The Milanese filmmaker Luchino Visconti was both a Marxist and an aristocrat. He found squalor amid opulence and beauty in decay, and is perhaps best known today for directing Death in Venice – a clammy-palmed yet masterly 1971 movie about an ageing composer who encounters unattainable perfection in the form of a 14-year-old boy. It’s a picture with a narrow focus on an unappealing protagonist’s inappropriate desire, but its unhinged commitment to feeling suggests that there’s also something more metaphysical going on. “The love in my film is not homosexual,” Visconti insisted. “It is love without eroticism, without sexuality.” That’s probably what Gustav von Aschenbach – the tortured composer played in a register of permanent desperation by Dirk Bogarde – would have told you, too.
Ryan Gilbey, who was for many years the New Statesman’s regular film critic, is a bit ambivalent when it comes to Visconti’s masterpiece but concedes that it “captures one thing with mortifying accuracy: the alienating force of queerness in a world hostile to difference”. In It Used to Be Witches, a daring, unconventional memoir wrapped inside a study of LGBTQ+ cinema, Gilbey initially introduces himself in the third person as a character observed from without, as if in a novel or a screenplay. We first see him, like Aschenbach, arriving in Venice – though only to deliver lectures about cinema to students on an art history course, rather than to stalk a waif. On his flight there, he frets over whether the selection of illustrative clips that he has brought along with him is too revealing of his sexual orientation; prepped on his hard drive are scenes from Ron Peck’s Nighthawks, about a gay teacher in late-1970s Britain, alongside a smattering of Warhol, Fassbinder and other works from the queer canon.
For Gilbey, cinema and sexuality have always been “closely intertwined”. Though now happily out and married, he spent many years in relationships with women, fathering three children. (In a movingly candid passage, he confesses that he recognised in Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s 2005 neo-Western about the frustrated romance between two American cowboys, “the sort of constricted existence he had engineered for himself”.) Having grown up in a conservative “two-pub tumbleweed village” in Essex in the overtly homophobic 1970s and 1980s, he was, for much of his life, “apologetically queer”, and “traces of the fear and shame from those years” still linger inside him. Even now, at a time when Marvel superheroes share same-sex kisses and words such as “inclusion” and “diversity” are worn as badges of honour by (non-Trumpian) corporations, Gilbey largely experiences his sexuality as an “identity crisis”.
Hence, perhaps, his decision to start his book in the third person, dramatising his sense of dislocation. In Jenni Olson’s 2015 documentary The Royal Road, a poetic rumination on American history and her butch lesbian identity, the narrator-director says that imagining herself as a fictional character has been “a mode of survival” for her. This tendency, writes Gilbey, is “an occupational hazard for anyone obsessed with cinema” and also a familiar part of growing up gay around hung-up homophobes. “Building a persona, or observing yourself as a character, creates space for play and performance, but it also means that the bad things aren’t really happening to you,” explains Gilbey. “They’re happening to the fictional you, the counterfeit one.”
The problem with shielding yourself in this way is that the same goes for the good things: they’re happening to the fictional you, too. You’re at best one step removed from what you want. In It Used to Be Witches, Gilbey grapples with a sense that he has missed, or is in the process of missing, the boat heading towards some sort of authentic gay self-realisation. One profound consolation throughout his life, however, has been cinema. Queer narratives that he encountered at the movies helped him to comprehend his desires as a younger man; later, whether he was “in or out of the closet”, they “provided a kind of IV line for his queerness, feeding him the necessary nutrients to keep that part of him from dying off even while it was outwardly dormant”.
Today, LGBTQ+ visibility is part of the cinematic mainstream. Whether it’s Daniel Craig’s gay detective in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery or the lesbian daughter in the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once, queer characters are no longer exceptions found almost exclusively in polemic issue-of-the-day movies or simply exploited for cruel comedy. But when Gilbey was first discovering cinema, they were more often than not merely glimpsed at the peripheries. So he collected them.
