
While this book can be understood as an epistemological intervention
in festival studies, it should not be taken as a totalizing critique of the
field. As such, it is not exempt from the conundrums it seeks to analyze. I
address these issues in my conclusion, a meditation on the nature of field
interventions that posits critical film festival studies and ‘the festivals
that did not matter’ as already enmeshed in the search for scholarly
legitimacy.
Speaking in queer tongues: a note on terminology
The words we use matter, especially so when it comes to sexuality. They
refract various forms of articulation between desires, subjectivities and social
movements. Concepts such as ‘gays and lesbians’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘queer’ reflect
historically situated conceptualizations of sexual desires. The difference
between gay and lesbian, LGBTQ, and queer festivals is however not so
clear-cut. The name a festival ‘gives itself’ is not necessarily indicative of its
sexual politics.
50
A self-proclaimed queer festival might adhere to a quite
classical gay and lesbian programming. As Zielinski puts it,
these festivals have gone through a number of important name changes
over the years that reflect, to various degrees of success, changes in their
structure and policies regarding content, effectively revealing their self-
understanding and how they want to been [sic] understood […] In fact,
to discuss these festivals in general quickly becomes quite a semantic
50 As explored in: Gever, ‘“The Names We Give Ourselves”’.

34 LGBTQ Film Festivals
challenge. Does the use of ‘lesbian and gay’ negate the broadened LGBTQ
claim of most festival today? When or under what conditions might an
LGBTQ film festival ever be queer? Not only have their names changed,
but also the meaning of the words comprising them.
51
For these reasons, I adopt the following conventions:
–
When discussing a specific event, I respect the terminology adopted
by the festival – the name it gave itself within its historical context.
– In order to avoid anachronism and to emphasize historical specificity, I
mobilize the term best fitted with a festival’s context. For instance: when
discussing 1970s festivals, I use the terminology ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’,
– When my inquiry is not limited by historical specificity, I mobilize ‘gay
and lesbian’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘queer’ interchangeably.
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1. Festivals that (did not) Matter:
Fe
stivals’ Archival Practices and the
Field Imaginary of Festival Studies
Abstract
Chapter 1 explores the historiographical and political project of festival
studies. In considering queer film festivals’ investment in preserving
their own history (or lack thereof) and the state of various archives, I am
interested in two inter-related issues. 1. How do institutional settings,
professionalization, and sexual politics shape festivals’ archival practices
and/or the very existence of archives on film festivals? 2. How might we
understand the gaps in the archives, the presence of documents that attest
to the existence of yet do not describe ephemeral festivals? In recovering
festivals which have been erased from traditional histories, Chapter 1
operates a critique of festival studies’ disciplinary unconscious. It reveals
the set of theoretical coordinates which conditioned the development
of the field.
Keywords: festivals; archives; epistemology; ephemera; methods; festival
studies
‘But then, perhaps we are taking our pleasure a bit too seriously? It is, after all,
rather difficult in an academic discourse to avoid the pleasures of seriousness
[…]. Indeed, to divorce ourselves from serious pleasure would immediately
involve us in another marriage with it, the very gesture of exclusion reinscribing
us in its hierarchical structure. Once again, the radical pleasure of abandoning
seriousness becomes a serious pleasure.’
1
1
Rutsky and Wyatt, ‘Serious Pleasures’, 10.
Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2020
doi 10.5117/9789463728409_ch01

40 LGBTQ Film Festivals
In this introductory chapter, I turn to the question of LGBTQ festivals’ physi-
cal archives and festival studies’ disciplinary apparatus.
2
I pay particular
attention to festivals which have been forgotten: some of the events I describe
only exist as neglected traces within archival collections. Symptomatically,
these ephemeral events are also ignored in the academic literature as the
field is typically concerned with festivals’ longevity and the role they play in
the economy of film. In defining festivals as ephemeral events, this chapter
thus sets out to interrogate festival studies’ historiographical project: it
argues that our focus on major, established events simultaneously justi-
fies festival studies’ theoretical apparatus and reasserts the legitimacy of
festival research within film studies. In centring festivals that failed or that
happened only once, this chapter hopes to carve a space for a reimagining
of festival studies itself.
While this chapter sets to detail some of the conundrums of histori-
cal research (which I develop further in Chapter 2 and 3) through what
I call a ‘critical festival studies’, it also can be taken as an homage to the
ephemeral nature of queer cinematic life: these traces act as a testament
to the remarkable work of an army of anonymous festival organizers and
film lovers whose existence may never be evidenced or proven through
so-called objective methods. Centred specifically on queer film festivals,
its conclusions largely apply to postcolonial and activist cinemas – to genres
that are usually relegated to the margins and whose archives are always
under erasure.
Cruising the archives
This chapter is deeply indebted to my numerous, sometimes unsuccessful,
trips to the archives. Needless to say, festivals’ records have been unevenly
kept and preserved – a fact which conditions the very parameters of any
historical inquiry. This chapter is thus a meditation on what gets to be
historicized and on what is missing from the archives. It is an ethnographic
description of my own struggle to get access to specific collections, of the
desires invested in my encounters with archives, and of my relationship
with history-writing – a practice Simon Ofield associates with cruising:
2
While several scholars have extended the notion to include the virtual a rchives created by
scholars (the archival turn), this chapter deals with physical institutional collections (archives
in the traditional sense of the word). I analyze festivals as archives in Chapter 4. For an analysis
of festivals’ use of archival material, see: Marlow-Mann, ed., Film Festival Yearbook 5 .

