Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture

In Edmund White’s short story Cinnamon Skin, the protagonist nostalgically recalls his queer adolescence, remembering how he abandoned himself to cloud-propelled dreams of love: melting ecstasy, heavenly embraces, ethereal intimacy. “People are wrong to imagine teenage boys want to shoot their loads; what they want is a union of souls which will only incidentally result in a tangling of arms, thighs, loins,” he contends. “Teenagers do not fetishize big cocks, hairy chests, powerful biceps, or blond hair and thick necks; their desire is too general to respond to anything less than eternal love and their love is vague and powerful enough to ennoble any body at all. And if I loved a particular man,” he adds, “it wasn’t as though I loved all men. No, we would be friends for life, not horrible, rodentlike queers” (29).

“Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art,” claims Charles Maier (1995) in his essay “The End of Longing?” The intricate relationship between nostalgia and memory is also problematized by Todd Gitlin in the introduction to his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Gitlin suggests that all times of upheaval begin as surprises and end as clichés. Such is the fate of the great tidal swells of history – especially in a shorthand culture in which insatiable media grind the flux of the world into the day’s sound bites. Gitlin notes that in our attempts to produce signs that will help us to design the memory of an era, we grapple for ready-made coordinates. “And so, as time passes,” he contends, “oversimplifications become steadily less resistible. All the big pictures tend to turn monochromatic” (4). Likewise, innumerous T-shirts with a portrait of Che Guevara are sold over the world, usually worn by teenagers who do not know anything about this revolutionary commandant and his totalitarian heritage, and slogans like “make love, not war,” “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” and “revolution!,” reminiscent of the 1960s, are heavily clichéd and trivialized by pop stars and advertisers who apply to contemporary bourgeois youth, rebels without a cause. Controversial social fighters are converted into cool poster boys, ideological resistance is turned into photogenic discontent, high ideals become slogans and jingles, dogmatism turns into opportunism, and anarchism is converted into hedonism.

“Sodomy and Justice for All!” was one of the significant messages in gay demonstrations in the early 1970s. In the same spirit, Queers — the anonymous authors of a radical New York pride march leaflet “Queers Read This; I hate Straights” –contend: “We are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented desire and lust,” they add. “We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we fuck, we win” (Queers, 774 — emphasis added). All-male sexual activities, perhaps the greatest fear (and lust?) of homophobic straight men, are much more than a human need, bodily satisfaction, libidinal force, and stereotypical (gay) male obsession. Homosex is often politicized as a dissident counterpraxis that celebrates transgres-sive desire and its joyful fulfillment. Notably, sex plays a significant role in gay nostalgia as in gay life.

Lady Gaga, one of the biggest popstars of the 2000s, produces a genuine queer nostalgia, an emergent collective memory with its own sensuous and sensational aesthetics. Her extravagant look, outfits, hairstyles, songs, and concerts, as much as her outrageous public statements, constitute an accumulated (counter)cultural phenomenon which integrates hyper-technological contemporariness with imaginary, legendary past-ness, and spectacular, almost prophetic retro-futurism. In her unique status as a young and classic pop star she combines innovativeness and iconicity, unruly womanhood and calculated marketing, global fandom and queer identification. Her multi temporalities are interwoven with her multicultural, intercultural, and countercultural identifications. In her queer way, she creates a fantastic, imaginary, and imaginative history, an invented history that transcends the limitations of reality, naturalness, daily routine, and traditional or conventional frameworks. She creates legendary landscapes, legendary spectacles, and legendary worlds. She is a legend.

One of the most prominent and exciting issues in black gay nostalgia is the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement of the late 1910s, the 1920s, and the early 1930s identified with major black poets, writers, and artists, e.g. Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, and the art quarterly Fire!! in Harlem in New York. The homosexuality of several of the Harlem Renaissance members is now generally known and is even occasionally mentioned in scholarly studies, but rarely has it been examined in depth. “In fact,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes, “it is astonishing that so many prominent participants in the [Harlem] Renaissance were reportedly gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The movement that enabled outsider Negro artists to emerge as a group for the first time,” he adds, “was also the movement that enabled gay and lesbian artists to express their sexuality with a greater degree of freedom than at any other period in American History” (xi).