A commonly cited trend in American “indie” gay and lesbian film is a movement away from the experimental aesthetics and narrative techniques characterizing the “New Queer Cinema” of the early 1990s toward more conventional narratives that draw on popular Hollywood genres, particularly the romantic comedy (McWilliam 10; Mennel 99; Pidduck 284). The ideological stakes of this transformation are rather high, especially as the discussions about these films are often reflective of larger social debates about the mainstream LGBTQIA projects of queer visibility and the possibility of inclusion within normative class and sexual frameworks. It is therefore tempting to read the new same-sex romantic comedy as a mere ideological symptom of an increasingly normative middle-class gay and lesbian politics, or what David Eng has unmasked as “queer liberalism” (2-3) or Lisa Duggan as “homonormativity” (68). However, against the grain of such analysis, I want to scandalously claim that the queer romantic comedy, which I argue develops as a rejoinder to the New Queer Cinema in the mid to late 1990s, might actually provide a more powerful and radical figuration of what José Muñoz calls “queer futurity.” The 1990s are a crucial hinge point in the history of US queer cinema—both because of the sheer number of films produced and the transformation of narrative queer cinema from its avant-garde beginnings to the more commercial genres we have seen in recent years. I propose that by focusing on this transitional moment in the 1990s, we can recover a crucially overlooked site of a queer ‘desire for utopia’ within popular queer cinema.
This essay therefore seeks to accomplish two tasks: first, I develop a new theorization of queer cinema during the 1990s, an analysis that hopes to make clear the close dialectical relationship between New Queer Cinema and the queer romantic comedy. I claim this relationship as dialectical in the sense that the queer rom-com is both a continuation of the thematic preoccupations of the New Queer Cinema as well as a radical break that moves beyond a critique of the present and begins to envision possible utopian futures. Secondly, I argue that the queer romantic comedy is a politically radical cultural form if we rethink it in terms of fidelity—or a sustained intervention and commitment—to the project of making a utopian, which is to say queer, world. I thus stage an encounter with Muñoz’s theorization of queer utopian futurity in Cruising Utopia—one of the most significant texts to come out of the incredible boon of queer theory in recent years—and Alain Badiou’s conceptualization of love as a radical, “evental” project. I use this encounter between love and queer futurity to rethink the history of 1990s queer cinema with an eye toward the horizon of utopia.