Festivals that (did not) Matter 41
Cruising is not represented as the alternative to more professional forms of
investigation, but understood as a form of practice always already caught
up in the disciplines that it attempts to dodge and the understandings
that it seeks to displace. […] [You] can never be quite sure if you will
find what you are looking for, or if you will come across something you
never knew you wanted, or even knew existed. In this way, cruising is a
productive rather than reductive process, and has an in-built potential
for diversion, irregular connections, and disorderly encounters.
3
Cruising, as a metaphor for a hazardous encounter with historical docu-
ments, points to the affective longings invested in historical research and
to the productive nature of archival failures and mismatches. Sometimes,
one finds only traces and ghosts; the labour of searching and courting
archives may be more exciting and productive than any eventual archival
pay-dirt moment.
4
As an oftentimes illegal investment of space with
desire, cruising further draws our attention to the institutionalization/
legitimation of archival materials (or lack thereof) as well as to the pro-
ductive nature of furtive, ephemeral, encounters with the unexpected
traces of queer cinematic life contained within established collections.
It resituates historical research within intergenerational desire, defined
as an unexpected erotic relationship with history that has the potential
to disrupt or at least suspend linear, heteronormative temporality – a
conundrum best summed up in Lucas Hilderbrand’s play on Derrida:
‘archive fever and other STDs’.
5
In that context, this chapter does not aim
to establish a reparative or an alternative history of LGBTQ festivals. Far
from providing any sort of happy ending or closure, it hopes to suspend the
temptation of linear history and to take seriously these compromising yet
ephemeral traces and ghosts. This chapter is an elegy, one that resuscitates
the traces of a utopian past in the hope they might energize contemporary
festival research and organizing.
Compromising evidences: ephemeral traces in the archives
Over the past few years, I have conducted several research trips to the ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California
3
Ofield, ‘Cruising the Archive’, 351;7.
4 Dever, ‘Papered Over’, 70.
5 Hilderbrand, ‘Historical Fantasies’, 329.

42 LGBTQ Film Festivals
(Los Angeles), the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives
Division, the Fales Special Collections (New York University), the Archives
gaies du Québec (Montreal), and the LGBT Community Center National
History Archive (NYC). I have also consulted several private collections, in
France and Canada. Other field trips have remained unsuccessful, either
because the documents collected by volunteers and archivists were not
publicly accessible or catalogued (Cherry Grove Historical Archives on Fire
Island) or because of quarrels and community-based struggles over the very
constitution of archives (Paris’s Conservatoire des archives et mémoires
LGBT and the Fonds Chomarat at Lyon’s public library).
Throughout my research, I stumbled upon various ephemeral traces of
events which have been forgotten in historical accounts of LGBTQ festivals.
Some of them predate San Francisco’s 1977 Gay Film Fest, oftentimes held to be
the oldest and/or first LGBTQ festival. From 1975 to the mid-1980s for instance,
the French gay liberation movement organized over a dozen of festivals in
small cities outside of Paris. Others were held in larger cities, such as the
1976 l’Autre amour (Lyon) or the 1978 Mémoire des sexualités (Marseille).
It is almost impossible to determine how many festivals happened in the
decade, as official archives at best only mention these events. Nevertheless,
these events uniquely express a commitment to a radical homosexuality that
aimed at visually and politically disrupting 1970s French society.
6
Similarly, several US-based adult theatres organized, as early as the late
1960s, gay film festivals, oftentimes intermixing pornographic and softcore
features – a topic I develop in Chapter 2 and whose neglected history points
to the marginalization of so-called adult cinemas within film historiography.
The phenomenon was furthermore not limited to adult businesses: for
instance, the Janus Theatre advertised a 1973 First American Gay Film
Festival (in collaboration with the Washington D.C. Area Gay Community
Council), not to be confused with the 1978 First Gay Film Festival (organized
this time by the American Film Institute in D.C.).
7
In New York, I found
traces of a lesbian film festival that may have happened in 1976, organized
in partnership with the Cultural council formation.
8
6 Most of these events were not called ‘film festival’ but semaine du cinema (‘ f ilm week’).
This partly explains their marginalization in the literature around LGBTQ film festivals. These
events are documented in: Jablonski, ‘De l’ouverture du ghetto à la dépolitisation’; Fleckinger,
‘Nous sommes un fléau social’; Isarte, ‘Silence ! On parle.’
7
The 1973 First American Gay Film Festival is documented in: Janus Theater, ‘Press Release:
First American Gay Film Festival, in DC’. The 1976 First Gay Film Festival is mentioned in: Dicks,
‘Memo from Homer Dicks on the Celluloid Closet’. 8
‘Lesbian Film Festival’.

Festivals that (did not) Matter 43
These events were quite eclectic and do not readily correspond to
classic definitions of what a film festival is. Some of them were put on
by universities, such as UCLA’s 1977 Gay Awareness Week Film Festival
and 1979 Projecting Stereotypes; Concordia University’s 1977 Images of
Homosexuality on the Screen; New York University’s 1983 Abuse; University
of Minnesota’s Lavender Images (1987-1989); or Université de Nanterre’s
Ciné-Rebelle (2014-2015).
9
Others were organized by cinematheques and
museums (among them: Baltimore’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1988, New York’s
Donnell Library Center in 1993, and Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive in 1995).
10

