This engaging and experimental book explores the complex politics of LGBTQ+ representation in film

For the British film critic Ryan Gilbey, “cinema and sexuality have always been as closely intertwined […] as the stripes on a barbershop pole”. His new book is a bricolage of memoir, criticism and interviews with film-makers that explores the personal and political dimensions of this coupling. It opens with the author in Venice, preparing to give a lecture on cinema; writing in the third person, Gilbey describes himself as the “Gustav von Aschenbach of easyJet”, a reference to the ageing, lustful composer from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (played by a moustachioed Dirk Bogarde in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation). Gilbey identifies with Aschenbach only because he remembers how his own once-hidden sexuality devitalised him: the closet “render[ed] him elderly before he had so much as touched puberty”. He employs the third person off and on throughout the book. Thinking of yourself as a fictional character, he says, is an “occupational hazard” for any film enthusiast. It can also be a survival technique for anyone queer, creating a distance between yourself and a hostile world.

It Used to Be Witches ranges from the early 1980s – when “queerness in film started to become a commercial possibility” – to the present day. Its chapters centre on box office hits such as Call Me By Your Name, beloved independent films such as Chantal Ackerman’s Je Tu Il Elle, and less well-known releases. Thanks to Gilbey’s journalistic skills, his interviews with film-makers (François Ozon, Andrew Haigh and Peter Strickland among them) are engaging even if you are unfamiliar with the material. These conversations include illuminating observations on the art form (Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s remark that “film is a parallel life that keeps intersecting with real life”, for example) but Gilbey keeps the dialogue tethered to the book’s central questions: what is the history and future of queer cinema? How should queerness be represented on film? What, exactly, does “queerness” signify today? The voices he has assembled provide diverse answers, testimony that is valuable precisely because it is so often in disagreement.