A Shelf of One's Own: A Queer Production Studies Approach to LGBT Film Distribution

and Categorization
Author(s): Bryan Wuest
Source: Journal of Film and Video , Vol. 70, No. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2018), pp. 24-43
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video
Association

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 A Shelf of One’s Own: A Queer Production Studies Approach
to LGBT Film Distribution and Categorization

bryan wuest

For a long time gay and lesbian movies were put in an actual category called “special interest”—with the likes of
exercise and hunting videos. The gay genre was perceived as too small to be a real category or topic—too small to
have its own place or enough consumers interested in it to call it a real genre. Now, gay film really is its own genre.
GLBT films now have their own category, just as do those in horror, or adventure.
—Maria Lynn, Former President of Wolfe Video (qtd. in van Maanen)

much was made of the “de-gaying,” as it
was commonly called, of A Single Man (2009)
by its distributor the Weinstein Company. Colin
Firth called the original trailers and one-sheets,
which featured him and Julianne Moore in bed
together, “deceptive. . . . There’s nothing to
sanitize. It’s a beautiful love story between two
men and I see no point in hiding that” (Voss,
“Colin Firth”). Moore reported that director Tom
Ford was “furious” and rejected this poster,
which Moore called “ridiculous” because it
made the film resemble a heterosexual romcom
(Voss, “Julianne Moore”; “Julianne Moore,”
BlackBook). When a Vulture writer asked Harvey
Weinstein a follow-up question about whether
“the poster seemed to play down the gay
part,” Weinstein quickly ended the conversa­
tion, saying, “I’m good. You got enough. Thank
you” (qtd. in Vilensky). Stuart Richards also
has noted the differences between Tom Ford’s
trailer (cut for the Toronto International Film
Festival) and the Weinstein Company’s trailer.
The former includes a kiss between Firth and
Matthew Goode, a meaningful gaze between
Firth and Nicholas Hoult, and “ultimately an
equal pairing of Firth interacting with male
bryan wuest received his PhD in cinema and
media studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles. His work has appeared in Film History
and the edited collection Queer Youth and Media
Cultures (2014). He is currently developing his
dissertation project into a book about niche LGBT
media distribution companies.
characters as he does with female, particularly
Julianne Moore” (Richards 19). The latter trailer
removes Goode’s and Hoult’s names and the
kiss and includes “a conspicuously unsubtle
attempt at pushing both Firth and Moore for
Academy Awards.” Richards describes this as a
common strategy by Indiewood distribution to
“downplay . . . queer content to favor the ‘qual­
ity’ characteristics of the films” (19).
A similar case occurred the following year
with another film featuring LGBT content, The
Kids Are All Right (2010). According to Alice
Royer, previously an Outfest staffer and at the
time a film screener for the festival, the film did
not play at the festival “because it had already
been picked up for distribution and [Focus Fea­
tures] did not want it to be ghettoized as a gay
film. And so they wouldn’t let it play at Outfest”
(qtd. in “The Mediascape Roundtable”). Focus
Features apparently disallowed the film’s as­
sociation with one of the country’s most visible
LGBT film festivals for fear that The Kids Are All
Right would become imbued with too much
“gayness” and would be irrevocably marked in
a way that, presumably, the company expected
would limit the film’s reach and success. Harry
Benshoff and Sean Griffin have identified this
same strategy as happening decades earlier,
when the Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Film
Festival (now Outfest) was unable to book Prick
Up Your Ears, Waiting for the Moon, and Mau-
rice in 1987 because the film producers did not
want these titles to premiere at an LGBT film

24 journal of film and video 70.3–4  /  fall/winter 2018

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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 24 7/11/18 12:07 PM
 festival and possibly “be labeled as exclusively
gay or lesbian” (Queer Images 194).
In both preceding examples, the meaning of
a film was deliberately managed—and indeed
created—not through the distributor’s control of
the actual film content but rather through what
was done with and around the text, or with its
paratexts. Jonathan Gray defines paratexts as
“texts that prepare us for other texts,” or the
materials that prime us to understand a text
in a particular way (25). In this case, the dis­
tributors’ choices about promotion or festival
exhibition (itself a form of promotion) were
intended to regulate these texts’ potential LGBT
“identities” for viewers. Here I am applying the
dense concept of identity unusually—to a text,
not a person—but this move is deliberate and, I
hope, helpful. Whether these films are or aren’t
really “gay” is not the right question here. The
question is how distribution, with its multiple
paratextual framing mechanisms, can produce
meaning for texts in an LGBT and broader
cultural context. Treating distribution as a col­
lection of industrial meaning-making practices
renders it an effective site for queer production
studies. In the same way that queer theory at­
tempts to deconstruct sexual and gender iden­
tities that have become politically expedient to
naturalize, attention to distribution foregrounds
the deliberate industrial processes that help
establish a media object’s identity.
Accordingly, my approach deprioritizes, but
does not preclude, textual analysis of so-called
LGBT films. Instead I examine distribution com­
panies with corporate images and business
practices centered on LGBT identity, treating
their Web sites, catalogs, advertisements and
promotions, and acquisition decisions as a
series of paratexts that can illuminate the in­
dustrial logics and nature of a media phenom­
enon. Additionally, I have conducted my own
interviews with company founders and employ­
ees and use these and published interviews to
examine the discursive creation of particular
meanings for these companies’ products. I
also note how these LGBT distributors and their
films are discussed by both LGBT and main­
stream press, which do their own work of fram­
journal of film and video 70.3–4  /  fall/winter 2018
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 25
ing these companies and contributing to the
identities of their products. These approaches
mean that rather than arguing whether a text is
conclusively “gay” or “queer” or “LGBT,” I track
the contexts and processes that encourage
such readings.
This article comprises two main parts. First, I
propose using distribution as a lens for examin­
ing meaning, particularly in the case of LGBT
media, and I attempt to “denaturalize” the
now-common idea that media can be identifi­
ably “LGBT” by showing how a text’s meaning
and categorization are crucially dependent on
the contexts in which, and rubrics by which, the
text is being signified. Second, with a series of
case studies concerning Wolfe Video, Ariztical
Entertainment, and Strand Releasing, I demon­
strate how LGBT distribution companies have,
since the mid-1980s, deliberately codified this
category, benefited from this category, and at
times intentionally disavowed or complicated
this category. Examples such as these make
it clear that a film’s LGBT “identity” is far from
a natural, stable certainty. Rather, it is highly
contingent on, among other things, the way
that industrial practice treats and presents the
text.
“The Invisible, or Taken-For-Granted,
Link”: Distributing Meaning
in LGBT Media
In the last few decades, queer scholarship has
often grappled with the question of what queer
media is, either explicitly or implicitly, and
certain methodological trends have emerged.
The most common approaches have involved
understanding a film as “gay” or “queer” or
“LGBT” based on authorship, spectatorship,
and textual form/content.1 In these cases,
academic work attends to how meaning is pro­
duced (1) by a text’s author (often hinging on
the idea of a queer sensibility permeating the
text), (2) through reading strategies and “use”
of the text, and (3) by the text explicitly present­
ing LGBT characters or issues or by the form of
the text mirroring ideas about queerness. The
approaches exemplified in this literature have
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7/11/18 12:07 PM
 been and are vital to research and analysis in
the field. Rather than dismantling or replacing
them, I seek to expand the breadth of analysis
of LGBT/queer media both by centering my
research on institutional practice and by ana­
lyzing how these texts’ “LGBTness” is defined
according to industrial practice.