Film distributors and producers have also held festivals, such as Women
Make Movies’s 1979 or 1980 In Our Own Image, organized in collaboration
with the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers and the
Chelsea Gay Association (NYC).
11
These festivals mostly exist as traces within the archives – as sole flyers,
sometimes even undated. This poses a serious methodological issue for
historical research as it is often impossible to determine whether these
events actually took place. Zielinski’s description of Toronto’s 1980 First
International Gay Film Festival is here particularly instructive:
I found a piece of ephemera, a simple flyer that announced the 1980 ‘First
International Gay Film Festival’ in Toronto, but could not find any source
to confirm that the event ever took place. There is no record of it in any
newspapers of the period. Its postal address is now a parking lot at the
south end of the village. This of course does not mean that it did not take
place, but rather that as an event it is left indeterminate, namely it may
have taken place.
12
9
The 1977 Gay Awareness Week Film Festival is documented in: Gay Student Union, ‘UCLA Gay
Awareness Week Film Festival’. On the 1979 Projecting Stereotypes: Gay Student Union, ‘Proposal
for PROJECTING STEREOTYPES’; Coordinators of Projecting Gay Stereotypes, ‘Evaluation’. On
Concordia’s Images of Homosexuality on the Screen, see: Waugh, Romance of Transgression in
Canada, 474. On Abuse: National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, ‘NALGF & NYU
Lesbian/Gay Film Festival Present Abuse’. On Lavender Images: ‘Lavender Images – A Lesbian and
Gay Film Retrospective’; ‘Lavender Images II’; ‘Lavender Images III’. Screenings were also organized
in 1977 by the University of Melbourne’s GaySoc. See: Richards, The Queer Film Festival , 63.
10 The Baltimore series is mentioned in: Jusick, ‘MIX Is HELL’, 93. On Viewpoint: Donnell Library
Center, ‘Viewpoint: A Film Series on the Crucial Political and Social Issues of Our Times’. In a
Different Light: Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), ‘In a Different Light Film & Video Series’.
11
‘Women Make Movies & Chelsea Gay Association Present In Our Own Image – Five Film
Programs of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Feminist Consciousness’. 12
Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 144n114 [emphasis in the original]. See also: Zielinski,
‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera’.

44 LGBTQ Film Festivals
Establishing a complete survey of minor LGBTQ festivals might well be an
impossible task. Nevertheless, these traces remind us of what seems to be
missing from the archives: not only do archival collections abound with
such traces, they also do not include festivals that were never archived in
the first place. Importantly, this type of ephemeral festival still exists today.
While my focus is here on festivals organized from the 1970s to the 1990s,
ephemeral festivals are still marginalized and will not be archived. In 2015
for instance, three LGBTQ festivals were held in Montreal. One of them, the
Festival de films LGBT de Montréal, was organized by a local porn star. It was
not renewed the following year, because of its modest size and its absence
of support from the local LGBTQ community. It will likely be forgotten.
Unpacking the archives: (dis)ordering ephemeral traces
While it is impossible to correct the historical record, one may ponder the
role played by archives in forgetting or remembering ephemeral festivals.
This situation is not unique to LGBTQ festivals: as scholars working on
or with alternative or activist histories know all too well, archives at best
only partially record the cultural life of minoritized groups. They reflect
a dominant ordering of knowledge which erases or conceals the bodies,
cultural practices, and remains of people who do not fit neatly within official
histories.
13
Kate Eichhorn thus insightfully argues that archives consist of
‘repositories of not only affect but also order ’.
14
The organization of archival
collections conditions our relationship to historiography:
archives do many things, but they do not necessarily stage encounters with
the past. Following Foucault’s premise that the archive not be understood
as something that ‘safeguards’ or ‘preserves’ past statements – not be
understood as something that ‘collects the dust of statements that have
become inert once more’ – contemporary theorising on the archive
has emphasized the archive’s status as a historiographic rather than a
preservationist technology.
15
As an unexpected exploration of traces and ghosts, cruising tunes us in to
the role played by archival institutions in both legitimizing and concealing
13
See among others: Beins, ‘Making a Place for Lesbian Life at the Lesbian Herstory Archives’, 27.
14 Eichhorn, T he Archival Turn in Feminism, 3. [Emphasis in the original]
15 Ibid, 7. [Emphasis in the original]

Festivals that (did not) Matter 45
queer history. These traces of gay and lesbian cinematic life constitute
what Ann Cvetkovich aptly calls a ‘problem archive’: they act not only as
rare indexical proofs of a forgotten past but also as paradoxical reminders
that something is missing from the archives. Queer people’s investment
in the moving image, assembled only by happenstance, cannot be fully
evidenced – despite and because of the archives.
16
In that context, problem
archives urge us to attend to the very constitution of archival collections and
their ordering principles: we are forced to wonder why and how a document
ended up in the archives in the first place. A document’s location within
the archives, the history of a particular collection, and the principles of
classification and cataloguing (or the absence thereof) used by the institution
are as significant as the actual vestiges of a forgotten past.
Unsurprisingly, gay and lesbian lives have historically been either forgotten
or erased from institutional archives. Indeed, archival institutions operate on
an epistemology of visibility: they emphasize the disciplinary apparatus of
history whereby, as Joan W. Scott reminds us, ‘seeing [a document] is the origin
of knowing’.
17
This epistemology of visibility is not particularly suited to an
exploration of queer cultural productions. As José Esteban Muñoz argues, gay
and lesbian history cannot be evidenced through traditional historical methods:
This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has
often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead
of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed
as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant
to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while
evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.
18
In casting documents as evidences that would simply need to be rediscovered,
archives obscure both queerness and their own legitimizing principles – the
set of representations and ideologies that dictate their mission. Historicizing
the relationship between archives and queer lives (paying attention to how
it constitutes and makes visible queer subjects as well as to the material
realities of document preservation) thus enables us to read traces for what
they are: ephemeral ghosts whose presence cannot always be seen and
taken as evidence.
16 C An Archive of Feelings, 133. See also: DeVun and McClure, ‘Archives Behaving
Badly’, 122.
17 Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, 776-778.
18 Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence’, 6.

