1Laura Stamm’s study of the New Queer Cinema that developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s—The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era—offers compelling insights into queer filmmakers’ turn to the biopic to respond to the AIDS crisis. At first, following Stamm’s argument, the notion of a specifically queer biopic may seem incongruous. The biopic genre represents one of the earliest and most recognizable film genres, almost to the point of seeming passé. Stamm’s strategy in placing the queer biopic within this historied genre is thus a novel one. The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era offers valuable insights into the biopic genre, the contribution of the queer biopic to the genre, and a new understanding of New Queer Cinema and filmmakers’ response to the AIDS crisis.

2Stamm’s purpose is, foremost, a corrective one. She notes film studies scholars’ and film critics’ failure to appreciate the biographical films of the New Queer Cinema as part of the biopic genre. Some examples of such films include, among many others that Stamm covers, Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which was made using Barbie dolls, Tom Kalin’s retelling of the Leopold and Loeb case, Swoon (1992), and Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986). Stamm aims to identify the possibilities inherent within a tradition that is often perceived “as an inherently conservative, closed-off cinematic form”; queer filmmakers were able to strategically co-opt and redeploy the biopic as a means of “sustaining life” during “a time of queer life’s fragility” (4). Stamm effectively proves that, by relegating the biopic genre to cliché and conservativism, critics and scholars have overlooked the “biopic’s importance in the proliferation of radical queer films” in the AIDS era (14). Following these correctives, Stamm probes the New Queer Cinema filmmakers’ motives for making these biographical films. In channeling life stories, biopics preserve those lives, an exigency that was particularly salient, even imperative, at the time. Thus, the AIDS crisis created the conditions that inspired, and perhaps necessitated the turn to the biopic.

3The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era begins with a detailed but concise overview of the biopic genre more broadly before delving into the queer biopic specifically; this study blends disparate critical or scholarly foci, including film studies, public health and biomedical history, psychoanalytic theory, feminist history, and queer theory, among others. For example, Stamm explicates the entangled history of biopics and public health discourse. Queer filmmakers took advantage of that connection by challenging and co-opting the biomedical lenses that had long marginalized or stigmatized queer bodies, which was further heightened during the AIDS crisis (18-20). This multifaceted approach gives important depth and comprehensiveness to this study. Stamm describes the structure of The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era as a “set of case studies”; as she explains, each chapter is structured around a filmmaker’s (or sometimes filmmakers’) “drive to take up the biopic genre” (15). This structure allows Stamm to tailor her discussion to the given filmmaker while identifying commonalities or links between these filmmakers in support of her argument. Importantly, Stamm’s approach to these various filmmakers’ concerns are connected by a sympathetic and personal insight into their projects; often, this study centralizes the emotionally charged motives for the turn to the biopic. Broadly, as Stamm proves, the biopic was a means to reimagine community, to redefine queer selfhood, to construct a lineage and to recreate a queer past, and to memorialize lives lost. This turn was precipitated by unbearable loss; the act of preservation—of lives, of stories—offered by the queer biopic becomes a means to process, but not presume to do away with that loss and trauma.

4Thus, the biopic presented a useful tradition for appropriation by queer filmmakers. Stamm qualifies that some, mostly mainstream biopics focused on LGBTQ subjects—e.g., Milk (2008) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013)—have replicated the conservative, normalizing functions traditionally ascribed to the biopic genre. For Stamm, the queer biopic is anti-assimilationist, open to radical identification and community-formation, welcoming of figures with “damaged” or imperfect lives, and not shy about sexual specificity and desire. Importantly, Stamm expands her study to other filmmakers who have not been included in the New Queer Cinema canon or lineage. For example, the final chapter focuses primarily on contemporary multimedia artist Kia LaBeija. Stamm deftly connects LaBeija’s autobiographical work as an HIV-positive queer Black woman with the PWA (People with AIDS) photography that was commonplace in mainstream media during the height of the AIDS crisis. In doing so, Stamm not only expands the scope of New Queer Cinema and its influence, but also underscores that the “AIDS crisis is a moment that is still with us today and cannot be quarantined to the past” (14). This expansion of the New Queer Cinema and its legacy is one of this study’s most important contributions.

5Beyond providing a new understanding of and appreciation for the biopic genre more broadly, The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era highlights the important contribution of the New Queer Cinema filmmakers to the genre; this study, by extension, also offers a new lens by which to perceive the project of those filmmakers. Thus, this study provides an engaging intervention in the definition and historiography of this important movement in film and the milieu from which New Queer Cinema emerged. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it offers a greater insight into the exigencies of the AIDS crisis itself and the way those imperatives profoundly shaped queer cultural practices in the decades since. Stamm concludes with an almost utopic statement on the queer biopic and its continued usefulness: “The biopic provides a form for queers of the past and future. In the queer biopic, we can become anything” (156). The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era channels that potential, giving credit to filmmakers who radically co-opted a genre that seemed foreclosed to queer lives and stories.