It Used to be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema

Ryan Gilbey takes us on so many journeys through queer cinema in this book: personal and political, aesthetic and historical. In doing so, he charts all the big issues around LGBTQI+ representation, but most of all, gives us a fresh perspective to familiar worlds of queer film, and leads us into others that we didn't know we needed.

Gilbey’s writing casts a spell of its own. It Used to Be Witches is an absorbing, nuanced journey through queer storytelling, expansive and intimate at the same time. A magical book.

For my generation of British cinephiles, growing up in the mid-1990s and early 2000s – aka that fascinating mini-epoch when Todd Haynes and François Ozon blew us away while Van Sant and Almodóvar turned legit – there was no doubt that Ryan Gilbey was the most stylish, curious, and adventurous film critic out there, the one indispensable guide. It Used to Be Witches, an account of queer cinema that has never been written before, a gap which only Gilbey would know how to fill, offers the combination of personal feeling and analytic trenchancy – expressed with his uncanny and enviable turn of phrase – that distinguished the thousands of marvellous pieces he has written for the Guardian and Sight & Sound. It also brings historical context and political dimension – a higher set of stakes – to many of the films he taught us to love in the first place while bringing to light a whole tradition sidelined by heteronormative commercial tastes.