A new film sea­son is cham­pi­oning queer sto­ries from the 1990s

For the queer com­mu­ni­ty, Pride Month can often feel over­sat­u­rat­ed with rain­bows slapped on every prod­uct imag­in­able and lip ser­vice promis­ing change that nev­er comes.

Many feel the orig­i­nal pur­pose of Pride as a protest has been lost, buried beneath cor­po­rate greed. June 1972 marked the first time that queer activists in the UK took to the streets to cam­paign for equal rights, regard­less of sex­u­al­i­ty or gen­der. Since then, the protest has only con­tin­ued to grow.

To cel­e­brate a time of rad­i­cal change where queer peo­ple were start­ing to tell their own sto­ries in a pub­lic forum, cin­e­ma cura­tor Alex David­son is bring­ing eight queer films pro­duced in the 1990s to the Bar­bi­can Cin­e­ma this Pride Month.

The decade marked the begin­ning of a cin­e­mat­ic queer rebel­lion; the films in the sea­son are not only var­ied in terms of the queer char­ac­ters they por­tray, but also the coun­tries in which they were made.

Any men­tion of queer ​’90s cin­e­ma is like­ly to bring to mind Gus Van Sant’s My Own Pri­vate Ida­ho or Jen­nie Livingston’s doc­u­men­tary Paris Is Burn­ing. But this sea­son aims to change that.

Show­cas­ing films from Chi­na to Cuba, David­son says these sto­ries ​“show flawed, unapolo­get­i­cal­ly queer char­ac­ters in a decade of great change.” After many of these films were screened for the first time, he adds, ​“queer cin­e­ma would nev­er be the same again.”

The sea­son will fea­ture cel­e­brat­ed queer films along­side lit­tle-known gems. For exam­ple, 1993’s Straw­ber­ry & Choco­late from Cuban direct­ing duo Tomás Gutiér­rez Alea and Juan Car­los Tabío depicts two men who are com­plete oppo­sites yet inex­plic­a­bly drawn to each oth­er with a delight­ful over­tones of comedic camp.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tion for the queer com­mu­ni­ty in the ​’90s was not always pos­i­tive, of course. As seen in My Own Pri­vate Ida­ho, queer char­ac­ters in film would often lead trag­ic lives that end­ed with their demise. If they were lucky enough not to die before the end, these char­ac­ters’ love lives were taint­ed with the con­stant threat of being discovered.

To that end, David­son has select­ed films where char­ac­ters are able to rev­el in their queer­ness. Austria’s Flam­ing Ears, which screens on 6 June, describes one woman’s obses­sion with a red-suit­ed alien and a futur­is­tic rep­tile in a dystopi­an world.

Then on 21 June, there’s a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to see Mohamed Camara’s Dakan (aka Des­tiny). Set and filmed in Guinea, the film fol­lows two gay men who must nav­i­gate com­ing out to their par­ents in what is hailed as the first West African film to depict a same-sex relationship.

Queer 90s: Cin­e­ma from a Decade of Rad­i­cal Change will take place from 6 – 29 June. Tick­ets are avail­able now, so why not cel­e­brate Pride Month by learn­ing more about the under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed decade of queer rebellion?