46 LGBTQ Film Festivals
The will to record gay and lesbian history is quite recent: institutional
archives were, up until the mid-1980s, about ‘something’ rather than about
‘the people’ or ‘somebody’.
19
The 1970s gay liberation movement fostered
a new interest in gay and lesbian history: the first archives containing
materials of interest to gay and lesbian history were personal collections,
often hosted within the confines of people’s homes. These community-based
archives both recorded the achievements of gay-liberation activists and
documented pre-Stonewall same-sex subjectivities. These collections cannot
be disentangled from activism: preserving (and making) history was an
integral mission of the gay liberation movement.
20
Two of the collections I consulted typically fit within the archival ethos
of the gay liberation movement, which partly explains my focus on 1970s
festivals. The International Gay Information Center Collection was dedicated
to preserving the history of New York’s newly formed gay activist scene.
While adopting the more classic format of a collection of personal papers,
the Vito Russo Collection was donated to the NYPL by Arnie Kantrowitz,
who participated in both the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay and Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation (two groups Vito Russo was particularly active
in). It consists in letters from and documents assembled by Russo himself –
from the mid 1970s to his AIDS-related death in 1990 at the age of 44. In both
cases, the bulk of the collections document politically active organizations
from the 1970s to the early 1980s and abound with ephemera.
This emphasis on recording gay and lesbian history took on a new im-
portance in the 1990s as the HIV/AIDS epidemic entailed an urgent need
to document the lives of gay men and activists who were dying. With the
parallel development of gay and lesbian studies in academia and a renewed
interest in identity politics and social/local history, gay and lesbian history
entered ‘legitimate’ archives.
21
For instance, the Fales Library and Special
Collection at New York University was created in 1993, as its director Marvin
Taylor realized the need to document the lives and cultural production
of New York’s recently deceased artists.
22
Similarly, the New York Public
Library Gay and Lesbian and HIV/AIDS Collections were founded in 1994 as
a consequence of both the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the library’s new focus
on social history. The same bureaucratic powers that let gay men die of
19 Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives’, 155.
20 James Fraser, quoted in: Brown, ‘How Queer “Pack Rats” and Activist Archivists Saved Our
History’, 123.
21 Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives’, 156–157.
22 Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism, 101.

Festivals that (did not) Matter 47
HIV/AIDS ironically participated in the legitimization and preservation of
LGBT history: for the first time, gay and lesbian history benefited from the
resources associated with professional institutions and archivists, notably
in terms of the preservation and cataloging of documents.
In the 1990s, archiving became a contentious issue within the LGBTQ
community: it encapsulated the increasingly important debate around
the institutionalization and political direction taken by the LGBTQ and
HIV/AIDS movements and reflected the schism between assimilationist and
separatist modes of activism. In particular, activists criticized institutional
archives for their lack of involvement in LGBTQ struggles and for refusing to
acknowledge the role they played in erasing queer histories. As Cvetkovich
argues, activists ‘fear[ed] that [official archives might] falsely represent
[themselves] as having an extensive history of collecting gay and lesbian
materials, when in fact [their] holdings were not until recently cataloged or
publicized as such’.
23
Indeed, institutional and community-based collections
are not led by the same ethos of preservation and archival politics. This is
particularly significant as the principle of ordering, the resources, and the
politics of archives not only condition the type of document they collect,
but also determine which traces are deemed worthy of being preserved.
Gay and lesbian collections within institutional archives can be an
asset to the researcher, be it only because of their accessibility. They usu-
ally contain both organizational collections (documents that pertain to a
specific association or institution) and subject files (grouping documents
thematically, using the headings fixed by the Library of Congress). These
two ways of ordering are mechanisms of knowledge production in and of
themselves, already shaping which type of documents will be visible and
preserved. Organizational collections are fundamentally about legitimate
and established institutions; they are not particularly suited to an explora-
tion of minor festivals. Furthermore, subject files collections depend on how
archivists define what a festival is: while the Library of Congress headings
do contain a ‘film festival’ entry, they have not defined the term; minor
events are often catalogued under a less accurate heading. Quite typically,
the bulk of my discoveries at the NYPL’s International Gay Information
Center and the Vito Russo Collections stemmed not from the subject files
‘film festivals’ but rather from headings such as ‘ephemera – diverse’ or
personal agendas.
Community-based archives might thus be better suited to an analysis
of festivals that were forgotten. Because of their commitment to collecting
23
C Archive of feeling, 245-248.

