READING BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

Putting together a syllabus for a course at Dartmouth - Queers, Queens, and Questionable Women: How Hollywood Shaped Post-War GLBT Politics and Vice Versa - Michael Bronski was amazed "at not only how brief, and fast moving, the history of specifically queer criticism has been, but also how protean it has been." His brief history begins with "the brilliant, and now largely forgotten by younger queer writers and academics, Parker Tyler," and takes Richard Dyer, B Ruby Rich and Vito Russo into consideration on his way to the present: "Academic queer film studies now finds itself in the sometimes awkward position of responding both to a need to continue to professionalize its work as well as to wrestle with the changing state of the market, which is now utterly different than it was a decade ago, never mind three decades. This cultural shift is, to varying degrees, apparent in the three volumes of recent queer film writing under review." And they are: The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers, The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows and Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film.