The Queer Film Guide author Kyle Turner takes us on a journey from S&M bars and murderous mansions to Greta Gerwig’s apartment and Korean spas, all in the search for queer-cinema nirvana.
I find it frustrating that there’s this expectation for one queer representation to exist fully formed in every idealized way.
—Kyle Turner“Starboard anal sex,” is how Mitchell for an all-queer episode on the occasion of his new book, The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTIA+ Stories (out now from Smith Street Books and Rizzoli Books). Covering over a century in queer tales on screen, Turner takes readers from pioneers like 1931’s Mädchen in Uniform to recent sensations, such as 2018’s Knife + Heart, and includes Academy Award winners and under-the-radar gems for your Letterboxd watchlists.
Conveniently, we’ve made this handy list of all 100 films featured in the book. If you’ve already seen them, take the advanced course by scrolling through Turner’s “Director’s Cut” list of every film that even gets a mention in the text (and a few that didn’t make the final print).
“I wanted to make sure that, from my perspective and the publisher’s perspective, I was creating a list that was interesting and idiosyncratic and nothing you would find anywhere on the internet,” Turner tells the hosts, explaining how The Queer Film Guide isn’t going to be the same selection you can find by Googling “best queer films” and clicking on the first result. “I don’t think many of those lists will include Seed of Chucky or My Hustler or O Fantasma.”
The Queer Film Guide makes a point of broadening the understanding of what “queer film” can be, with Turner explaining, “I wanted to include as wide an array of ideas and interpretations of what queerness can look like as a creative expression or a sensibility or as a point of view as possible within the confines. The secret is that I was able to basically include about 200 movies because each main entry has a double-feature sidebar recommendation. A wine pairing, basically.”
The podcast conversation includes deep dives into Turner’s four favorites selections. Two of them are featured entries in his new book (William Friedkin’s controversial and reappraised Cruising, and Fire Island director Andrew Ahn’s debut feature, Spa Night) and the other two have queer elements running through them (Jonathan Lynn’s Clue and Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s s Ha).
Listen Mia and Mitchell’s full conversation with Turner to get all the juicy morsels, including Turner’s devoted effort to get his copy of the s Ha screenplay signed by Baumbach and Gergwig, and just why he’s completely obsessed with a film called The Christmas List.
‘The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTIA+ Stories’ is available now from Rizzoli Books.