48 LGBTQ Film Festivals
ephemeral traces of queer lives, such collections tend to be quite eclectic
and to preserve documents that do not necessarily correspond to the
rather narrow criteria mobilized by professional archivists.
24
Further-
more, community-based archives oftentimes resist the urge to classify
and order their collections, thereby not necessarily prioritizing already
legitimated events. However, some documents/collections might simply
be unavailable, as these archives are often run by volunteers who may
not have fully catalogued their holdings. For instance, I could not consult
the vast collection of ephemera acquired by the New York LGBT Center
Archives, as these documents are unclassified and the institution did
not have the necessary resources to call back several dozen boxes of
unordered flyers and posters stored in New Jersey. Similarly, I could
not get access to the Cherry Grove Archival Collection on Fire Island, a
collection entirely managed by volunteers who are unable to be there on
a regular basis and who have not (yet) catalogued their holdings. Most
documents are thus inaccessible to researchers. This situation can at
times be paradoxical: for instance, while the Arts Project of Cherry Grove
and the Cherry Grove Archives Committee regularly organize a festival
dealing specifically with archival queer moving images (OUTTAKES,
2016-ongoing), I could not access several documents contained in the
archive (in particular the programmes of the Fire Island Film & Video
Festival).
25
Community-based archives have also suffered from censorship legislation:
their collections have historically been the target of anti-obscenity laws. In
Canada and in the USA, gay and lesbian archives have been surveyed and
raided. Documents deemed obscene by State officials were tragically ‘lost’
or destroyed.
26
In other cases, tensions with the local LGBTQ community
might prevent access to the archives. For instance, despite several attempts
to create a unified and accessible LGBTQ archival centre in Paris, collections
remain scattered in several private apartments.
27
24 Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives’, 167.
25 On Outtakes: ‘Cherry Grove’s First-Ever Outtakes Film Festival Kicks off Friday Night ‒ Fire
Island and Beyond.’ In the archival collection of the New York LGBT Center, I found a 2004 flyer
advertising the ‘3rd Fire Island Film and Video Festival’. Other events may have been organized
prior to 2001. See: ‘Fire Island Film and Video Festival’.
26 Titkemeyer, ‘Assembling the Fragments and Accessing the Silenced’, 5.
27
This issue may be solved in the near future. With the success of 1 20 Battements par minutes
(directed by Robin Campillo, 2017) – a fiction film on the HIV/AIDS association Act Up Paris,
Paris’s city council has voted to finance the creation of an ‘official’ LGBT archival centre.

Festivals that (did not) Matter 49
In detailing some of the issues associated with the praxis of historical
research, I do not aim at criticizing the labour of professional or amateur
archivists, but rather to simply expose some of the methodological conun-
drums associated with cruising these eclectic collections. Archives are
never neutral; they already produce and order knowledge, thereby bringing
visibility to particular types of festivals while ignoring others. In pondering
the ordering principle of particular collections, it becomes clear that the
experience of researching traces of forgotten festivals simultaneously entails
both frustration and unexpected bliss – because and in spite of the archives.
Crucially, it urges us to think carefully about why particular documents
ended up in archival collections while others were left out or are inaccessible,
and to wonder what we are missing in the absence of records which were
either left unpreserved or cannot be consulted.
Festivals that did not matter: festivals’ archival practices and
historiography
Archives are not the only institutions enmeshed with historiography. As
Julian Stringer reminds us, festivals constantly narrate their own history.
They both define their audience and position themselves as important
players within their respective fields or circuits.
28
Consequently, de Valck, in
an introduction to festival studies, describes the privileged methods of the
field as being based on both ethnographic observation and textual analysis:
a solid scholarly account of festivals ‘includes fieldwork and interviews […]
[as well as] critical analysis of the variety of texts that is churned out with
each festival edition’.
29
While archival institutions partly account for why some festivals have been
forgotten or are excluded from the literature, we need to take into considera-
tion both the effects of festival studies’ methodologies and festivals’ own
relationship to archiving and knowledge production. In particular, festival
studies’ reliance on readily available textual productions may inadvertently
participate in the marginalization of smaller festivals. As Loist rightly notes,
LGBTQ festivals are often organized by precarious cultural workers who
may simply not have the time or resources to preserve their own history.
30

Past catalogues, flyers, and press releases become useless once the festival
28
Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 112;244.
29 de Valck, ‘Introduction’, 8.
30 Loist, ‘Precarious Cultural Work’.

50 LGBTQ Film Festivals
is over and are often discarded.
31
Kay Armatage exemplifies quite well this
conflict between archiving and the material realities of festival organizing:
With a few exceptions, women’s film festivals have usually existed on
intermittent or volunteer labour, government grants and community
centre venues and without permanent institutional homes. Like Toronto
Women & Film 1973, often they have been one-off events. Thus they have
come and gone, with their erstwhile founders caching old catalogues in
their basements (if they had basements) or not at all.
32
It is thus necessary to distinguish festivals which have the resources, exper-
tise, and will to preserve their own history from amateur or less legitimate
events which never attempted to safeguard their historical records in the
first place. Some of the events I described earlier exemplify quite well this
distinction. For instance, 1970s French film festivals were organized by local
gay liberation groups as a way to circumvent censorship legislation and to
energize in-group debates about the direction of the movement. While over
a dozen of gay film festivals were held in small cities such as Hyères (36 000
inhabitants at the time), they were never fully archived. They are mentioned
only in a few texts, in passing. Their history is largely lost.
This situation is not unique to France: activist festivals were for instance
organized in Melbourne (1974 and 1975), Amsterdam (1978), and Vienna
(1988).
33
It is probable that other events were held, as these festivals are
triply marginalized in archival collections: as radical festivals which
were not necessarily open to outsiders and therefore more likely not to be
remembered; as happening outside of the United States and its archival
institutions; and as non-English speaking events whose gay character might
not be noticed by Anglophone scholars.
While we don’t know much about these smaller events, two French gay
liberation festivals are well documented. These events, organized in Paris
in 1977 and 1978, were the targets of both State censorship and homophobic
violence. Waugh recalls that
five people, including the event’s chairperson and one of the participating
filmmakers, had to be hospitalised after an attack on the theatre by
31
Zielinski, ‘On Studying Film Festival Ephemera’, 141.
32 Armatage, ‘Toronto Women & Film International 1973’, 83.
33
On the festivals organized in Melbourne: Richards, The LGBT Film Festival , 6 3. On Amsterdam:
‘Gluren in’t Donker Flicker Filmfestival’. On Gay Filmfestival (Vienna): ‘Gay Filmfestival, Vienna’.

