Welcome to Queens of the B’s

The idea for a podcast and a companion Medium publication came, as such things usually do, from a queer bitch fest. The two of us, Mark and T.J., were complaining about a young queer historian who, at the tender age of twenty-something, had managed to get his book published by a trade press and set off on a media blitz. How was it possible, we asked ourselves, that this young person had already attained a significant amount of fame and we were still largely unknown? Petty as it might seem, this question basically lit a fire under us and, after talking about it for a while, we decided that we’d start a podcast (because why not?) We knew at once that such a podcast was going to focus on queer stuff, but the question became: what kind of queer stuff?

We finally decided that our podcast should focus on those queer films that have, for whatever reasons, haven’t received a lot of critical attention or have slid into obscurity. These are, of course, largely independent and “B” films, which by their very nature seem more ephemeral and transient than their big-budget Hollywood counterparts. But these films also played a significant part in the lives of many queer people, for whom these films were often the only time that they got to see themselves represented on screen in a sympathetic light. That being said, there will also be times when we review films that aren’t independent or “bad,” canonical…