Although my specific attention to niche
distribution may be unique (though in “Distri­
bution Is Queen” Candace Moore tracks the
strategies underlying Wolfe Video and Logo’s
digital media platforms), this focus on indus­
trial factors is part of the recent body of work
on queer production studies, both in this issue
and elsewhere. This work has examined LGBT-
focused networks such as Logo and Here TV,
the (limited) conglomeration of LGBT media
industries, and the motivations, investments,
and personal logics that power niche LGBT
companies.2 Eve Ng uses fascinating primary
materials to offer a behind-the-scenes look at
Logo and its recent attempts to “gaystream”
both through changing its content and, most
importantly for me, through changing the ways
in which such content and the network itself
were framed to viewers. Though he does not
focus on niche venues such as Logo or Here, in
“Scripting Black Gayness” Alfred L. Martin ana­
lyzes how the writing-room structure of the tele­
vision industry introduces complications into
representations of queerness, with the writing-
room outlines, individual writers, and showrun­
ners and producers all intervening into exactly
what final object appears on a viewer’s home
screen. Martin’s analysis attends to individual
authorship, but he grounds it in the material
context of television sitcom production. He
thereby explores how industrial factors influ­
ence the creation of authorial meaning, rather
than performing a textual analysis that simply
evaluates what appears on screen. My use of
industrial practice, specifically distribution, as
an analytical lens allows me to consider the
strategic labeling of media as “gay” or “LGBT”
and how “LGBTness” is produced by choices
about how a text is described, categorized,
marketed, and exhibited. Such an analysis has
been suggested in existing scholarship but is
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 26
ultimately an area in which not as much sus­
tained, in-depth analysis has been done. This
approach offers the possibility of complicating
the idea of “LGBT media” and denaturalizing
this category in the field of queer production
studies and queer media studies in general.
Centering analysis on “the industry” chal­
lenges conventional approaches to authorship.
Michele Hilmes argues that “industry study is
the translation of authorship into a dispersed
site marked by multiple, intersecting agendas
and interests, where individual authorship in
the traditional sense still most certainly takes
place, but within a framework that robs it, to
a greater or lesser degree, of its putative au­
tonomy,” a shift she describes as a potentially
“deeply disturbing displacement” but also a
“necessary corrective to the narrow categories
of traditional scholarship” (22). Following
Hilmes, I look at distribution as one site of this
dispersed authorship. To avoid slipping from
one oversimplification to another, I do not
claim that a distributor is the author any more
than a director, writer, or producer is. Rather,
I see distribution as one crucial contributor in
the long line of framings and interactions that
infuse a text with (multiple) meanings. A 2015
special issue of The Velvet Light Trap on this
topic calls distribution “the invisible, or taken-
for-granted, link between production and con­
sumption” that often goes overlooked because
it appears “dusty” and dull when compared to
juicier topics such as “the drama of produc­
tion, the pleasures of the text, or the struggle
over meaning” (Introduction 1). But distribution
is a crucial site of meaning-making, one that
sometimes goes overlooked, as scholars who
study distribution often point out (Drake 63;
Knight and Thomas 14). I respond to this aspect
of distribution not only by focusing on LGBT
distributors that have not received their due
attention, but also by engaging with conceptual
questions about the discursive work performed
by distribution.
Gray argues that close readings of individual
texts cannot fully explain “social meanings and
uses—what place a text has in society” (24).
Paratexts help us understand why and with
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 what expectations a viewer comes to a text.
Gray differentiates between “entryway” and “in
medias res” paratexts: the former “control and
determine our entrance to a text” by alerting
viewers to the existence of a text and preparing
them for a certain kind of experience, whereas
the latter inform, resignifiy, or reinvigorate
viewers’ relationship with a text after they have
begun (or “finished”) engaging with it (35). The
examples from A Single Man and The Kids Are
All Right that begin this article demonstrate the
industrial importance of and attention to entry­
way paratexts. In these cases, the distributors’
paratextual choices were attuned to maintaining
as broad of an audience appeal as possible.
A Single Man’s initial promotional materials
attempted to decenter the film’s gayness and
potentially draw a wider audience that might
not intentionally go see a “gay film,” and Focus
Features’ withholding of The Kids Are All Right
from an LGBT film festival attempted to prevent
too much “LGBTness” from attaching to the film
and potentially reducing its broader audience
appeal upon wider release. With these choices,
the distributors were attempting to create and
manage the “meaning” of these films not by
requesting changes to the content itself, but by
producing paratexts to influence the kinds of as­
sociations viewers would make with these films.
These choices frame a film in particular ways by,
in Robert M. Entman’s definition, “select[ing]
some aspects of a perceived reality and mak[ing]
them more salient in a communicating text, in
such a way as to promote a particular problem
definition, causal interpretation, moral evalua­
tion, and/or treatment recommendation” (52).
For Entman, framing as a rhetorical activity takes
place in a variety of sites, including the interpre­
tative schemata that the message receiver brings
to the communication, but I am most interested
in how distributor activity attaches meanings to
a text.
When this use of paratexts specifically at­
tempts to “highlight themes identified as
attractive by marketers and promoters, and
subvert those designated as culturally trou­
bling,” Andre Cavalcante calls this discursive
move “paratextual domestication,” a process
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 27
that “neutralize[s] and domesticate[s] potential
threats a narrative poses to a social of cultural
status quo” (86–87). As an example, Brenda
Cooper and Edward C. Pease have argued that
reviews treating Brokeback Mountain (2005) as
a universal love story encouraged viewers to
deprioritize queer subjectivity in their reception
of the film. In this case, framing shapes the
meaning-making experience a viewer has with
a text. But framing choices also can unleash
a host of economic and marketing effects, as
both Cavalcante and Richards would note. How­
ever, although both of these scholars are con­
cerned with the deprioritization of LGBT content
as a marketing strategy, I am concerned with
the inverse: how a text’s LGBT content can be
centralized, or selected as salient in Entman’s
phrasing, in order to activate a set of promo­
tion, distribution, and exhibition circuits.
To think through how LGBT content can
become a defining element of a text, I draw
from work on meaning and identity. Barbara
Klinger’s Melodrama and Meaning: History,
Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk offers
a theory of interpretation and meaning that
provides a strong foundation for this kind of
analysis. Forgoing traditional textual analysis,
Klinger “consider[s] the contributions that con­
textual factors, as opposed to textual devices or
viewer subjectivities, make to an understand­
ing of how texts mean” (xvi; emphasis mine). I
accentuate that phrase because of my own ap­
proach’s close adherence to hers: rather than
argue for our interpretations of what our chosen
films mean, we demonstrate how they mean—
what factors go into creating potential (and in
my case, industry-intended) meanings around a
text. Klinger argues that “the contextual factors
that accompany the presentation of a film, in­
cluding such materials as film reviews and in­
dustry promotions as well as specific historical
conditions, serve as signs of the vital semiotic
and cultural space that superintend the viewing
experience” (xvi). She rejects the idea that texts
have any “intrinsic, formally verifiable signifi­
cance,” insisting instead on “the importance of
analyzing contextual factors in discussions of
the social meaning of texts” (Klinger xvi–xvii).
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 This approach to how a text’s meaning is cre­
ated parallels work on identity formation. Stu­
art Hall prefers the term “identification” over
“identity” because the former illuminates the
ongoing contingency that is part of any “iden­
tity.” As a product of discourse (as opposed
to intrinsic nature, as he and many others
argue), identification is “a construction, a
process never completed—always ‘in process.’
It . . . can always be ‘won’ or ‘lost,’ sustained
or abandoned” (2). For Hall, identification is
“a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-
determination not a subsumption” (3), and in
the same way that Klinger argues that a text’s
context produces its meaning, Hall argues that
identity is “produced in specific historical and
institutional sites within specific discursive
formations and practices, by specific enuncia­
tive strategies” (4). These enunciative strate­
gies necessarily involve as much exclusion as
inclusion, creating “points of temporary attach­
ment” (6) that always contain “‘too much’ or
‘too little’ . . . never a proper fit, a totality” (3).
Here Entman is helpful when he claims that
“frames call attention to some aspects of reality
while obscuring other elements” (55), an idea
that matches almost exactly with Hall’s argu­
ment. In Entman’s case, inclusion and exclu­
sion of particular elements lead audiences to
particular interpretations of a film, whereas for
Hall, inclusion and exclusion of particular ele­
ments lead people to identify themselves and
others in particular ways, with both subject to
revision upon a change in how these inclusion
decisions are made. Klinger makes a similar
argument in her first chapter when she dem­
onstrates how the meaning and significance of
Douglas Sirk’s films were redefined according
to changes in academic film criticism from the
1950s to the 1980s.
