"Beautiful publicity": An introduction to queer Asian film

With a few seemingly apolitical exceptions, openly queer cinemas have gener ally charted two opposing courses-a propagandistic search for bourgeois acc eptance or a radical challenge to sexual hegemony. Yet even the most politi cally challenging of queer films, for example those of Pasolini, are nevert heless distributed and disseminated through the heteronormative and hegemon ically capitalist means they philosophically oppose. This essay thus takes as its texts two low-budget gay male Japanese films of the 1980s, which hav e been made available on international home video, as opposing examples of politicoeconomic allegories enacted within the self-reflexive contexts of q ueer cinema and gay male political history, Taken together, the two films p resent an interlocking example of how Asian queer films both engage and ref ute "Eastern" and "Western" conceptions of homosexuality and sexual politic s in general.