Accepting Queer Visionary Award, Todd Haynes Sees Community Under Siege

Todd Haynes sees queer and trans Americans under siege, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Haynes spoke about the current political and cultural climate for LGBTQ+ people while accepting the NewFest35 Queer Visionary Award last Thursday at New York's SVA Theater.

Queer Americans are currently living in a "culture that just seems to be becoming more infantile in every conceivable way" and that has resulted in an "open season on queer and trans bodies, identities and youth."

Haynes' latest film, "May December," hits theaters on November 17 before streaming on Netflix in the U.S. and Canada on December 1, 2023. The film stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore and looks at a relationship between an aggressive reporter (Portman) and a middle-aged woman (Moore) who, years before, had made headlines when she married a teenage boy. The film is loosely inspired by the story of Mary Kay Letourneau.

In discussing his decades-long career, which began with his controversial short "Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story" in 1978 and includes "Safe," "Far from Heaven," and "Carol," Haynes said the the queer community is once again "a besieged culture."

He continued: "We are in a terrifying time right now. I think we all know all the reasons how and why, or maybe not why but how and the examples of it; what's on top of so many aspects of what we all face environmentally and culturally, and in a sort of degradation of a culture that just seems to be becoming more infantile in every conceivable way and the politics that result in that."

He sees multiple communities under the LGBTQ+ banner under attack. "Queerness is newly fair game, and it's an open season on queer and trans bodies, identities and youth, coupled with an assault on women's reproductive health and on the way we tell our racial history, and teach our racial history in this country."

Haynes also addressed how the challenges queer people face today differ from those during the AIDS epidemic 40 years ago. "There isn't a pandemic that circulates around the panic of a queer body like there was around HIV, which gave a life and death urgency to the kinds of activism you and I were partaking in," Haynes said. "But also in a way of framing what making art or making film needs to be – a kind of weaponized moment where we all felt we needed to engage and every anything that anybody could do was needed to make change."

Haynes said it was a moment in time where the community "did make change, as a culture – as a queer culture – and we learned how activism can work in Act Up."

In discussing his films in general, Haynes said: " My films aren't about natural history, they're about social history. They're about languages that we all share and inherit. That's why I think [there's] a return to themes that are often considered natural, that my films try to revise or rewrite as pointedly artificial and that has to do with like identity and even sexual identity and gender – things that are constructed and that we all navigate within these histories."

And he hit upon a specific project, which he has previously described as being an NC-17 gay love story starring Joaquin Phoenix set during 1937 and 1938, calling the story "full of transgression."

"It's the kind of work Haynes was turned on to, in part, by listening to the music of The Velvet Underground – a band that he covered with his 1998 musical drama 'Velvet Goldmine,'" THR said.

"When I first heard the Velvet Underground music, it was like this room – this space – where it was like eating a piece of dirty candy off the floor. It made you understand that feeling the sweetness of the candy and the dirtiness were all commingled," he recalled. "What it made me want to do was make something in return. It stimulated a creative urge that had a darkness to it. That took you somewhere outside of norms and into a place where there was some element."