So in the same way that Sirk’s axiomatic
place as a progressive auteur directs contem­
porary viewing of his films in an academic
seminar on melodrama, in the same way that
universalizing reviews of Brokeback Mountain
discourage viewers from focusing on queer
specificity in Ennis and Jack’s relationship, and
in the same way that popular understandings of
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 28
sexual orientation and identity provide people
an organizing framework to understand and
label their feelings of difference, a distributor’s
practices prepare us for a certain relationship
with and understanding of a film. Few would
argue that point; in “Overcoming the Stigma,”
Richards makes this case specifically regarding
LGBT film. But implicit in his argument is that
the films he discusses are LGBT films—some­
times he calls them films with LGBT content,
but as often he calls them “LGBT films” or
“LGBT Indiewood films”—whose queerness
their distributors attempt to manage or buffer
through promotional choices. I note this minor
distinction because I want to move that analy­
sis one step backward and suggest that there
may be no such thing as an intrinsically, defin­
ably LGBT film. I read Klinger, Hall, and Entman
together because they all demonstrate, if not
the arbitrariness of meaning and interpretation,
at least their contingency. Queer scholarship
has offered us similar lessons; plenty of queer
history and theory has spent considerable
time deconstructing the medical, economic,
cultural, and political factors that have shaped
different understandings of sexuality in differ­
ent periods. This denaturalizes the admittedly
politically expedient idea that LGBT identity
as currently understood is an inborn and his­
torically constant reality, and I want to extend
this analysis to what now gets called “LGBT
media.”3
For example, John D’Emilio demonstrates
how the rise of wage labor and urban living
in the United States lessened the importance
of the nuclear family as a social structure
for survival, which better enabled people to
“construct a personal life based on attraction
to one’s own sex” (D’Emilio 134). Homosexual
behavior in the United States had existed
previously, but not homosexual identity in the
same way we think of it now, because there
was “no ‘social space’ in the colonial system
of production that allowed men and women to
be gay” as a claimable social identity (D’Emilio
134). Hall would describe this as an example of
“discursive practices construct[ing] . . . points
of temporary attachment” (6) for subjects;
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 a man who desires to have sex with another
man, when “presented” with the idea of a gay
sexual identity, can use that as a framework for
understanding and organizing these impulses.
For Hall, this is a “successful articulation or
‘chaining’ of the subject into the flow of the
discourse” (6).
A similar process occurs in categorizing
media as LGBT. Queerness, whether connoted
or denoted, has appeared in American film
throughout its history, albeit in a variety of
forms and more or less commonly depending
on the period. But there have not always been
media-industry infrastructures predicated
upon the centralization of LGBT content as a
text’s definitive core. When media began to be
categorized this way, it was not the result of
recognition, finally, of the true nature of a body
of texts and the consequent correct identifica­
tion of them. Rather, it was one particular way
to name and organize texts that had become
increasingly tenable and strategic. This cat­
egorization is not the origin of LGBT content in
media any more than recent understandings
of sexual identity are the origin of all same-
sex interest or activity. But the categorization
provided a logic and commonality with which
to think about media, and this “flow of dis­
course,” as Hall would phrase it, became a
place that extant and future texts could “chain
into.” The creation of this categorical space en­
courages continued activity within it, whether
that be claiming a personal queer identity or
producing more media with LGBT content.
This process could be denaturalized and
analyzed at a variety of sites: for example,
Moore’s “Proto-Queer Media Criticism” and
Joshua Gamson’s “The Organizational Shaping
of Collective Identity” demonstrate that by their
nature, both queer film criticism and queer
film festivals establish a body of texts based
on the assumption that they share a common
element that can become a first-order point of
categorization. Or elsewhere, Bryan Wuest has
demonstrated the deliberate discursive work
to produce a category for narrative gay-themed
films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, argu­
ing that framing and grouping choices (i.e.,
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 29
describing films as “homosexual love stories”
or organizing a variety of films under a common
“homosexual film festival” banner) were as
vital to the apparent newness of this media as
were actual differences in its content. But this
article focuses on LGBT distributors, another
vital site of this implicit categorical argument.
These sites make LGBTness a sort of center of
gravity in a text; we might say that LGBT content
exerts a centripetal force that gathers meaning
around itself. In these cases, the LGBT content
will often act as a center of meaning or identity,
marking the text itself as LGBT and demoting
other “generic” features as secondary. That is,
a film might be described as a “gay film” before
it is described as a “romcom” or a “drama.” I
do not argue that this categorization is inherent
or intrinsic but rather argue that cultural and
industrial infrastructures of the past couple of
decades have created conditions that activate
this centripetal force. I also do not argue that it
is inevitable; in the following discussion, I pro­
vide examples both of companies deliberately
constructing LGBT meaning around a text and
of companies deliberately avoiding LGBT mean­
ing. But LGBT content in a text is easily activat­
able as a focus of meaning, certainly through
reception practices but also through industrial
positioning. The imminent “threat” of this cen­
tripetal force is demonstrated in the preceding
examples of A Single Man and The Kids Are All
Right, where industry practitioners warily at­
tempted to avoid “activating” it through careful
promotion and exhibition choices.
Addressing a similar case, Katherine Sender
contrasts the strategies of cable networks Logo
TV and Bravo, comparing Logo’s “gay narrow­
casting” with Bravo’s “dualcasting” to both gay
men and women (“Dualcasting” 314). Whereas
Logo was eager to centralize its programming’s
gayness as definitive to the network’s identity,
Bravo was careful to not let series such as Boy
Meets Boy (2003) and the very successful Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–07) pigeonhole
Bravo as a “gay network.” The then president
of the network, Jeff Gaspin, insisted that the
debut of these shows did not mean a change in
the network’s identity or even in the network’s
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 targeted audience (Sender, “Dualcasting” 307).
The majority of Queer Eye and Boy’s advertising
was directed toward women, the segment that
Gaspin claimed as the network’s priority, with
gay men as the secondary market in Bravo’s
“dualcasting” strategy. Notably, as Sender
recounts, Gaspin imagined that viewers saw
Queer Eye not “as a gay show,” but rather as “a
show with five gay leads” (Hibberd). Like the
distributors of A Single Man and The Kids Are All
Right, here Gaspin was attempting to avoid “ac­
tivating” the leads’ gayness in a way that would
classify the entire show as gay.
In contrast to the previous examples, exhibi­
tion venues such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon
deliberately center and activate LGBT content
when they use “LGBT” as a genre label along­
side more conventional genres such as horror,
comedy, and thriller. Rick Altman identifies
labeling as one of the key functions of genre,
which provides “the name of a category cen­
tral to the decisions and communications of
distributors and exhibitors” (14). But he dem­
onstrates that the logic of an object’s grouping
and labeling is not self-evident and is itself
largely based on what aspect of the object
the categorizer is choosing to prioritize. As an
example, Altman describes how nuts are clas­
sified in different contexts—for instance, in a
supplier’s warehouse the packaged nuts are
kept with other objects in similarly sized jars
and cans, whereas in Altman’s pantry the nuts
are kept with other snacks such as pretzels and
chips. He argues that “each new location brings
out a differing aspect of nuts: their size, weight,
composition, growth patterns, packaging, per­
ishability, orthography, social functions, and
so forth” (Altman 97). Instead of containing “a
single common characteristic defining all nuts,”
some unique and essential “nutness,” the ob­
jects labeled as “nuts” are diverse and exhibit
characteristics also found in other objects not
labeled as “nuts” (Altman 97). Different char­
acteristics are activated in different locations.
Similarly, Michel Foucault famously uses Jorge
Luis Borges’s description of an improbably
complex animal taxonomy to denaturalize more
familiar, seemingly commonsense classifica­
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tion systems. He wonders, “[A]ccording to what
grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have
we become accustomed to sort out so many dif­
ferent and similar things? . . . There is no simili­
tude and no distinction . . . that is not the result
of a precise operation and of the application
of a preliminary criterion” (Foucault xxi). Both
Altman and Foucault recognize that a single
object is classified not according to a core, es­
sential identity, but rather in response to the
criteria and rubrics either explicitly or invisibly
undergirding that instance of classification. No
classification can precede a classifying logic.
