ABSTRACT
A sharp-witted writer-director-cinematographer, Gregg Araki is one of a few underground gay filmmakers to emerge in the 1990s. Struggling for artistic originality, Araki, a Japanese American and graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, demands that contemporary audiences negotiate with AIDS as it has come to transform gay sex into metaphors of suicide and cautions against risk, rather than just say no to male-male desire. Concerns with sexual identity, selfdisclosure, and subversiveness resonate urgently in Araki’s work, which borrows paradigmatic motifs of his predecessor, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.
