Little Joe: A book about queers and cinema, mostly - Sam Ashby

This volume brings together material from the cult queer cinema journal Little Joe, published between 2010 and 2021. Described by Gayletter as ‘The best damn film magazine in the whole wide world’, Little Joe is a unique forum for the discussion of film around subjects of sexuality and gender within a queer historical context. The publication’s rebellious perspective challenges our preconceived notions of film history and proposes a queer canon of cinema, frequently from the margins of taste and style.

The hard-to-find, limited-edition publication is stubbornly print-only, privileging the word-of-mouth and hand-to-hand method through which many of the films it celebrated would have primarily circulated. It rejects the typical approach of reviewing new releases in favour of exploring films that demand reappraisal, celebrating everything from obscure art films to porn and Hollywood classics as worthy of critical debate. Each issue featured essays, in-depth conversations, short stories, comics, commissioned artworks, 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, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Abdellah Taïa, Marlene McCarty, John Cameron Mitchell, Rosa von Praunheim, Stuart Comer, Ed Halter, Tobi Haslett, Jenni Olson, A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, Desiree Akhavan, and Andrew Haigh.

For the first time this now collectable and rare material will be available in a publication that also pays homage to the original DIY Risograph aesthetic of the journal.

SPBH, 2024
Softcover, 416pp
216 x 138mm