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Ah! how they answered let the ages tell,
For they shall guard the sacred story well!
Green grows the grass to-day on many a battle-field;
War’s dread alarms are o’er; its scars are healed;
Its bitter agony has found surcease;
A re-united land clasps hands in peace.
But, oh! ye blessed dead, whose graves are strown
From where our forests make perpetual moan,
To those far shores where smiling Southern seas
Give back soft murmurs to the fragrant breeze—
Oh! ye who drained for us the bitter cup,
Think ye we can forget what ye have offered up?
The years will come and go, and other centuries die,
And generation after generation lie
Down in the dust; but, long as stars shall shine,
Long as Vermont’s green hills shall bear the pine,
As long as Killington shall proudly lift
Its lofty peak above the storm-cloud’s rift,
Or Mansfield hail the blue, o’erarching skies,
Or fair Mount Anthony in grandeur rise,
So long shall live the deeds that ye have done,
So deathless be the glory ye have won!
XI.

Not with exultant joy
And pride without alloy,
Did the twin Centuries rejoice when all was o’er.
What though the Nation rose
Triumphant o’er its foes?
What though the State had gained
The meed of faith unstained?
Their mighty hearts remembered the dead that came no more!
Remembered all the losses,
The weary, weary crosses,
Remembered earth was poorer for the blood that had been shed,
And knew that it was sadder for the story it had read!
So, clasping hands with somewhat saddened mien,
And eyes uplifted to the Great Unseen
That rules alike o’er Centuries and men,
Onward they walked serenely toward—the End!
XII.

One reached it last year. Ye remember well—
The wondrous tale there is no need to tell—
How the whole world bowed down beside its bier;
How all the Nations came, from far or near,
Heaping their treasures on its mighty pall—
Never had kingliest king such funeral!
Old Asia rose, and, girding her in haste,
Swept in her jewelled robes across the waste,
And called to Egypt lying prone and hid
Where waits the Sphinx beside the pyramid;
Fair Europe came with overflowing hands,
Bearing the riches of her many lands;
Dark Afric, laden with her virgin gold,
Yet laden deeper with her woes untold;
Japan and China in grotesque array,
And all the enchanted islands of Cathay!
XIII.

To-day the other dies.
It walked in humbler guise,
Nor stood where all men’s eyes
Were fixed upon it.
Earth may not pause to lay
A wreath upon its bier,
Nor the world heed to-day
Our dead that lieth here!
Yet well they loved each other—
It and its greater brother.
To loftiest stature grown,
Each earned its own renown;
Each sought of Time a crown,
And each has won it;
XIV.

But what to us are Centuries dead,
And rolling Years forever fled,
Compared with thee, O grand and fair
Vermont—our Goddess-mother?
Strong with the strength of thy verdant hills,
Fresh with the freshness of mountain-rills,
Pure as the breath of the fragrant pine,
Glad with the gladness of youth divine,
Serenely thou sittest throned to-day
Where the free winds that round thee play
Rejoice in thy waves of sun-bright hair,
O thou, our glorious mother!
Rejoice in thy beautiful strength and say
Earth holds not such another!
Thou art not old with thy hundred years,
Nor worn with toil, or care, or tears:
But all the glow of the summer-time
Is thine to-day in thy glorious prime!
Thy brow is fair as the winter-snows,
With a stately calm in its still repose;
While the breath of the rose the wild bee sips,
Half-mad with joy, cannot eclipse
The marvellous sweetness of thy lips;
And the deepest blue of the laughing skies
Hides in the depths of thy fearless eyes,
Gazing afar over land and sea
Wherever thy wandering children be!
Fold on fold,
Over thy form of grandest mould
Floweth thy robe of forest green,
Now light, now dark, in its emerald sheen.
Its broidered hem is of wild flowers rare,
With feathery fern-fronds light as air
Fringing its borders. In thy hair
Sprays of the pink arbutus twine,

And the curling rings of the wild grape vine.
Thy girdle is woven of silver streams;
Its clasp with the opaline lustre gleams
Of a lake asleep in the sunset beams;
And, half concealing
And half revealing,
Floats over all a veil of mist
Pale-tinted with rose and amethyst!
XV.
Arise, O noble mother of great sons,
Worthy to rank among earth’s mightiest ones,
And daughters fair and beautiful and good,
Yet wise and strong in loftiest womanhood—
Rise from thy throne, and, standing far and high
Outlined against the blue, adoring sky,
Lift up thy voice, and stretch thy loving hands
In benediction o’er the waiting lands!
Take thou our fealty! at thy feet we bow,
Glad to renew each oft-repeated vow!
No costly gifts we bring to thee to-day;
No votive wreaths upon thy shrine we lay;
Take thou our hearts, then!—hearts that fain would be
From this day forth, O goddess, worthier thee!

GETTYSBURG
1863-1889
I.
Brothers, is this the spot?
Let the drums cease to beat;
Let the tread of marching feet,
With the clash and clang of steel
And the trumpet’s long appeal
(Cry of joy and sob of pain
In its passionate refrain)
Cease awhile,
Nor beguile
Thoughts that would rehearse the story
Of the past’s remembered glory;
Thoughts that would revive to-day
Stern War’s rude, imperious sway;
Waken battle’s fiery glow
With its ardor and its woe,
With its wild, exulting thrills,
With the rush of mighty wills,
And the strength to do and dare—
Born of passion and of prayer!
II.

