Introduction: There Is Something about Richard Dyer

Abstract

Introduction:There Is Something about Richard Dyer Lisa Henderson (bio) To Cinema Studies Friends and Comrades: I write to introduce you to a collection of epistolary essays on the work of Richard Dyer, prepared on the occasion of his retirement from King's College London. Few scholars have considered as many topics in cinema and media studies as Dyer, or with as much depth and love—love for film and its history, for audiences of all stripes, for the endeavor of cinema scholarship, and for colleagues and their work. Dyer's published scholarship has ranged from light entertainment and the history of stardom to film song, serial killers and seriality, and especially pathbreaking and sustained work as a founding author (in English) of gay film studies. Throughout, he reveals the rich mix of affect, form, and world, whether in the slippery and overwhelming power of whiteness, the delicacy of male genitalia in porn (a genre typically condemned as indelicate), the expressive complexity of pastiche, or the vaporous whimsy of an eye line. His oeuvre and presence have enriched our field for forty years. This collection of letters, some of them addressed to Dyer, all of them about him, his presence in the field, and his work, emerges from a 2016 Queer Caucus panel at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Atlanta. That occasion was not the first time SCMS had recognized Dyer; he received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award in 2007. But the retirement of a broadly read and beloved colleague brings with it new forms of recognition, new feelings and reflections, and renewed solidarities. Our Atlanta panel sought to crystallize that evolution since 2007, and this collection—epistolary, [End Page 148] classic, fanciful, personal, and lived—is our archive. We thank the Queer Caucus and our Atlanta cosponsors.1 Victor Fan and I asked contributors to condense their comments in the form of a letter, to preserve the embodied feeling of the occasion and speak to how Dyer has touched our own scholarship, training, and teaching, sometimes up close, other times from a distance. Some of us, like B. Ruby Rich and Thomas Waugh, fought and taught with Dyer in the trenches of early gay and lesbian film studies, gripping their copies of Gays and Film or Dyer's Jump Cut essay "Homosexuality and Film Noir" as queer talismans that might help "connect our life and work," to quote Rich (in this collection).2 Even at a distance, across generations, nationalities, genders, and race, reading Dyer felt close, as Miriam Petty writes of her encounter with Dyer's work on black stardom and whiteness as a graduate student in Atlanta in the early 2000s. Petty's recent monograph Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood is exemplary evidence of that solidarity and inspiration.3 In her letter, Petty notes Dyer's attunement to representations of race in films in which race was not the dominant theme. In his reply, Dyer uses everyone's letters to think about how queerness enters his work whether or not he's writing about queerness. Intersectional attunement surfaces in Petty's contribution, Dyer's reply, and the collection overall. Louis D. Bayman and Ryan Powell share the honor of having formally been Dyer's advisees as doctoral students at King's in the 2000s. Both write now as appreciative peers. Dyer hears (and credits) insight wherever it comes from, on campus or off, and counts on his students-turned-colleagues to keep him current on the expanding range of directions in which they, or we, take his work. It is a sustained circuit of expertise and regard in the commons of cinema scholarship. For Bayman, a recent graduate assistant for Dyer's course on serial-killer films, that commons turns out to be a bloody basement, expertly appreciated! For Powell, it is a contemporary expansion of Dyer's classic analysis of the image of the homosexual as a sad young man. As readers of this collection will notice, there is a premium on affection in that commons, one that most authors here attribute at least partly to the felt character of Dyer's work, his mode of address...