Employing a rubric that centralizes LGBT
content and labels a text accordingly has pow­
erful effects. Establishing “LGBT” as a concrete,
discrete category or genre of media can set up
a reliable and repeatable circuit for the distribu­
tion and exhibition of these texts. The existence
of this category informs the industrial logic of
financing and producing LGBT films. Having a
built-in point of engagement with customers,
such as the LGBT section of a video store or
Web site, justifies the production of these texts,
with the expectation that they can be funneled
directly to an eager market through well-estab­
lished venues. Citing a niche LGBT audience is
one thing; being able to invoke the existence
of guaranteed shelving space or search returns
based on a film being categorized and labeled
as LGBT is an additionally valuable selling point
when filmmakers are attempting to gather sup­
port for the production of their films.
Before we move to the next section, it de­
serves mention that although I earlier cited
Richards’s phrasing as an example to theorize
against, I have already used and will continue
to use terms such as “LGBT media” in this
article. I am thinking specifically about how a
text’s LGBT “identity” is discursively produced
by industry/distribution practice, so if I am
talking about a Wolfe Video film, I am indeed
talking about an “LGBT film” within this system
of logic. But more pragmatically, this choice is a
shortcut to avoid endless syntactic gymnastics.
Readers are invited to keep the complications
of identifying a text as LGBT in the back of their
minds throughout the analyses that follow.
©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
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 Now I turn to some examples of distributors
navigating this centripetal force; three brief
case studies will demonstrate the complexities
of “LGBT” becoming part of the identity of a
company and its products. First, Wolfe Video
recognized the power of “LGBT” as a recogniz­
able, discrete category and worked deliberately
to popularize and enact this idea. Second, by
virtue of the category’s existence, an Arizti­
cal Entertainment text could benefit from this
centripetal force by gathering meaning and
attention around the limited LGBT content in
a film; marking the text as “LGBT” in this way
then enacted a set of promotional practices
predicated on this LGBT textual identity. Third,
Strand Releasing demonstrates the variability
or contingency of “LGBT” as a category because
of the company’s longstanding ambivalence
toward the label; Strand often wants to avoid
being “pigeonholed” as LGBT and prefers to
create alternate centers of gravity for meanings
to gather around, such as auteurism, foreign­
ness, or art-house prestige.
“This Simple but Important Distinction”:
Mainstreaming, Promoting, and
Negotiating Film as LGBT
Wolfe Video
Founded by Kathy Wolfe in New Almaden, Cali­
fornia, Wolfe Video began in 1985 as a company
focused on lesbian film but later expanded to
LGBT film more generally. The company grew
significantly in the early 1990s, and since then
the idea of “mainstreaming” has been central
to much of Wolfe Video’s work and is an im­
portant element of an analysis of the company.
The term “mainstreaming” repeatedly occurs
in journalists’ coverage of the company and in
discourse by the company itself. In 2004 the
company’s mission statement claimed that due
to their years of distributing gay and lesbian
films, the staff at Wolfe Video are “experts in
mainstreaming gay entertainment nationwide,”
as well as experienced in “provid[ing] special
outreach and marketing to assist mainstream
companies in accessing the gay market”
(“About Wolfe,” 2004 version). This language
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 31
lasted until at least 2014, when Wolfe Video
declared itself “the leader in mainstreaming
films with gay content. . . . Servicing our long­
standing mainstream relationships as well as
the LGBT marketplace makes us truly unique”
(“About Wolfe,” 2014 version). The descriptor
“leader in mainstreaming films with gay con­
tent” was important enough to appear twice
on the 2014 iteration of the site, once in the
“About Wolfe” section and once in the descrip­
tion of the work of Maria Lynn, then president
of Wolfe Video. This idea also recurs in articles
and interviews. In some cases it’s clear that
Wolfe Video has succeeded in making “main­
streaming” a key message that journalists pull
or paraphrase from the company’s copy. Other
cases demonstrate more generally the cultural
presence of this idea about Wolfe Video’s work,
as in a 2003 San Jose Mercury News article that
quotes Helen Grieco, of the California chapter
of the National Organization for Women, stat­
ing that Kathy Wolfe “single-handedly” main­
streamed LGBT media (De La Vina).
What does “mainstreaming” entail for Wolfe
Video? Part of this work was getting LGBT con­
tent into more visible venues. By the summer of
1994, Wolfe Video’s catalog consisted of hun­
dreds of titles and reached over 100,000 cus­
tomers annually (Levin). Wolfe Video had origi­
nally used gay and lesbian bookstores as one
of its main ways to get product to consumers,
but by 1994 mainstream stores such as Tower
Records and Blockbuster had begun carrying
its videos. In the following years Wolfe Video
collaborated directly with chains such as Virgin
Megastore and Hollywood Video to set up gay
and lesbian sections in-store (Hunt; Scheinin).
But this “mainstreaming” process was not
without its obstacles—according to Wolfe,
some store owners claimed to not have gay and
lesbian customers, were unable to comprehend
the very idea of gay and lesbian film, or simply
assumed she was distributing pornography,
forcing her to repeatedly explain the films and
their market in the company’s earlier days (De
La Vina).
Lynn frames Wolfe Video’s ability to have
these kinds of conversations and to manage
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 LGBT titles in wider mainstream markets as a re­
sult of the company’s history of interacting with
its customers via mail-order catalogs; she says
it was a place to “market-test every title that
[came] out” (qtd. in Anderson-Minshall). For
example, during the first season of the US ver­
sion of Queer as Folk (2000–05), Wolfe Video
approached Showtime with a proposal to dis­
tribute the show on DVD. “We get tons of feed­
back and letters everyday,” Lynne explained
to Showtime. “Let us help you do it” (qtd. in
Levine). This expertise has helped Wolfe Video
in its coordination with video stores consider­
ing setting up a gay and lesbian section; Wolfe
Video both could sell the idea of having the
section by explaining the profit potential in
tapping into this demographic and then could
recommend how to actually curate and adver­
tise the section based on its experience with
consumers.
Placing DVDs (and previously videocas­
settes) into stores is one of the ways Wolfe
Video worked to mainstream LGBT media. Of
course, this made this kind of product easier
for LGBT viewers to find, but there was also the
chance that if these movies were on the shelves
of a video store, straight consumers might pick
one up and watch an LGBT-themed story they
might otherwise not see. Kathy Wolfe sees this
kind of distribution as a form of advocacy her
films are performing. For example, in her ac­
ceptance speech upon receiving the Frameline
Award on behalf of Wolfe Video in 2010, she ex­
pressed her pride in “the way that we’ve made
images of our lives visible and accessible to
the world at large” (“Frameline Award Presenta­
tion”). Here she is suggesting that besides the
positive effects of identification and validation
for LGBT viewers that her company’s media can
provide, these films also can do work to change
mainstream perceptions of LGBT people. As an
example she offers Big Eden (2000), whose
PG rating is unusual for gay-themed movies.
Wolfe says that “you could show this movie
to a friend or your family or your mother, and
they’d get it. . . . It’s the kind of movie that re­
ally helped a lot of people” (qtd. in Scheinin).
In a 2010 interview with the San Francisco
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ABC affiliate, she proposed that Wolfe Video’s
films could have significant impact on people
with antigay beliefs; she said “it could make a
huge difference” in how those resistant to gay
politics understand and evaluate LGBT people
(Profiles of Excellence). Indeed, communica­
tions research has demonstrated that media
representations of LGBT people affect (straight)
viewers; for example, the parasocial contact
hypothesis suggests that observing minority
groups on television can “influence attitudes
about such groups in a manner consistent with
the influence of live intergroup contact” and
ultimately reduce prejudice in majority groups
(Schiappa et al. 22).
Of course, the political effects of this main­
streaming strategy are accompanied by eco­
nomic effects. When Wolfe Video convinced
video stores to dedicate shelf space to LGBT
film, it also secured a venue for its own titles,
increasing the company’s ability to move prod­
uct and consequently encouraging filmmakers
to seek distribution with Wolfe in the future.
