OUTRAGEOUS! was the paradoxical paving stone of Canadian queer cinema in the Seventies, spurned by The Body Politic and embraced by The Toronto Sun, the low-budget sleeper that could only make it in Canada when it had made it in New York – just like its drag queen protagonist Robin. A showcase for the understated brilliance of first-time director, Richard Benner, and the over-the-top brilliance of its star Craig Russell (who would both fall to the HIV pandemic in 1990), OUTRAGEOUS! fully deserved its exclamation mark. On the occasion of this thirtieth anniversary, this talk will show how it was the right film in the right place at the right time, English Canada’s CASABLANCA. I will dissect this ultimate feel-good movie about schizophrenia, stillbirths, roommates, self-hating hairdressers and artists-in-exile, and situate it within the first decade of the Canadian “industrial” feature film industry, within the urban landscape that Toronto gays were reshaping in the decade of the Spadina Expressway, and within the utopian and sometimes doctrinaire exhilaration of queer politics and culture in the decade of Anita Bryant. – Thomas Waugh
Thomas Waugh is Professor of Film Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. He has published widely on political discourses and sexual representation in film and video, on queer film and video, and on Canadian cinema. His books include The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (Duke University Press, 2000) and The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
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