Little Joe: A book about queers and cinema, mostly

This well-built little tome is a cinephile’s wet dream in 512 lilac-tinted (& minty poison-green) pages. It features “the best bits” from a host of queer and allied writers, artists, filmmakers, and academics. It delivers an abundance of “gloriously impure cinephilia,” saluting the erotic & esoteric, the sinister & the steamy, the saucy & the melancholy, the darkly glamorous & the wildly desperate. The offerings range from low-brow, no-budget trash masterpieces and camp/queer/underground avant-garde works to LGBT porn pearls, foreign arthouse gems, and “Saturday matinee eye-openers.” Give it to someone you love. — Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store.

The cult periodical Little Joe, published as a limited-edition zine from 2010 to 2021, challenged the mainstream narrative of film history with a rebellious, queer perspective. Rather than reviewing new releases, it explored forgotten and overlooked films and celebrated a diverse spectrum of cinema – from obscure art films to porn to Hollywood classics – as worthy of critical debate. Stubbornly print-only, Little Joe was notoriously hard to find, privileging word-of-mouth distribution akin to the films it championed. This volume, compiled by editor-in-chief Sam Ashby, brings together the best of its previously elusive texts and proposes a new, alternative cinematic canon drawn from the fringes of taste and style.

This volume features essays, in-depth conversations, short stories and archival discoveries from a host of queer and allied writers, artists, filmmakers, and academics, including John Waters, Sarah Schulman, Douglas Crimp, William E. Jones, Erika Balsom, Jeremy Atherton Lin, John Greyson, Elizabeth Purchell, Liz Rosenfeld, Peter Strickland, Ira Sachs, Terence Davies, Shu Lea Cheang, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Abdellah Taïa, Marlene McCarty, John Cameron Mitchell, Rosa von Praunheim, Stuart Comer, Ed Halter, Jenni Olson, A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, Desiree Akhavan, and Andrew Haigh.

2024; paperback; 5.4 x 8.5 inches; 512 pages; ISBN: 9781739606763.