Video stores may have been more willing to
feature LGBT content at this time because of
shifts in how advertisers imagined their ideal
targets. As Ron Becker has argued, not only
were LGBT people (and specifically gay men)
understood as a particularly valuable market to
tap in the 1990s based on assumptions about
their income and loyalty, but also so-called
Slumpy (socially liberal, urban-minded profes­
sional) consumers, an increasingly valued de­
mographic at the time, were eager to perform a
hip, liberal politics of tolerance. Becker identi­
fies the consumption of LGBT content in media
as one popular channel for Slumpies to practice
this “affordable politics of affirmative multicul­
turalism” (200). Wolfe Video was able to tap
into this moment: if Big Eden, by Kathy Wolfe’s
account, “really helped a lot of people,” then
we can assume a lot of people were buying or
renting this Wolfe Video title (qtd. in Scheinin).
If defining “LGBT” as a legible media cat­
egory or genre helps encourage the inclusion of
LGBT content in media because of the existence
of a distribution and exhibition circuit, as I
argued in the last section, then we can under­
©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
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 stand contributing to this category’s creation
as a form of mainstreaming. April 2012 saw a
particularly significant success of Wolfe Video’s
mainstreaming strategy when digital media
platform Hulu introduced “Gay and Lesbian” as
a new “genre category” alongside its existing
labels such as “Action & Adventure” and “Hor­
ror & Suspense” (Gmelich). This development
resulted from a project spearheaded by Wolfe
Video over several months to convince digital
distribution platforms to employ “LGBT” (or a
variation on the term) as a media categoriza­
tion. In fact, according to Lynn and Wolfe in
an interview with me, Hulu had requested the
Wolfe Video catalog for streaming, and the dis­
tributor made a deal that Hulu needed to first
create an LGBT section, which Wolfe Video then
ended up curating for them due to the com­
pany’s expertise.
In a Huffington Post article and in an inter­
view with me, Wolfe explicitly connects this
work with Hulu to her work convincing and
helping brick-and-mortar video retailers to in­
clude gay and lesbian sections on their shelves
in the 1990s (“New New Queer Cinema”). In a
GLAAD blog post on the topic, Wolfe Video’s
then executive vice president Linda Voutour
appealed to this same history: “Wolfe has been
working with content providers and retailers
for more than twenty years on this simple but
important distinction” of categorizing media as
LGBT (qtd. in Adam). These articles and posts
about Hulu’s announcement also consistently
discuss the political importance of this cat­
egory. Wolfe focuses on the benefits for newly
out LGBT youth and LGBT people living in areas
where they do not have local access to LGBT
media, calling such access a “sociocultural
lifeline” for these people (“New New Queer
Cinema”). The Human Rights Campaign blog
emphasizes the importance of LGBT characters
to LGBT youth, borrowing lines from Wolfe’s
Huffington Post article (McCarty). In the GLAAD
post Voutour describes Hulu’s move as “a
vitally important reflection of LGBT equality in
our culture,” and the then president of GLAAD,
Herndon Graddick, states that “making such
groundbreaking and popular LGBT films avail­
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 33
able and accessible to a wider audience can
have a tremendous impact on LGBT people
longing to see relatable stories onscreen” (qtd.
in Adam). These commendations demonstrate
a telling central concern with categorization
and curation. Although this deal with Hulu
involved increasing the platform’s volume of
LGBT film, what these articles focus on is the
creation of the label itself. So in this case Hulu
already had content that might be described as
LGBT, but either the content was not explicitly
categorized as such, or it was not readily vis­
ible or searchable. The category does enable
viewers to more easily find content, and Kathy
Wolfe pointed out that people are constantly
coming out as LGBT for the first time and that a
dedicated section makes it easier for them to
find media that speaks to their experience. But
as important for this discussion is the symbolic
effect of this kind of business practice that
openly and visibly includes LGBTs.
As Stuart Hall reminds us, an important part
of establishing a category is also clarifying what
falls outside its boundaries. In Wolfe Video’s
case this includes pornography, the specter
of which appears throughout the company’s
history. In a 1994 interview Lynn lamented the
tendency for viewers or retailers to assume that
“female-oriented videos” referred to “Triple
X-rated movies, featuring lesbians.” She as­
sured readers that Wolfe Video is concerned
with “positive images about the gay culture and
women in general” and that if Wolfe Video were
to carry erotic videos for women, “they would
be tasteful, not pornographic” (qtd. in Hunt).
Kathy Wolfe echoes this sentiment when report­
ing the confusion retailers had about the very
idea of a gay or lesbian film. Unfamiliar with the
concept of LGBT film, store owners would as­
sume Wolfe was offering porn instead of films
showing “just life,” a phrase Wolfe uses to
separate the non-titillating portrayals of lesbian
life in her company’s films from the content in
porn (De La Vina). Even as late as 2013, Wolfe
recalled this confusion as a recurring obstacle
to the functioning of her company, calling it a
“constant battle [of] educating everyone we
work with” (“Wolfe Video: An Interview”). For
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 Wolfe Video, distancing its films from porn was
a way to more clearly delineate the category of
“LGBT film” and claim it as discrete, and any as­
sociation with porn threatened that distinction.
Lynn describes porn as something “that we
could do that would make a lot more money,
but that we would just hate doing” (qtd. in
Anderson-Minshall). Wolfe is more specific,
describing her no-porn logic as at least partly
a business decision. Even though, as Lynn
suggests, porn might make Wolfe Video more
money, Wolfe points out that the company
“distribute[s] lots of titles to libraries. We
couldn’t do that if we were a porn company”
(qtd. in Scheinin). Image management through
distancing the company from porn is part of
Wolfe Video’s mainstreaming strategy. Porn
is anything but mainstream—even aside from
questions about gendered consumption of por­
nography, porn is seen as audience-specific, in­
appropriate for many contexts, and potentially
offensive to any consumer who is not explicitly
seeking it out. And as Wolfe explains it, carrying
any porn runs the risk of polluting the image of
the entire catalog and potentially blocking the
company’s access to some retailers and by ex­
tension some audiences. A venue interested in
Wolfe Video’s films may demur if the company
is understood as a porn company, even if this
classification is based on only one element of
its product.
This move to manage LGBT media’s relation­
ship to sexuality is not without precedent.
Elsewhere, Wuest uses Los Angeles filmmaker
Pat Rocco as an example of an LGBT media
practitioner deliberately separating his work
from the label of “porn” in order to codify a
discrete category of “homosexual love stories”
in the late 1960s. And in her study of profes­
sionals in LGBT marketing and media, Katherine
Sender tracks how LGBT magazines such as The
Advocate became “desleazified” in the 1980s
and ’90s through removal of the sex advertising
prevalent in LGBT press since the 1970s. She
observes that for publishers, “sex ads were
perceived to reduce the quality of gay and les­
bian media, making them appear sleazy” and
less likely to sell space to mainstream advertis­
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 34
ers (Business, Not Politics 205). Sender also
notes that publishers had concerns that sex
ads would limit the venues for their magazines:
the founder of POZ magazine worried that sex
ads would endanger his magazine’s distribu­
tion in health and social service spaces, which
echoes Kathy Wolfe’s assumption that any porn
in her company’s catalog might discourage
libraries from carrying any Wolfe titles (Sender,
“Sex Sells” 341). In both cases, by managing
the categorization of their output as not porn or
sleaze (and instead associating it with quality
and respectability), these companies were able
to move more product and perform their stated
missions of continuing to serve communities in
need of information and representation.
As a strategy, mainstreaming works in two
main ways for Wolfe Video: first by establish­
ing and reinforcing “LGBT film” as a discrete
and functional category for use in distribution,
promotion, and online search, and second
by getting the product into more libraries and
retail/streaming venues. The second is predi­
cated upon the first—by consolidating the idea
of LGBT film and creating that conceptual space
that differs from pornography, Wolfe Video
opens access to wider markets and in turn en­
ables additional kinds of LGBT filmmaking by
establishing a way for films to find their way to
viewers and turn a profit. In the following sec­
tion, we’ll see how Ariztical makes use of this
category, particularly by centralizing the LGBT
content in a film with a minimal amount of it.
