Kyle Turner has always embraced the old soul archetype. When he was five years old, his mother introduced him to a movie called Bringing Up Baby — a 1930s cinema classic that finds a paleontologist played by Cary Grant getting into some quirky situations with an heiress played by Katharine Hepburn and leopard named Baby. This planted the seed for the prolific journalist’s love of film.
24 years, and several published film critique articles later, Turner would publish his comprehensive reference book The Queer Film Guide: 100 Great Movies That Tell LGBTQIA+ Stories through Rizzoli Books. While Turner tells us that the development of The Queer Film Guide, available for purchase on Amazon and wherever books are sold, began last year, as part of a commission he describes as a “guns for hire job,” Turner has been laying the groundwork for this book for his entire life. He knew by second grade that he wanted to be a film critic and historian.
“In my heart of hearts, I’m an old man,” says Turner. “I like my screwball comedies, I like my Boys In The Band, I like my Bringing Up Baby.”
Our Zoom conversation takes place in the middle of “Noirvember,” and Turner has been indulging in classic black-and-white cinema. Specifically, Marlene Dietrich films, and other works that are considered queer canon.
“I gravitate toward things that are simmering with queerness,” says Turner, “[things] that have this suggestive quality to them, where you can see where the boundaries between the explicit declaration or assertion of sexuality is slightly more under the surface and a little bit more gestured toward.”
Turner began blogging about movies when he was 13, and two years later, he would come across a call for pitches for an indie movie blog. Around that time is when he started to take film journalism very seriously. This was also around the time Turner recalls one of his earliest exposures to queer film.
Before Turner had awareness of his own queerness, he remembers being introduced to the drag queen-centric road trip comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar by his mother. Through this LGBTQ+ cult classic, Turner became fascinated by the dynamics of queer friendship.
“There’s a cognizance of the way that queer people play with each other,” says Turner. “Even as they’re roasting one another, they do it in the most elegant fashion. The way that they construct their verbal jokes is not to create an oppositional frame or anything, but I think the way that queer people roast each other has a dynamic quality to it because they’re thinking about like, ‘What can I say about this person that they know is also an indication of how intimate we are as friends?’ That’s not just like, locker room talk, so to speak, where I’m just razzing them for the most obvious thing there. It doesn’t cut deep in necessarily a cruel way.”
Another one of Turner’s early favorites is Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 romantic horror Let The Right One In, which would later get an American remake as 2010’s Let Me In. The movie, which is based on the 2004 Swedish novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, tells a story set in the ‘80s about a boy who suffers merciless bullying by his peers, and later befriends his new neighbor, who is revealed to be a vampire. In The Queer Film Guide, Turner notes that Eli, the “canon nonbinary” vampire played by Lina Leandersson, purposely had his voice dubbed “to make their gender more ambiguous.”
“When [Let The Right One In] came out in 2008, I was really indifferent about it, and I had like this chilliness about it that I didn’t really understand,” says Turner. “But then, as I was coming out, I really returned to it, and it revealed itself to me in new ways. I kind of understood why it had this sense of estrangement from the viewer. As far as like, moody horror movies go, it’s sort of an ultimate ‘if you know, you know’ feeling where you really have to have had that experience of feeling adrift or unmoored.”
As his coming out continued, Turner found himself researching LGBTQ+ film during his college years, using these works and their auteurs as reference points for himself. But oftentimes, Turner would find the same movies show up on Google-able lists. “Not that those films don’t deserve to be canonized or anything,” he says, “But I think that sometimes the problem of list making, as I’ve definitely found with [writing The Queer Film Guide], is that in list-making, there’s necessarily a form of exclusion happening. And I was hoping that if people are going to pick up my book, versus Googling all these other lists, that they would be able to find something new and interesting and off the beaten path.”
The Queer Film Guide does more than highlight films about cisgender, gay, white men. Throughout the book, which features beautiful illustrations by Andy Warren, Turner offers thoughtful synopses on American queer cinema, foreign queer cinema, trans stories, stories with BIPOC at the forefront, and women-led movies.
When putting The Queer Film Guide together, Turner went through various cinema reference books, includubg guides by queer art and culture archivist Jenni Olson. He compiled 186 movies, which he then narrowed down to 100.
The guide features a wide range of films, including Hollywood blockbusters like Jennifer’s Body and Moonlight, as well as hidden indie gems, like Saving Space and spa night. There are also other movies featured in the book that aren’t overtly queer, however, the undertones and overall messages resonate with LGBTQ+ viewers.
“I think it’s important, and it would be intellectually dishonest for me not to include movies that show diversity or a breadth of experience, because queerness can mean so many different things to so many different people,” says Turner. “So it was important for me to include things like The Watermelon Woman, next to Seed Of Chucky, next to Boys In The Band, next to Pariah, next to Tomboy. All of these different experiences of queerness are very crucial.”
Most of Turner’s favorite movies tend to be older, but he is happy to see the landscape become more diverse. Some of his newer favorites include May December, The Five Devils, and Please Baby Please. He is also willing to argue that 2022’s Fire Island, does, in fact, warrant the “modern classic status” it was given by the LGBTQ+ community.
He may also argue that 2023’s Red, White & Royal Blue wasn’t as good as most people say it is.
“They say these things are apolitical, and meant for like, the lowest common denominator, and then you hear these excuses from people who are like, ‘Yeah, we deserve our like dumb romcom too,’ And I take issue with both sides,” says Turner. “Because like, on the one hand, yes, it’s nice to have queer people being able to express and tell their stories on these platforms, but we still should demand quality. We should still demand artistic rigor from those things.”
Although these platforms often highlight these major queer releases, Turner finds that many films that are equally good, if not better, often get swept under the rug through streaming services. He recalls using Netflix circa 2014, and being able to find lesser-known gems at the top of the LGBTQ+ section — early aughts movies that would often get limited releases, or direct-to-DVD distribution. Now, much of the films in this section are either Netflix Originals, or films that already performed well at the box office.
“I find it frustrating that streaming platforms encourage the most obvious things to rise to the top more than the things that often get pushed under the radar,” says Turner. “I think we’re incentivized to not put in that effort.”
But thankfully, The Queer Film Guide does the hard work for us — immortalizing the movies that often get overlooked, and providing thoughtful synopses on their cultural impact, whether widespread or simply within the LGBTQ+ community.
“There were a lot of days spent inside just watching one movie after the other,” says Turner. “But it was with great pleasure, and I’m really thankful to have had the opportunity to share that research with people.”
