Over the corporate rainbow: LGBTQ film festivals and affective media networks

ABSTRACT

Contemporary LGBTQ film festivals are often held to a standard of nostalgic radicalism based in U.S. independent film cultures of the early nineties, and found diluted and assimilationist as a result. In an effort to track the complex circulation of affect still present within LGBTQ film festivals, this article troubles this critique of commodification and investigates the networking of LGBTQ film festival affect amongst contexts of significant socio-historical importance like group belonging, pride, and activism. I offer the concept affective media network to consider the organization of public feeling emergent from the negotiated emotional orientation attendees experience through films, corporate installations, and various festival events, each with differing relationships to LGBTQ history. Reading festivals as affective media networks allows us to see them as the unique public spheres they are – mediated spaces of community, ritual, and history that reflect the desires of a specific place and time. Using participant observation methodologies, I focus on Outfest, the premiere LGBTQ film festival in Los Angeles. Paying particular attention to the aggregate of Outfest’s rainbow iconography, and its curation of programmed space, I frame the LGBTQ film festival as an ambivalent space mediating nostalgia for the past against the hope of the future.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQ film festivals
• affect
• nostalgia
• Outfest
• ambivalence
• queer cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Susanna Paasonen uses the instructive term ‘affective formation’ to articulate this balance of affect communicable in a discursive system. Paasonen writes that affective formations ‘are cognitive inasmuch as they are discursive … experienced as visceral intensities and contingent bodily states, but they equally come about as objects … in cultural and social analyses’ (2021, 12).

2. Lauren Berlant writes ‘in popular culture ambivalence is seen as the failure of a relation, the opposite of happiness, rather than as an inevitable condition of intimate attachment and pleasure in its own right … One might say that it’s a space of disappointment, but not disenchantment’ (2008, 2). This persistent ‘intimate attachment’ describes the affective relationship between LGBTQ audiences and ambivalently viewed media publics, as sites of pleasure, but with reminders of the concessions mainstreaming has brought to queer culture.

3. Outfest in 2020 was held primarily online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with virtual film screenings and limited online viewing windows. Alongside online screenings, the festival also hosted a series of drive-in screenings at Calamigos Ranch in Malibu. 2021ʹs festival adopted a hybrid model of in-person screenings and online content. Outfest executive director Damien S. Navarro expressed in a publicity statement that he hoped the return of the in-person festival in 2021 ‘brings all the “feels” everyone is ready for,’ another reflection of the importance placed on communicated feeling in LGBTQ film festival spaces (Reynolds).

4. One of Dunn’s main case studies, a Toronto statue of early 1800s Canadian magistrate Alexander Wood, who was embroiled in a gay sex scandal, is frequently graffitied by its Toronto community with homoerotic images, which Dunn reads as a less respectability-minded retort to the statue’s classicism. AT&T’s offering of markers to Outfest attendees for adorning its rainbow arch is a similar strategy, though the very fact that its graffiti is ‘permitted’ limits its role as any kind of check or protest on the monumental.

5. I use the nomenclature ‘Stonewall Riot’ as opposed to ‘Stonewall Uprising’ or other names to preserve the radical anti-establishment nature of the original act.

6. The closest State of Pride comes to addressing and reforming systematic tensions regarding LGBTQ pride festivals and coalition is in the words of SF Pride Community Grand Marshall Kin Folkz, interviewed by Braun in the film. Folkz expresses interest in reorganizing Pride leadership ‘from the margins,’ and insists on the importance of multiple Pride events celebrating different LGBTQ identities.

7. The faceless online viewers in Hard Paint are not deliberately racialized as white. Yet their association with capital, as financial support for the protagonist, enforces a dichotomy where they represent a dominant power that the spurned darker-skinned friend does not.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean M. Donovan

Sean M. Donovan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film, Television, & Media at the University of Michigan. He is writing a dissertation on LGBTQ nostalgia media, in a project ranging from arthouse cinema to online hookup cultures. His scholarship has appeared in Jump-Cut and Somatechnics. Outside of academia, Sean works in the film festival sphere, where he programs LGBTQ experimental cinema for the Ann Arbor Film Festival.