The Embers of Paris Glow for 'Born in Flames: New Queer Cinema'
The thrills of '90s queer films still live at BAM  On the cover
of this publication dated March 24, 1992, two naked men were
locked in a deep kiss in a scene from Derek Jarman's Edward II,
an anachronistic remix of Christopher Marlowe's play about the
14th-century regent. Inside the issue, critic B. Ruby Rich
heralded the "New Queer Cinema," films that were radical in both
form and content, breaking away from the previous decades'
emphasis on pleading for tolerance and "positive" lavender
screen representations in favor of historical re-appropriation
and outlaw heroes. Although 1991 and '92 are considered the anni
mirabiles of the NQC—the era when uncompromising works such as
Poison, The Hours and Times, and My Own Private Idaho swept up
awards on the film-festival circuit—BAMcinématek's week-long
tribute to the movement spans 1983 to 1997. What unites this
disparate corpus was aptly expressed by Rich in a later article
on NQC that ran in the Se