I Know Where I'm Going!

I am humbled by the company in which I find myself in this tribute dossier, not to mention by its subject. But it offers the perfect context to convey the unique combination of the scholarly and the sociable that characterizes Richard Dyer’s contribution to the field. “Friends of Richard,” like “Friends of Dorothy,” is an imagined, everexpanding community. In Critical Visions, the film theory anthology I coedited with Timothy Corrigan and Meta Mazaj, Richard Dyer is the best-represented author, with three selections: from White, from Stars, and his 1976 classic, “Entertainment and Utopia”––much of which I know by heart: “To call attention to the gap between what is and what could be, is, ideologically speaking, playing with fire.” None of these was dispensable. Indeed, many other papers, essays, and book excerpts by Dyer were candidates for inclusion in that anthology for their centrality to the field and their promise of relevance for future generations learning film “theory.ˮ As important as their standing in intellectual history, however, is their affective power. I have very personal relationships with Dyer’s texts: with my Xerox of “Lana: Four Films of Lana Turner” from Movie, acquired long ago through interlibrary loan; with the stamp inside the front cover of Gays in Film from Cinemabilia, New York’s legendary, long-shuttered secondhand cinema bookstore; with the broken spine of Now You See It, after years of teaching from it; with prose that seems to express my secret self. And these cherished artifacts have pictures: I traced the image from the cover of Gays in Film to publicize a screening of Olivia ( Jacqueline Audry, 1951) for the feminist film society I ran in college, and smiled that he’d chosen that image of Sal Mineo for the cover of The Matter of Images. It was Dyer’s work that linked scholarship to affective life for me as a young queer feminist scholar; the privilege of his friendship keeps this alive for me today. My feminist film theory bona fides go back to