Ariztical Entertainment
Ariztical Entertainment was founded in Tucson,
Arizona, as a reincorporation of CEO Michael
Shoel’s previous video distributor, Phoenix
Distributors, which since its inception in 1984
had focused on low-budget horror titles. As a
company specifically focusing on the distri­
bution of independent LGBT film, Ariztical is
perhaps best known for both producing and
distributing the Eating Out series, five raunchy
teen sex comedies notable for their empha­
sis and celebration of LGBT sex and identity,
earning such reviewer descriptions as “a gay
version of Porky’s II” (Wright). But here I want
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 to look at one of Ariztical’s lesser-known titles,
one without the same degree of explicit con­
tent as the Eating Out series and which offers
an example of how paratexts and institutional
authorship help establish the meaning of a
film, especially in the film’s promotion and
reception. In the same way that LGBT catego­
rization can facilitate distribution and exhibi­
tion of texts, it can also activate a promotional
circuit. A text being “marked” as LGBT draws
attention in a variety of venues. LGBT blogs
such as Queerty, NewNowNext, Autostraddle,
Towleroad, and Huffington Post Gay Voices are
likely to cover media with any potential interest
to LGBT consumers and are sometimes even
directly connected to the media producers: for
example, NewNowNext (previously The Backlot
and AfterElton before that) is owned by Viacom,
the parent company of Logo, and Queerty of­
fers integrated advertising for LGBT products,
such as when HBO paid the blog to overtly and
covertly promote its gay-focused show Looking
(2014–15). As another example, Here Media not
only produces and distributes LGBT media but
also owns The Advocate, Out, and Pride, which
gives the conglomerate ample opportunity to
cross-promote its product. Whether directly
sponsored by or connected to the media’s
producers or not, LGBT media has a dispropor­
tionately high chance of securing coverage in
venues with highly interested audiences who
are actively pursuing certain kinds of informa­
tion. According to consumer research in 2017,
71 percent of LGBT consumers (especially mil­
lennials) reported recently visiting LGBT-specific
Web sites and blogs (CMI’s 11th Annual Survey
42). Essentially, because of the relatively few
instances of LGBT media and such media’s
“over-coverage” in niche venues, promotion for
LGBT product is more likely to get in front of the
eyes of its intended audience.
In 2010 Ariztical released Hit Parade, which
follows Archer, a retired hitman who now works
in a bookstore. He is forcefully, and improb­
ably, recruited by the covert operations arm of
the Census Bureau to take down Speed Razor,
a dangerous, unpredictable hitman. However,
Archer ends up developing sympathy for the
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 35
younger hitman and tutors him in how to refine
his methods. Although Speed Razor is a highly
idiosyncratic character and resembles a raver
from the 1990s, it is not until halfway through
the film that we learn he may actually be gay,
when he recounts a brief story of having an
affair with a married man. The trailer makes no
mention of this—more than anything, Speed
Razor is simply shown as being erratic and un­
balanced—but the trailer does make a lesbian
joke about Agent Fresno, the female Census
Bureau agent, with her fellow agent remarking
that she’s “playing for the other team.”
Fresno’s lesbian identity is winked at
throughout the film. Early in the film she is
seen talking on the phone to an unseen sig­
nificant other, whom she refers to as “Jesse” or
“Jessie,” a gender-neutral name. At one point
her fellow agent comments on her somewhat
masculine attire, a hat and a tie, and we even
see Fresno having a tense phone conversa­
tion with her mom about the fact that she and
Jesse/Jessie are living together. The cover art
for the film includes the tagline “Hitmen, cen­
sus takers & porn stars! Get in line . . .” How­
ever, in Ariztical’s own promotional venues, the
tagline is adjusted. In Ariztical’s Facebook post
about the film, the tagline is amended with
two extra words: “Gay hitmen, lesbian census
takers and porn stars . . . get in line . . .” (Arizti­
cal Facebook page, emphasis mine). And in
Ariztical’s Blogspot post announcing the DVD
release of the film, the tagline reads, “A con­
tract killer, a gay hitman and a lesbian census
agent . . . Let the parade begin!” (“HIT PARADE
Now on DVD!”). This latter tagline also appears
on the Amazon page for the film.
Reviews of Hit Parade vary in how they pres­
ent the film. In some venues, such as a zine and
a personal movie review Web site, Speed Razor
is called “flamboyant,” whereas elsewhere he
is simply described as “spazzy” or “hyperac­
tive” (Coffman; CriticNic; Gil). An IMDB user
review omits mention of Speed Razor’s sexuality
but does describe Fresno as an “angry lesbian
agent” (Lantana). Erie Gay News, a Web site
and occasional print publication targeting parts
of Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, held a
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 contest to win a copy of Hit Parade in the month
after the film’s DVD release (“Win Hit Parade
DVD”). The publication’s synopsis did not men­
tion anything gay about the film (unless one
cares to read its description of the hitman as
“out-of-the-box” as a sort of dog whistle for LGBT
readers). The only potential connection here
is that the contest posting mentions the film’s
origins with Ariztical and includes a link to the
company Web site (“Win Hit Parade DVD”). View­
ers might be familiar with Ariztical’s corporate
identity or may click on the link and learn about
it. Similarly, OutSmart Magazine, a Houston-
based LGBT magazine and Web site, includes a
review of Hit Parade without any mention of LGBT
content; only a mention of Ariztical and a link
to its site connects the movie to any sort of gay­
ness (“Hit Parade,” OutSmart). Although more
popular press paid Hit Parade little attention,
the film description that commonly appears on
mainstream Web sites such as Rotten Tomatoes
excludes any mention of LGBT content, describ­
ing Speed Razor only as “trigger-happy” (“Hit
Parade,” Rotten Tomatoes).
The most interesting example of the intersec­
tion between this film’s content and its framing
occurred in the explicit uncertainty about how
to categorize this film on the (now defunct) Web
site OutFilms. This site was managed by Ken
Sain, a former news editor at The Washington
Blade. His review of Hit Parade started with
this caveat: “I debated not including this film
because the gay content is minimal, but since
it is being distributed by Ariztical, a company
known for its gay films, I figure I should include
it.” After a rundown of the film plot, he ends the
review by writing, “The gay content is that one
of the agents from the Census office is a lesbian
and Speed Razor appears to have been in love
with his former boss. There’s also an adult film
session with two women making out” (Sain).
Here Sain explicitly engages with the com­
plications of an LGBT venue reviewing a film,
explaining his uncertainty about reviewing Hit
Parade and delivering a perfunctory-sounding
list of the “minimal” gay content in the film. Of
course, a similar curation process takes place
in other LGBT venues, such as those listed pre­
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 36
viously, but in most cases it is not broadcasted,
obscuring the processes that implicitly define
a film as “LGBT” through its inclusion in such a
context.
I asked Ariztical’s Michael Shoel about the
company’s acquisition of Hit Parade, and he
claimed it was partly due to a personal relation­
ship with the filmmaker but also partly because
the film was not likely to find distribution any­
where else, and it was a story Shoel thought
should be told. When I pressed him on whether
he would have acquired it without those two
gay characters, he said, “No. I couldn’t have
sold it. It was gay enough to be able to sell as
a gay film, yet not gay enough to be a big hit
as a gay film.” But through its association with
Ariztical, the film accessed promotional venues
that a film without any connection to gayness
would not have been able to. Because of Hit
Parade’s place under the umbrella of Ariztical’s
gay identity, assumptions are made, or at least
questions are asked, about the film’s own cat­
egorical identity. Although Ken Sain of OutFilms
explicitly describes this uncertainty about the
film’s appropriate categorization, that catego­
rization still has the effect of promoting aware­
ness of the film. And in the cases of OutSmart
and Erie Gay News, the film is simply promoted
alongside other films that we might more easily
identify as categorically “gay” of their own ac­
cord. Two sets of assumptions are at play here:
Ariztical distributes this title, so gay magazines
should cover it; and this gay magazine covered
it, so a gay viewer consuming gay media should
watch it. Both of these assumptions are based
on the institutional identities of the distributor
or press venues, which themselves are predi­
cated on such sites being identified as LGBT.
Both Wolfe Video and Ariztical Entertain­
ment have organized their corporate images
and logics around LGBTness, which helps them
navigate the marketplace and the media land­
scape. This identity has been constitutive of
these companies from day one, and everything
about their practices and self-description ef­
fectively, and profitably, connects back to that.
