Fuck-Scripting: Becoming-Queer in Interior. Leather Bar

Abstract

This chapter focuses on James Franco’s and Travis Mathews’ Interior. Leather Bar. (2013), which purportedly adapts a sequence from William Friedkin’s 1980 film, Cruising. This queer adaptation is an experimental docu-fiction that uses “fuck-scripting” to blur boundaries between documentary and fiction and between performance and identity. The film relies on the queer sensibilities of filmmakers and cast to reify “becoming-queer,” a term connoting queerness not as a particular fixed sexuality but as a transformational state where citizens adapt to something strange and unfamiliar through watching and reading queerness. This chapter examines the role of Interior’s scripts in connection with shifting norms of queer visibility, arguing that explicit queer sex is not only a useful storytelling tool, but also a tool for increasing queerness horizontally across cultures.