Let the present fade away,
And the splendors of to-day;
For our hearts within us burn
As our glances backward turn.
What rare memories awaken
As the tree of life is shaken,
And its storied branches blow
In the winds of long ago!
Do ye not remember, brothers,
Ere the war-days how ’twas said
Grand, heroic days were over
And proud chivalry was dead?
Still we saw the glittering lances
Gleaming through the old romances,
Still beheld the watch-fires burning
On the cloudy heights of Time;
And from fields that they had won,
When the stormy fight was done,
Saw victorious knights returning
Flushed with triumph’s joy sublime!
For the light of song and story
Kindled with supernal glory
Plains where ancient heroes fought;
And illumined, with a splendor
Rare and magical and tender,
All the mighty deeds they wrought.
But we thought the sword of battle,
Long unused, had lost its glow,
And the sullen war-gods slumbered
Where their altar-fires burned low!
III.

Was the nation dull and sodden,
Buried in material things?
’Twas the chrysalis, awaiting
The sure stirring of its wings!
For when rang the thrilling war-cry
Over all the startled land,
And the fiery cross of battle,
Flaming, sped from hand to hand,
Then how fared it, O my brothers?
Were men false or craven then?
Did they falter?
Did they palter?
Did they question why or when?
Oh, the story shall be told
Until earth itself is old,
How, from mountain and from glen,
More than thrice ten thousand men
Heard the challenge of the foe,
Heard the nation’s cry of woe,
Heard the summoning to arms,
And the battle’s loud alarms!
In tumultuous surprise,
Lo, their answer rent the skies;
And its quick and strong heart-thrills
Rocked the everlasting hills!
Forth from blossoming fields they sped
To the fields with carnage red!
Left the plowshare standing still;
Left the bench, the forge, the mill;
Left the quiet walks of trade
And the quarry’s marble shade;
Left the pulpit and the court,
Careless ease and idle sport;
Left the student’s cloistered halls
In the old, gray college walls;

Left young love-dreams, dear and sweet,
War’s stern front, unblenched, to meet!
Oh, the strange and sad amaze
Of those unforgotten days,
When the boys whom we had guided,
Nursed and loved, caressed and chided,
Suddenly, as in a night,
Sprang to manhood’s proudest height;
And with calmly smiling lips,
As who life’s rarest goblet sips,
Dauntless, with unhurried breath,
Marched to danger and to death!
IV.

Soldiers, is this the spot?
Fair the scene is, calm and fair,
In this still October air;
Far blue hills look gently down
On the happy, tranquil town,
And the ridges nearer by
Steeped in autumn sunshine lie.
Laden orchards, smiling fields,
Rich in all that nature yields;
Bright streams winding in and out
Fertile meadows round about,
Lowing herds and hum of bee,
Birds that flit from tree to tree,
Children’s voices ringing clear,
All we touch or see or hear—
Fruit of gold in silver set—
Tell of joy and peace. And yet—
Soldiers, is this the spot
That can never be forgot?
Was it here that shot and shell
Poured as from the mouth of hell,
Drenched the shrinking, trembling plain
With a flood of fiery rain?
Was it here the awful wonder
Of the cannon’s crashing thunder
Shook the affrighted hills, and made
Even the stolid rocks afraid?
Was it here an armèd host,
Like two clouds where lightnings play,
Or two oceans, tempest tost,
Clashed and mingled in the fray?
Here that, ’mid the din and smoke,
Roar of guns and sabre stroke,
Tramp of furious steeds, where moan
Horse and rider, both o’erthrown,

Lurid fires and battle yell,
Forty thousand brave men fell?
V.

O brothers, words are weak!
What tongue shall dare to speak?
Even song itself grows dumb
In this high presence.—Come
Forth, ye whose ashes lie
Under this arching sky!
Speak ye in accents clear
Words that we fain would hear!
Tell us when your dim eyes,
Holy with sacrifice,
Looked through the battle smoke
Up to the skies;
Tell us, ye valiant dead,
When your souls starward fled,
How from the portals far
Where the immortals are,
Chieftains and vikings old,
Heroes and warriors bold,
Men whom old Homer sung,
Men of each age and tongue,
Knights from a thousand fields
Bearing their blazoned shields
Thronged forth to meet ye!
Tell us how, floating down,
Each with a martyr’s crown,
They who had kept the faith,
Grandly defying death;
They who for conscience’ sake
Felt their firm heartstrings break;
They who for truth and right
Unshrinking fought the fight;
They who through fire and flame
Passed on to deathless fame,
Hastened to greet ye!
Tell how they welcomed ye,

Hailed and applauded ye,
Claimed ye as comrades true,
Brave as the world e’er knew;
Led your triumphant feet
Up to the highest seat,
Crowned ye with amaranth,
Laurel and palm.
VI.
Alas, alas! They speak not!
The silence deep they break not!
Heaven keeps its martyred ones
Beyond or moon or suns;
And Valhalla keeps its braves,
Leaving to us their graves!
Then let these graves speak for them
As long as the wind sweeps o’er them!
As long as the sentinel ridges
Keep guard on either hand;
As long as the hills they fought for
Like silent watch-towers stand!
VII.

Yet not of them alone
Round each memorial stone
Shall the proud breezes whisper as they pass,
Rustling the faded leaves
On chilly autumn eves,
And swaying tenderly the sheltering grass!
O ye who on this field
Knew not the joy to yield
Your young, glad lives in glorious conflict up;
Ye who as bravely fought,
Ye who as grandly wrought,
Draining with them war’s darkly bitter cup,
As long as stars endure
And God and Truth are sure;
While Love still claims its own,
While Honor holds its throne
And Valor hath a name,
Still shall these stony pages
Repeat to all the ages
The story of your fame!
VIII.
O beautiful one, my Country,
Thou fairest daughter of Time,
To-day are thine eyes unclouded
In the light of a faith sublime!
No thunder of battle appals thee;
From thy woe thou hast found release;
From the graves of thy sons steals only
This one soft whisper,—“Peace!”

