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

A kaleidoscopic history of LGBTQ+ cinema . . . written in a tone mixing the poetic, the slangy and the scholarly, the playful and the introspective . . . Gleefully surprising . . . Frank, often funny and sometimes moving . . . [a] glittering multiplicity of perspectives.

In his sparkling new book [Gilbey] describes films as evocatively and trenchantly as readers would expect from one of the best film critics around.

One of the chief joys of It Used to be Witches is how leftfield it is, not just in its inventive hybrid form, but in Gilbey’s choice to shine a torch in the less obvious areas of the queer film canon . . . A splendid book.

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.

Ryan Gilbey offers the combination of personal feeling and analytic trenchancy – expressed with his uncanny and enviable turn of phrase – 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.