Jack Babuscio, Gay News and the Development of Gay Film Criticism

Moor, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7691-638X (2023) Jack Babuscio, Gay News and the Development of Gay Film Criticism. In: Film Critics and British Film Culture: New Shots in the Dark. Edinburgh University Press. (In Press)

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Abstract

In this 7000 word chapter I analyse for the first time in academic work the relationship between emerging gay film criticism in the 1970s and the political dynamics of the Gay Movement, to argue that this mode of professional journalistic writing gives fresh historical evidence that helps us better understand the way that same-sex politics took shape during that vital decade. Engaging both with canonical queer academic writing and with a range of published material in the gay press, I show how some of the crystalised templates for how the Movement developed give too tidy and linear an understanding of this moment of discursive foment. Important issues relating to identity politics, minoritarianism, universalism, oppositional radicalism and assimilation inform the criticism I attend to. By taking Gay News and the extensive writing of Jack Babuscio as a case study I bring material to the reader's eye that has never before been written about in an academic context within film studies.