Saturday was Pride in Edinburgh, the beautiful, touristic, city where I live. This has been my city for over twenty years, but I only marched at Pride for the first time last year. I marched with friends from the dance studio I attend, and I didn’t tell anyone it was my first time properly marching at Pride. This year, I’d booked a dance workshop that clashed with the march but afterwards, I was walking with a friend across town, to meet up with respective pals, to hang out, maybe go dancing later. My friend asked me whether I usually celebrated Pride, and my response was “not historically, no.”
This is because I’ve had a complicated history with my sexuality and what kind of name I ought to give it. In my teenage diary, I use the word bisexual to describe myself. But it was the 90s and so I was neither exactly in nor exactly out. I did try to come out to my mother at one point, but she was quite resistant to this, not quite using the word “phase” but that was the general undercurrent. I decided it was useless to confront her about this. She later met two of my girlfriends, and adored both of them.
But, after my friend asked me about Pride, I was reflecting on how my arrival in Edinburgh in 2001 coincided with something of a return to the closet. It became clear to me that the way I’d been conducting myself in Canada wasn’t quite going to work here. And I wanted to fit in and I wanted to make friends, so I think I toned it way down in general. I had dyed, dark red hair and I didn’t know that being a redhead was not necessarily something to aspire to in Scotland; my hair was wrong, but I kept it anyway.
I’ve just finished reading the Little Joe anthology (“a book about queers and cinema, mostly”) and this has also made me think about what it means to be seen, understood, represented, and loved. A lot of people have talked to me about shows like Sex Education and Heartstopper, what that would have meant to them to see themselves represented when they were teenagers. Students have said to me that my classroom makes them feel safe to be queer. In Little Joe, there’s an amazing piece called “The Streets Are My Cinema” (2015). It’s by a writer and artist called William E. Jones, writing about the film critic Boyd McDonald, author of Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to “Oldies” on TV (1985). He notes that in the films McDonald watches “homosexual fantasies revolved around actresses who could go after men (if not their cocks) as enthusiastically as the Production Code would allow them.” (51)
Mcdonald observes “motion pictures are for people who like to watch women” and that if he wants to look at men, “the streets are my cinema.” (Jones 2015: 51) I think about this in the same way I think about Robin Wood’s coming out and his essay “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic” (1978).
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In this essay, Wood lays out his some of the ways in which the concerns of movements for feminist, queer, and anticaplitalist liberation coalesce: “the attack, for instance, could—indeed, should—be directed at the economic structures of capitalism that support the norms, as they are embodied in the structure of the film industry itself as well as its products.” (653, Movies and Methods Vol II) Wood is most interested in the ways in which the cinema offers up ideologies about sexuality and love:
“What is repressed [especially in mainstream cinema] is the possibility that people might relate freely to each other, on a non-pairing basis, without imposing restrictions on each other’s liberty… By and large, however, ideology has no place for promiscuity (or as I prefer to call it, relating freely to one another) as an asserted life-style or a possible norm.”
Wood’s championing of this phrase ‘relating freely to one another’ “involves potentially the whole person—including his or her sexuality, without which the relating wouldn’t be free, but not restricted to it. (This is not to denigrate the pleasure of quite casual sexual relations, or to suggest that every relationship should be “complete,” whatever that might mean.)” (Wood, 653) I love that Robin Wood puts this in an essay about the cinema, that he puts his finger on the things that are missing, that he tries to give a name to an ethics of care and intimacy that we might extend to a range of people in our lives, something that people are already doing, and the impact of never seeing that represented on screen.
So, I suppose it should not surprise me that I like the cinema because I like to watch women, and I also feel like the streets are my cinema. I tried to think about films that were important to me when I was younger in terms of seeing queer desire and embodiment, and the things I thought of were how much Xena: Warrior Princess I watched as an undergraduate. I remember going to see Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling (1995), her beautiful queer romance movie, and that I saw it with the girl I was in love with. But it’s never just been about watching women for me, since I also like men, and people who slither somewhere in between the binaries and this is where I often feel like the streets are my cinema. The streets are filled with Orlandos, people who have never looked more ravishing, and this is why Sally Potter’s beautiful Orlando (1992), and Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando: My Political Biography (2023) feel like the evolution from coming out to feeling proud. Preciado’s film was probably one of the best things I saw last year (it was programmed as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival’s strand of Edinburgh International Festival), and it is at last coming to UK cinemas on 5 July, while Criterion have released it for streaming in the US, and on DVD and blu-ray. It is a joyful film, but it does not shy away from the fact that seeking gender-affirming care is a constant battle. It balances the urgency of continuing to fight for liberation while emphasising the necessity of pleasure, joy, and communal support.
What does freely relating to one another feel like?
I think it smells like hair dye and leather
it fizzes on your palate like champagne
it looks like your most delicious friend in golden hour light
it is glitter on the floor
it is the sun-warmed forearm of a pleasing stranger resting on your waist in the all-gender bathroom queue
it is fanning your pals and hot strangers on the dance floor
it is your friends waving at you from the grass to join them
it is walking home alone at night and feeling safe
It is all of this and so much more.