When his class on queer cinema was listed under three different
course names, film Professor Chon Noriega expected confusion and a
high drop rate. As it turned out, only the first turned out to be
true.
“The first quarter the class was offered, there were 110
students enrolled, and up until that point there had never been a
gay/lesbian course larger then 20 people,” Noriega said.
“I knew there had been some kind of mistake.”
Noriega discovered that through some kind of schedule mix-up,
the course had been identified as three separate classes ““ a
genre class, a gay and lesbian film course, and a class on Chicano
film.
“I had three groups of students all there for different
courses. What I did was explain to everyone what had happened and
described the range of films that we would be discussing in the
class and told the students that if this was not what they had
signed up for, they were free to leave,” Noriega said.
To Noriega’s surprise, his class ended up being almost the
same size as it had began. Just three students dropped after the
description of the class.
“I thought we ended up with such an interesting group
since for many of them, this class wasn’t something they
normally would have taken. They were taking a leap into something
they didn’t know or understand much about, and that takes
bravery,” Noriega said.
Noriega was the first professor to teach LGBTS 187, “Queer
Hollywood,” which started in spring 1998. With the help of a
group of graduate students (who later went on to become teaching
assistants for the class), two years were spent obtaining grants
and developing the course material.
The curriculum focuses on how gay and lesbian characters are
portrayed in cinema and also how gay and lesbian filmmakers portray
themselves.
“We looked at early silent films, Westerns and
exploitation films, then switched over to looking over at more
independent and experimental work done by gay and lesbian
filmmakers,” Noriega said.
Now, after a three-year hiatus, the queer cinema class will be
again taught in the fall by Kristin Hatch, who is one of the
original graduate students who helped develop the course. The
course has now been shaped to explore the seemingly contradictory
relationship between Hollywood cinema’s reinforcement of the
ideal of heterosexual monogamy and queer spectators. The study and
recognition of queer cinema has since rapidly expanded, but at its
core, the course still reflects the pioneering spirit of the
original class.
“I had a number of grad students interested in this area
and there had never been a course like this offered before, so this
was not only a way of offering a new undergrad course, but also a
way to train grad students to teach this type of class at other
universities,” Noriega said.