Introduction

The book’s introduction proposes that film programming, the practice of selecting and grouping films to be exhibited for a specific venue and expected audience, assembles disparate texts into a network of interrelations. US film programming or curation between 1968–1989 marshalled together what have been deemed deviant subjectivities, animating historical publics hungry for nonnormative perspectives on gender and sexuality. A range of deviant practices that include but are not delimited by LGBT identities were regularly on the menu at urban repertory and art house cinemas: sex work, intergenerational desire, interracial desire, fetishism or “paraphilia,” “swinging” or nonmonogamy, bondage, domination, and sadomasochism (BDSM), and other stigmatized forms of desire and gender experience filled the screens. The introduction lays out the book’s argument that, by way of intertextuality, post-1968 art house programming created coalitional bonds among these interrelated though distinct outsider or misfit types and experiences.