In his teens, he learned of the existence of gay bars while flicking through a copy of Time Out. Hesitant to visit one, he dreamt up his own and crammed it full of gays he’d encountered on screen: the assassins Mr Wint and Mr Kidd from the Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever; Colin, the cruising gangster “sliced up at the start of The Long Good Friday”; Murray Melvin’s Geoffrey in A Taste of Honey, with his “pinched Pierrot face”; the flasher in Mel Brooks’s Alfred Hitchcock parody High Anxiety. And he would imagine himself peering through the door at them in wonder, amazed by their very existence.
But are such characters representative of all that it meant to be gay? The true richness of queer cinema was something that Gilbey would only later come to discern; indeed, It Used to Be Witches is an account of his continuing exploration of its myriad forms as it restlessly evolves.
However, “queer cinema”, like queerness itself, is beyond simple definition. There’s little consensus on what it entails. Early on in It Used to Be Witches, Gilbey describes himself sitting in the British Film Institute library, working on a few paragraphs that he hopes might make for a compelling introduction to the book. “Though the narratives of queerness and gayness overlap,” he writes, “there is a difference between how those modes manifest themselves on screen.” He proposes that whether the major protagonists in a movie are gay or not, queerness is something that can be perceived in the “denial of specific pleasures and consolations, and a rejection of convention”; he cites Todd Haynes, the director of the 2015 lesbian drama Carol, who once described the LGBTQ+ cinematic mode as “a critique of mainstream culture”. To Gilbey, queerness is intrinsically “an innovating force and a catalytic power”, and he concludes his draft introduction with this rallying sentiment.
Yet what it means to him isn’t necessarily what it means to others – especially younger people for whom the term “queer” has “no negative connotations”. Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, the director of the 2019 trans drama So Pretty, complains of a “homogenising impulse” contained in the word, which, to her, seems somewhat passé – too palatable, too marketable. (“No one’s ever called me ‘queer’,” she says. “They called me ‘faggot’.”)
There’s evidently a generational divide. The 71-year-old German filmmaker Monika Treut, who directed 1999’s Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities, is nostalgic for a “time when queer people were outcasts”, associated with activism and “not agreeing with family values”. In some ways, the wider embrace of LGBTQ+ communities and culture by the Hollywood mainstream seems to have sapped the term of its oppositional force; it now feels almost “polite”. As Paul Mescal’s 20-something character Harry puts it in Andrew Haigh’s romantic fantasy All of Us Strangers (2023), “It’s like all the dick-sucking’s been taken out.”
Gilbey nonetheless persists in his survey of queer cinema and seeks out filmmakers whom he deems to be at its forefront, from Cheryl Dunye – the Liberian-American director of The Watermelon Woman (1996) – to current trailblazers such as Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca), Lyle Kash (Death and Bowling) and Rovinelli. In a Weird Weekends-style episode, he shadows the Canadian underground filmmaker Bruce LaBruce on the set of a gay-porn take on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem; he interrogates the enduring influence of Chantal Akerman’s debut, Je Tu Il Elle (1974), which contains the first explicit lesbian sex scene in a mainstream film. He touches upon the coyness of crossover hits such as Philadelphia and Call Me by Your Name (“Mainstream movies about homosexuals are not for homosexuals,” the LGBTQ+ activist Vito Russo once put it) and the importance of the “toilet-based sexual encounter” for many gay men, as documented in William E Jones’s 2007 art film Tearoom.
What he finds is that there are as many versions of queer cinema as there are queer filmmakers, and that is a mark of its vitality. When it comes to telling LGBTQ+ stories, writes Gilbey, the “options are infinite” – and the same goes for his own life, too. He starts the book with a self-loathing identification with Death in Venice’s Aschenbach, trapped in a life of disappointment and impossible longing. By its conclusion, however, he has accepted that he doesn’t have to play any role that he doesn’t like because he can simply choose, or create, another. Good for him. As he discovers, there’s nothing more authentically queer than that spirit of liberating self-invention.
It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema
Ryan Gilbey
Faber & Faber, 352pp, £20
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This article appears in the 18 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Warlord