The Queer Movie Poster Book by Jenni Olson
From the underground to the Oscar-winning, the titillating to the tasteful, the campy to the heartfelt, The Queer Movie Poster Book is a captivating visual history of the best of queer film culture. From low-budget underground movies to studio films with marquee actors, queer-themed cinema has been around for decades. The relatively recent acceptance and mainstreaming of queer culture meant that the films' primary marketing vehicles - the posters - historically deployed a broad range of strategies to convey, or allude to, films about the love that dare not speak its name. The first overview of its kind, The Queer Movie Poster Book traces the history of gay film vis-a-vis its often coded promotional art. Sometimes alluring, sometimes lurid, the posters speak volumes about the social mores of the times and the struggle for GLBT recognition and civil equality. Featuring over 150 posters from Wallace Beery drag follies to the latest out-and-proud production, The Queer Movie Poster Book turns a critical eye on the development and changing definitions of queer cinema from the often heterosexually produced films with negative themes to the emerging, independent, queer-produced film scene. Filmmaker and historian Jenni Olson accounts for the varied spectrum of queer cinema by including sidebars treating dykesploitation films, and films with transgender themes. The Queer Movie Poster Book is a broad and colourful overview of this fascinating and previously unexplored realm of film history.