ABSTRACT
A student once said of me to a colleague, ‘Of course, Richard doesn't believe in authors – unless the author is a woman’. He or she might have added ‘black’ or ‘lesbian/gay’, but it was an acute remark. I'll happily teach The Searchers (John Ford) as a John Wayne movie about race, but as soon as it's Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner) or Car Wash (Michael Schultz) I'm wanting students to worry about whether you can tell they were directed by a woman and a black person, respectively, and how, and whether it matters. (Note already, however, the discrepancies: Ford is banished as Ford, but Arzner and Schultz come back emblematically as woman and black; then there's the unaddressed whiteness of Arzner, the maleness of Schultz, the white maleness of Ford, the sexualities of all three…) Equally most of my writing has been about images and representations, texts and readers, yet I have just finished a book on films made by lesbians and gay men (Dyer 1990), a book posited, that is, on the notion that it does make a difference who makes a film, who the authors are. In this essay I want to think through some of the implications of what that student observed, relating it to a further apparent paradox, a commitment to lesbians and gay men and an acceptance that being lesbian/gay is ‘only’ a social construction. I do this through an account of some of the problems and discoveries I had writing the book just mentioned.