“NO MORE THE THUNDER OF CANNON”

No more the thunder of cannon,
No more the clashing of swords,
No more the rage of the contest,
Nor the rush of contending hordes;
But, instead, the glad reunion,
The clasping of friendly hands,
The song, for the shout of battle,
Heard over the waiting lands.
O brothers, to-night we greet you
With smiles, half sad, half gay—
For our thoughts are flying backward
To the years so far away—
When with you who were part of the conflict,
With us who remember it all,
Youth marched with his waving banner,
And his voice like a bugle call!
We would not turn back the dial,
Nor live over the past again;
We would not the path re-travel,
Nor barter the “now” for the “then.”
Yet, oh, for the bounding pulses,
And the strength to do and dare,
When life was one grand endeavor,
And work clasped hands with prayer!
But blessed are ye, O brothers,
Who feel in your souls alway
The thrill of the stirring summons
You heard but to obey;
Who, whether the years go swift,
Or whether the years go slow,
Will wear in your hearts forever
The glory of long ago!

GRANT
August 8, 1885

God sends his angels where he will,
From world to world, from star to star;
They do his bidding as they fly,
Whether or near or far!
Whither it went, or what its quest,
I know not; but one August day
A great white angel through the far
Dim spaces took its way;
Until below it our fair earth,
Like a rich jewel fitly hung—
An emerald set with silver gleams—
In the blue ether swung.
The angel looked; the angel paused;
Then down the starry pathway swept,
Till mount and valley, hill and plain,
Beneath its vision slept.
Poised on a far blue mountain peak,
It saw the land, from sea to sea,
Lifting in veilèd splendor up
The banner of the free!
From tower and turret, spire and dome,
From stately halls, and cabins rude,
Where crag and cliff and forest meet
In awful solitude,
It saw strange, sombre pennants float,
Black shadows on the summer breeze
That bore, from shore to shore, the wail
Of solemn symphonies.
It saw long files of armèd men,
Cldi bffddbl

Clad in a garb of faded blue,
Pass up and down the sorrowing land
As if in grand review.
It saw through crowded city streets,
Funereal trains move to and fro,
With tolling bells, and muffled drums,
And trumpets wailing low.
Descending then the angel sought
A stern, sad man of many cares—
Ah, oft before have mortals talked
With angels, unawares!
The angel spake, as man to man—
“What does it mean, O friend?” it cried,
“These sad-browed hosts, these weeds of woe,
This mourning far and wide?”
The stranger answered in amaze—
“Know you not what the whole world knows?
To his long home, thus grandly borne,
Earth’s greatest warrior goes.
The foremost soldier of his age,
The victor on full many a field—
Who saw the bravest of the brave
To his stern prowess yield.”
The angel sighed. “That means,” it said,
“Tumult and anguish, pain and death,
And countless sons of men borne down
By the fierce cannon’s breath!”
Then passed from sight the heavenly guest,
And from the mountain-top again
Took its far flight from North to South,
Abovethehomesofmen

Above the homes of men.
But still, where’er it went, it saw
The starry banners half mast high,
And tower and turret hung with black
Against the reddening sky!
Still saw long ranks of armèd men
Who for the blue had worn the gray—
Still saw the sad processions pass,
Darkening the summer day!
“Was this their conqueror whom you mourn?”
The angel said to one who kept
Lone watch where, deep in grass-grown graves,
Young Southern soldiers slept.
“Victor, yet friend,” the answer came,
“Even theirs who here their life-blood poured!
He, when the bitter field was won,
Was first to sheathe the sword,
And cry: ‘O brothers, take my hand—
Brave foemen, let us be at peace!
O’er all the undivided land
Let clash of conflict cease!’”
The wondering angel went its way
From world to world, from star to star,
Where planet unto planet turned,
And suns blazed out afar.
“Learn, learn, O universe,” it cried,
“How great is he whose foemen lay
Their love and homage at his feet,
On this—his burial day!”

FRIAR ANSELMO AND OTHER
POEMS

FRIAR ANSELMO

Friar Anselmo for a secret sin
Sat bowed with grief the convent cell within;
Nor dared, such was his shame, to lift his eyes
To the low wall whereon, in dreadful guise,
The dead Christ hung upon the cursèd tree,
Frowning, he thought, upon his misery.
What was his sin it matters not to tell.
But he was young and strong, the records say:
Perhaps he wearied of his narrow cell;
Perhaps he longed to work, as well as pray;
Perhaps his heart too warmly beat that day!
Perhaps—for life is long—the weary road
That he must travel, bearing as a load
The slow, monotonous hours that, one by one,
Dragged in a lengthening chain from sun to sun,
Appalled his eager spirit, and his vow
Pressed like an iron hand upon his brow.
Perhaps some dream of love, of home, of wife,
Had stirred this tumult in his lonely life,
Tempting his soul to barter heavenly bliss,
And sell its birthright for a woman’s kiss!
At all events, the struggle had been hard;
And as a bird from the glad ether barred,
So had he beat his wings till, bruised and torn,
He wished that night he never had been born!
And still the dead Christ on the cursèd tree
Seemed but to mock his hopeless misery;
Still Mary mother turned her eyes away,
Nor saint nor angel bent to hear him pray!
The calm, cold moonlight through the casement shone;
Weird shadows darkened on the floor of stone;
Without, what solemn splendors! and within
What fearful wrestlings with despair and sin!
Sudden and loud the cloister bell outrang;
Afd tithlll

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Lgbtq Film Festivals Curating Queerness Antoine Damiens

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