“I got this one in middle school.”bootleg copies still circulate; and in 2003
the film made it onto Entertainment
Weekly’s list of the Top 50 Cult Movies.
In 1988, Haynes, Vachon, and another
college friend, Barry Ellsworth (who had
collaborated on “Superstar”), set up their
own company, Apparatus Productions,
in New York. The goal, according to
Vachon, was “to change people’s percep-
tion that ‘experimental’ was synonymous
with ‘excruciating.’” In the late eighties
and early nineties, the aids epidemic in
New York was nearing its peak. “Our
lives were so defined by that kind of death
and fear,” Vachon recalled. “It felt like
we were constantly going to memorial
services.” Haynes became a founding
member of Gran Fury, a group of artists
who devised visual campaigns for ACT
UP, and he was acutely aware, he said,
“of how gay people with H.I.V. were
being depicted by the media.” He started
to examine the cinematic tropes of other
forms of “deviant” behavior—the out-
cast, the castigated, the criminal. He was
trying to locate “the ways that our cul-
ture orients the insider and the outsider
through our storytelling,” he told me,
adding, “These are not benign practices.”
The result of this inquiry was “Poi-
son,” which Haynes co-edited with his
then lover Jim Lyons, who also acted in
the film and later edited and co-wrote
the story for Haynes’s “Velvet Gold-
mine” (1998). A daring, irreverent trip-
tych, “Poison” is organized into discrete
segments—“Hero,” “Horror,” “Homo”—
in each of which society rejects the main
character and destroys his sense of
belonging. “Hero,” which is shot in
faux-documentary style, tells the story
of a troubled seven-year-old, who killed
his father for abusing his mother, and
then apparently flew out an open win-
dow. His escape plays as an ironic day-
dream of romantic transcendence, ele-
vating him from the stigmatized to the
sanctified. In “Horror,” filmed in black-
and-white, a scientist invents a sex-drive
potion. When he drinks it himself, he
becomes an incarnation of contagion,
his skin mottled with oozing pustules,
a walking embodiment of alienation
who disgusts himself and others. Re-
jected, spat on, enraged, and enraging,
he is hunted and finally cornered in his
apartment, where he jumps to his death
from a fire escape in front of a gawping
crowd. “Homo,” which is shot in color,
reverses the angle on otherness. Draw-
ing on Jean Genet’s work, it depicts a
lyrical, elliptical gay prison romance inwhich transgression is embraced as a
weapon against cultural convention, “the
ink that gives the white page a mean-
ing,” as Genet wrote.
At the 1991 Sundance Film Festival,
“Poison” beat out movies by Stephen
Frears and Richard Linklater to win the
Grand Jury Prize. “He has restored my
faith in youth,” John Waters said of
Haynes, who at thirty became the poster
boy for the budding queer-cinema move-
ment. Haynes said, “The thing I dug
about New Queer Cinema was being
associated with films that were challeng-
ing narrative form and style as much as
content. It wasn’t enough to replace the
boy-meets-girl-loses-girl-then-gets-girl
with a boy-meets-boy version. The tar-
get was the affirmative form itself, which
rewards an audience’s expectations by
telling us things work out in the end.”
He went on, “Queerness was, by defini-
tion, a critique of mainstream culture. It
wasn’t just a plea for a place at the table.
It called into question the table itself.”
Inevitably, a graphic rape depicted in
the “Homo” chapter of “Poison,” and a
“gobbing scene”—a ritual humiliation
in which prisoners spit into another in-
mate’s open mouth—got the movie into
political hot water. The Reverend Don-
ald Wildmon, of the fundamentalist
Christian group the American Family
Association, brought it to the attention
of some members of Congress, who then
protested the twenty-five-thousand-
dollar N.E.A. grant that had made it
possible for Haynes to finish the film.
Haynes found himself drawn into an
ongoing congressional debate about gov-
ernment funding of the arts. He ap-
peared on “Larry King Live” and other
talk shows to defend himself and artists
in general against the right-wing out-
cry over taxpayers’ money being used
to fund art that offended public sensi-
bilities. A special screening of “Poison”
was held in D.C. for senators and their
spouses. An editorial in the Washing-
ton Times afterward declared Haynes
“the Fellini of fellatio.” “A proud mo-
ment!” Haynes said.D
espite his new acclaim and the fact
that “Poison” turned a profit, it took
Haynes four years to raise the million
dollars he needed to make his next fea-
ture, “Safe.” A restrained, masterly tale
about a rich San Fernando Valley house-