Review: Dyer, Richard. The Culture of Queers.

Abstract

Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies at The University of Warwick (GB), is the author of several highly acclaimed works such as Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film (1990), The Matter of Images (1993) and White (1997). His latest monograph is a collection of fourteen essays out of which only two were specifically written for this volume. The task of this collection is to present a wide range of genres, aesthetics and individuals as "cultural productions", which together help to form a notion of male queer culture before the infamous Stonewall riots in 1969. Each of these individual articles can be loosely linked to the overall historical context to which The Culture of Queers adheres. Looking at the contribution made by queer cultural production before the era of Gay Pride, Act Up and Gay Studies, their underlying queer quality, Dyer suggests, proves to have been even more coded, subversive, and isolated than its manifestations and representations nowadays are.