But as we saw in the examples at the beginning
of this article, there exists a contrary strategy
©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
7/11/18 12:07 PM
 to escape LGBT categorization for the purpose
of not limiting the potential uses and reach of a
text. Strand Releasing provides an example of
a company often associated with LGBT media
trying to navigate that identity or label, to avoid
its titles being understood as “just a film for
gay appeal,” in the words of a Strand founder
(qtd. in Anderson).
Strand Releasing
Strand Releasing was formed between Los An­
geles and San Francisco in 1989, when Marcus
Hu, then a programmer at the Strand Theater in
San Francisco, showed Macho Dancer (1988),
a Filipino film without US distribution. This film
about gay prostitution in Manila was popular
with the theater audience, which encouraged
Hu and the Strand Theater manager, Mike
Thomas, to work with Macho Dancer’s director,
Lino Brocka, to independently distribute the
film in the United States. Its success then al­
lowed Hu, Thomas, and Jon Gerrans to launch a
distribution company called Strand Releasing.
The company became associated with New
Queer Cinema through Strand’s production
(although not distribution, at the time) of Gregg
Araki’s The Living End (1992), as well as Hu’s
involvement with the famed “Barbed-Wire
Kisses” panel at the 1992 Sundance Film Festi­
val, a panel that B. Ruby Rich describes as hav­
ing “so many queer filmmakers in the audience
that a roll call had to be read” (17).
Although Strand has distributed—and even
produced—plenty of films with LGBT content
and has many cultural associations with LGBT
film, the company has always had an am­
bivalent relationship to the actual category
of “LGBT,” even in the years just following its
1989 formation: in a 1994 interview, cofounder
Marcus Hu stated, “[A] lot of filmmakers come
to us thinking that we’ll be an automatic out­
let for their films. But the thing is, we look for
quality films, and just because it’s gay doesn’t
mean we’re going to handle it. It has to be a
good movie before we’ll take care of it” (qtd. in
Lally). Strand’s relationship to “goodness” and
“badness” is itself worth analysis, but here I
want to use Strand as an example of a company
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 37
decentering the LGBT content in its films and
LGBT “identity” in its company image. Alfred
Martin calls such a strategy “queer dispersal,”
whereby rather than offering “an entirely queer
space,” an institution “offer[s] content with a
‘queer sensibility,’” possibly in response to a
disappointing return on investment in this mar­
ket (“Queer [In]frequencies” 12). Martin warns
that any assumption that “queerness no longer
needs a dedicated space, but can be sub­
sumed into mainstream spaces,” undervalues
the specificity of particular queer venues, es­
pecially for those with limited access to spaces
and institutions organized around queerness
(“Queer [In]frequencies” 14). Martin examines
an LGBT-dedicated station on SiriusXM, its
eventual dissolution, and the “dispersal” of its
queer content into other less specific stations.
Strand Releasing’s case is subtler: the company
never claimed queer or LGBT exclusivity, and
the changes I track entail discursive position­
ing rather than structural reorganization. But
in the following pages I will demonstrate how
queerness is discursively “dispersed” into and
among Strand’s image and products in order to
leave space for alternative understandings of
the company.
Although most of Strand’s early distribution
(and occasional production) practices entailed
films with LGBT content, and though the com­
pany was closely associated with the New
Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s,
by the end of the ’90s, press coverage of
Strand tended to position the company as gay-
inclusive but not categorically “gay.” A 1998
Hollywood Reporter profile of the company
described Strand’s strategy as releasing “12
pictures a year, many of them gay-themed” (B.
Gray). A 1999 Advocate article called Strand a
“gay-friendly independent company” (Griffiths).
A 1999 Hollywood Reporter write-up of Strand’s
MOMA retrospective described Strand’s LGBT
product as only one of the company’s foci,
praising its “American indies, foreign-language
films and gay-themed cinema” (“A Decade of
Strand”). Screen International deemed the
company a “distributor of risky pictures, be
they gay, foreign-language, or just daringly
37
7/11/18 12:07 PM
 independent” (Goodridge). And when Strand
cofounder Mike Thomas left the company,
Daily Variety mentioned that he was founding
LGBT-specific distributor Jour de Fete in order
“to focus solely on gay-themed pics” (Zahed),
implicitly emphasizing that this was not the
core mission of Strand—although the same
article did point out that “Hu and [cofounder
Jon] Gerrans have continued to score with
titles with homosexual themes” (Zahed). When
interviewed about his cocreation of Jour de
Fete, Thomas himself identified a transition in
Strand’s strategies, saying that in the 1990s
Strand focused less specifically on queer film
and “drifted into a broad market including
prestige art films and foreign releases” (qtd. in
Koehler).
Strand’s description of its own product
has shifted over the years. In 2000 the com­
pany Web site described Strand’s product as
“independent cinema” and “titles that have
generated tremendous national and local
critical attention in theatrical release, yet are
not considered ‘commercial’ enough to be
stocked at your local store” (“Video”). In 2002
the site’s “About Us” added queer movies to
Strand’s list of merits, albeit in a telling order.
The page first explains the company’s expertise
in “handling foreign films,” then discusses the
company’s rerelease of art and independent
films such as Contempt and The Graduate, and
only then mentions Strand’s “commitment to
lesbian and gay cinema,” alongside a list of
such titles the company carries (“About Us,”
2002 version).4 In the site’s 2003 “About Us,”
the only explicit reference made to LGBT film is
that the company won a lifetime achievement
award from Outfest (which the site explains is
an LGBT festival). Otherwise, the description
emphasizes Strand’s association with art and
cinephilia, with comments about Strand’s abil­
ity to “fuse quality art films with commercial
product,” its ten-year retrospective at MOMA,
and the company’s “prestigious library” and
“renowned international filmmakers.” This de­
scription includes films with LGBT content, such
as Frisk (Todd Verow, 1995) and Billy’s Holly-
wood Screen Kiss (Tommy O’Haver, 1998), but
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 38
the films are not categorized as LGBT or queer
(“About Us,” 2003 version). Unlike in the 2002
version, there is no paragraph specifically nam­
ing gay and lesbian cinema.
Strand has taken this approach ever since,
with an even more pared-down version since
2015 listing Strand’s specialties in “foreign
language [and] American independent and doc­
umentary films” and leaving it at that (“About
Strand Releasing”). The current “About” section
on Strand Releasing’s Facebook page keeps
it simplest: the company’s mission is listed
as “distributing the best in contemporary art
house filmmaking,” and the company’s “story”
consists only of “distributing the best in inde­
pendent, foreign and art house cinema since
1989” (“About,” Strand Releasing’s Facebook
page).
In a 2010 interview I asked Hu and David
Bowlds, then director of theatrical sales and
distribution, about the viability of a film de­
fined only by its LGBTness. Hu brought up
François Ozon’s Hideaway (2009), which the
company had recently acquired. Hideaway fol­
lows Mousse, a recovering heroin addict whose
boyfriend Louis impregnated her before he
died of an overdose, as she stays in a secluded
beachside house and is later joined by Louis’s
brother Paul, who we eventually learn is gay.
Hu said the film “has gay plot elements, but
[he] wouldn’t identify it as a gay film.” Bowlds
responded, “Which isn’t to say that that angle
won’t be exploited. But it’s a French film, from
an established gay filmmaker,” François Ozon,
two of whose previous films (each with gay con­
tent) Strand had distributed, Criminal Lovers
(1999) and Time to Leave (2005). Actual “ex­
ploitation” of the gay angle in Hideaway seems
to have been minimal: the Strand blurb for the
film does describe Paul as “Louis’ gay brother,”
but there is little else in the promotion to
emphasize any LGBT content. The US trailer
features one shot of Paul and his lover together
in a club (although with Mousse between them)
but overall more forcefully implies there might
be romantic interest between Mousse and Paul;
and indeed, she seems to exhibit mild jealousy
throughout the film before Paul, inebriated,
©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
7/11/18 12:07 PM
 initiates sex with her during the last night he
spends at the house.
