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

©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois 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 one­sheets, 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 follow­up 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 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 Maurice in 1987 because the film producers did not want these titles to premiere at an LGBT film 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. A Shelf of One’s Own: A Queer Production Studies Approach to LGBT Film Distribution and Categorization