There exists a particular species of cultural memory that lives not in archives but in the body’s own recall—the sensation of watching something forbidden in a room full of strangers, each person isolated by darkness yet united in transgression. Ryan Gilbey’s It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema begins in this territory of furtive spectatorship, where the act of looking became inseparable from the act of survival.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
Gilbey came of age in Essex during the 1970s and 1980s, when queerness existed primarily as subtext, encrypted in gestures and glances that only certain viewers could decode. He recalls staying awake for Derek Jarman films broadcast late on Channel 4, or making pilgrimages to London’s Scala cinema, that gloriously disreputable temple where forbidden images flickered across screens sticky with spilt drinks and the residue of previous audiences. The director Terence Davies once described attending a 1961 screening of Victim, Basil Dearden’s thriller in which Dirk Bogarde played a barrister ensnared in blackmail. The film reportedly contained the first utterance of the word “homosexual” in British cinema. “You could have heard a feather drop,” Davies recalled. “That word was never used in England. Never!” Even decades later, watching these films felt like an act of trespass.
The landscape has shifted considerably. Daniel Craig, who embodied James Bond with heteronormative authority for a generation, now appears in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer without apparent controversy. Festivals devoted to LGBTQ cinema proliferate. Directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Haynes, and Céline Sciamma command the respect accorded to established auteurs. Films including Tár, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Emilia Pérez accumulate awards with the regularity of dividend payments. For many, this represents cultural revolution—visibility transformed into validation.
Gilbey approaches this triumph with ambivalence. “Subtext is now text—and greater visibility can feel like a diminished presence,” he observes. His book, structured as memoir, criticism, and interview, resists conventional taxonomy. He writes occasionally in the third person, describing himself in Venice as “the Gustav von Aschenbach of easyJet”—a reference to Thomas Mann’s ageing composer in Death in Venice, played by Bogarde in Visconti’s 1971 adaptation. The device creates deliberate distance, acknowledging how queer survival often required constructing oneself as fiction, a character observed rather than inhabited.
The book’s strongest passages emerge from conversations with contemporary film-makers who articulate competing visions of representation. Jessica Dunn Rovinelli makes a compelling case for what she terms “anti-aspirational” queer cinema, arguing that communities deserve the right to portray themselves as “vile subjects” rather than perpetual paragons. “If we can only exist as the best versions of ourselves,” she contends, “we will die.” This position collides directly with calls for “queer joy”—a phrase that has acquired something approaching liturgical status in certain quarters. When the 2023 psychological thriller Femme, depicting brutal homophobic violence, premiered at the Berlinale, transgender director Harvey Rabbit publicly condemned it during a post-screening discussion, potentially affecting its distribution prospects. Gilbey identifies the paradox: “A well-meaning liberal aversion to the dramatisation of trauma” can align uncomfortably with “a right-wing tendency to police or nullify challenging queer material.”
The book occasionally suffers from what might be called the collector’s affliction—an impulse to catalogue every relevant title and director, producing sections that resemble annotated filmographies rather than sustained argument. The persistent metafictional commentary (“What he intends to do in this book…”) creates distance where intimacy might serve better. Yet Gilbey’s fundamental insight remains persuasive: the cinema functions as what he terms “a kind of IV line” for queerness, delivering sustenance when other sources proved unavailable or unsafe.
He quotes the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s observation that “film is a parallel life that keeps intersecting with real life”—a description that captures cinema’s peculiar utility for those whose actual lives required encryption. The dark auditorium offered not merely entertainment but epistemology: a space where desire could be acknowledged, if only through the intermediary of projected light. Whether that space retains its potency now that queerness has migrated from subtext to text remains the book’s unresolved question—one that visibility alone cannot answer.
★★★★
It Used to be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema by Ryan Gilbey is published by Faber & Faber, €17.
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