Overall, Hideaway’s gay plot elements, to use
Hu’s term, are minimal and do more to color
the edges of the character study of Mousse, the
main drive of the film. But an earlier Strand film
with more significant LGBT content provides
another instance of the company’s navigation
of the “LGBT” label. Previously, I used Arizti­
cal’s Hit Parade as an example of a film with
minimal LGBT content but with paratexts and
a promotional infrastructure that emphasized
and played off this aspect of the film. An inverse
example is the Strand-distributed Wild Reeds
(1994), directed by André Téchiné, a well-re­
garded French writer-director whose recent films
have often found US distribution with Strand,
including The Girl on the Train (2009), Unforgiv-
able (2011), and Being 17 (2016). Wild Reeds,
set in the southwest of France during the Alge­
rian War, follows four high schoolers navigating
coming-of-age emotionally and sexually in a tur­
bulent political climate. The film was met with
critical acclaim and won four César Awards in
France. In the article referenced earlier, wherein
Mike Thomas attributes his founding of Jour de
Fete to Strand’s shift from queer film to “a broad
market including prestige art films and foreign
releases,” Thomas specifically cites Wild Reeds
as an example of this shift (qtd. in Koehler).
This is a noteworthy choice given the second-
billed character’s storyline revolving around his
discovery, exploration, and navigation of his
burgeoning gay identity. François fools around
with a close friend, discusses his interest in
men with several people, practices saying that
he is a pede (a French slur for “homosexual”)
in the mirror, and seeks out an older gay man’s
advice. As one of his last actions in the film, he
even asks for clarification from his friend with
whom he was intimate, trying to understand
whether it meant anything for a romantic future
together. This storyline/conflict comprises a
large chunk of the film, but for Thomas the text
is a “prestige” or “foreign” film instead of an
LGBT film.
In another interview a year after his original
comments about Wild Reeds, Thomas men­
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 39
tions the film as an example of European films
that cross over to mainstream audiences while
“includ[ing] gay relationships and express[ing]
a gay sensibility.” But here he also clarifies that
Strand “marketed Wild Reeds to a gay male
audience first, with stills and naked boys,”
and speculates that without this approach, the
film’s theatrical run would have been too short
to catch the attention of straight/mainstream
audiences (Thomas, qtd. in Foreman). The Las
Vegas Review-Journal picked up on this cross­
over strategy in a 1995 article about the market­
ing of LGBT films, in which the journalist noted
inconsistency in the framing of Wild Reeds.
The writer, Rene Rodriguez, observes that
based on the venue for the ad, the film would
be presented as “either an art-house flick or a
steamy sex romp” by the ad’s focus “on either
the good-looking cast or the movie’s high-brow
pedigree.” In this article Dennis O’Connor,
Strand’s vice president of distribution and
marketing at the time, calls these differences
deliberate: “It would be limiting to qualify [Wild
Reeds] as a gay film. It has tremendous gay ap­
peal, but to only target that audience would not
be fair to the film. There’s a heterosexual love
story there, and it has won awards, so there’s
certainly a conventional art-film audience for
this” (qtd. in Rodriguez).
How might a different distributor have cho­
sen to treat the film? In 2014 the TLA retail site,
which sells and streams films both from LGBT
distributor TLA Releasing and from other dis­
tributors, called Wild Reeds “one of the most af­
fecting depictions of gay first love ever commit­
ted to screen,” tagging it with “Coming of Age,”
“Gay,” “High School,” and “TLA Favorites” and
categorizing it within the “Drama” and “Gay/
Lesbian” genres (“Wild Reeds”). Other venues
have also centralized the LGBTness of the film:
a 1999 Advocate profile on LGBT “movers and
shakers” calls Hu a “producer and/or distribu­
tor of landmark gay films including . . . Wild
Reeds” (Kilday and Steele), and Harry Benshoff
and Sean Griffin include the title in a list of
“queer films from around the globe” in their
introduction to Queer Cinema: The Film Reader
(“General Introduction” 12).
39
7/11/18 12:07 PM
 To be clear, I am not arguing that the film is
an LGBT film or that Strand is attempting to ob­
scure this core truth about its nature, any more
than I am arguing that Hit Parade is not LGBT or
that Ariztical Entertainment and LGBT promo­
tional venues are misguidedly attempting to
cram the film in an ill-fitting category. In both
cases, I am using these films to demonstrate
both the important contribution distributors
make to how a film is popularly understood and
the variability in how a film might be “identi­
fied” based on what a particular rubric chooses
to prioritize.
Conclusion
By now I hope to have demonstrated some
of the complications of categorizing a text as
“LGBT.” As the foregoing examples illustrate,
besides being a product of deliberate and stra­
tegic discursive work, this label does not corre­
late to a neat, well-defined category into which
films clearly do or do not fit. A text’s identity is
highly contingent, able to be marshaled around
a particular “center of gravity,” and different
venues (e.g., festivals, video stores, or stream­
ing platforms) and practitioners (e.g., distribu­
tors) can choose to centralize LGBT content/
appeal or not. To repeat an argument I made
previously, even though it is easy and even
often helpful to imagine a text having some
form of LGBT “identity,” this is as fictional as
queer theory suggests that contemporary per­
sonal LGBT identity is: important, meaningful,
and not to be discounted but also highly sub­
ject to historicizing and contextualizing analy­
sis of the investments, methods, and effects of
such a categorizing choice.
When I teach students about this idea, I use
a visual example: I show a collection of objects
of varying shapes and colors, and then ask
someone how we might group them. A student
usually volunteers “by color” first, and I show
an image of such a grouping: reds on one side,
yellows on the other, and then two greens left in
the middle (with the individual shapes becom­
ing subsumed as a less-defining aspect of the
objects). When they offer the alternative “by
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JFV 70_3-4 text.indd 40
shape” rubric, I show an image of all squares on
one side and all circles on the other, leaving the
two diamonds sitting in the middle (the colors
now relegated to relative unimportance). And
sometimes, of course, the students surprise me
with an alternative rubric I had not considered. I
use this exercise when asking students to think
more rigorously about genre and categorization
because I want to help them see that although a
certain organizational strategy seems logical and
natural, it is often but one of several similarly
logical choices. This example also demonstrates
Hall’s notion about the excess that is almost
always a by-product of a categorizing choice, the
“too much” or “too little” that can never quite be
tidily accounted for in any particular organiza­
tional rubric (3).
This is one reason that attention to industrial/
production analysis is so vital for queer/LGBT
media studies. Meaning is not produced only by
creators’ choices, by LGBT content in a text, or by
viewers’ personal interactions with the represen­
tations onscreen; meaning also results from the
industrial work of packaging, promoting, fram­
ing, and naming a text. Paratexts such as these
do not just prepare us for certain interpretations
of or relationships with a text—in the case of the
companies described here, the paratexts tell us
what the text is. It’s gay, it’s queer, it’s LGBT, or
it is none of these things, and this framing of the
text activates a range of very real economic ef­
fects, as exhibition and advertising venues open
that might not otherwise be available. It is at our
peril that we scholars take for granted the idea
of an “LGBT film” and forget the important con­
tributions that industrial and production cultures
make to what soon becomes understood as the
core identity of a text.
notes
1. For examples of scholars thinking about these
parameters of queerness in media, see Doty, Making
Things xi–38 and Flaming Classics 1–21; Dyer 1–7;
Benshoff and Griffin, Queer Images 1–18.
2. For examples of queer production studies work,
see Freitas 213–33; Aslinger, “Creating a Network”
107–21 and “PlanetOut” 113–24; Kies 194–209; Gam­
son, “Gay Media, Inc.” 255–78; Farrell 26–37.
3. For examples of queer theory/history decon­
©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
7/11/18 12:07 PM
 structing sexual identity, see D’Emilio 131–41;
Chauncey 1–29; Gamson, “Must Identity Movements”
390–407; Weeks, Making Sexual History 1–14, 181–93
and “Necessary Fictions” 41–53; Katz 1–32, 57–112.
4. The films listed here were “Gregg Araki’s Totally
F***ed Up, Ferzan Ozpetek’s Steam: The Turkish Bath,
the films of Bruce LaBruce including Hustler White,
Nigel Finch’s Stonewall . . . Julia and Gretchen Dyer’s
Late Bloomers . . . David Moreton’s Edge of Seven-
teen, Lukas Moodyson’s Show Me Love, and Ana Kok­
kinos, Head On.”
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