WWU’s Greg Youmans Awarded $50,000 Grant from Creative Capital for Book Project

WWU Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies Greg Youmans was awarded a $50,000 grant from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation to support his book on queer filmmaking in the 1970’s San Francisco Bay Area.

Youmans’ book, with the tentative title “Something New Under the Sun: Bay Area Queer Filmmaking Across the 1970’s,” traces different filmmakers’ approaches to queer documentaries and experimental films during that time. He chose to focus on the Bay Area in the 1970’s because it was the first decade to witness a massive eruption of openly queer lifestyles.

Youmans said he got the idea for the book from other projects he was worked on in the past. In graduate school he wrote a dissertation about queer cinema in the 1970’s, and in 2011 he published a book about the pioneering 1997 documentary “Word is out: Stories of Some of Our Lives.” For this book, he is building off of both of these ideas with the emphasis on the Bay Area specifically.

 “It tends to go that way for me; I have trouble letting go of ideas. I just go deeper and contextualize them,” Youmans said.

Youmans applied for the grant in May 2017. Youmans said he had heard about the Creative Capital grant for a number of years before applying for the first time. He said when he applied he doubted he would actually receive the grant.

“It is a great honor because it is an organization that I know and respect. Creative Capital really supports the arts,” Youmans said. “A lot of books that have had a big splash were funded by the grant, and the organization is known for its support of visual artist and filmmakers.”

The grant will allow Youmans to take one or two quarters of leave to focus exclusively on finishing the book.

Youmans is very interested in the topic of queer cinema,  specifically activist and experimental representation of queer people by queer filmmakers. He said he finds it interesting toc chart the changes in queer representation over the course of his own lifetime.  

“There are always queer media makers who are trying to keep radical and transgressive queer content in the public eye, and I’m really interested in that current and tracing it historically in the US from the 1960s to the present,” Youmans said.

Youmans teaches multiple film studies classes on queer topics, including LGBTQ+ cinema and a transgender film and media studies course. He also tries to integrate queer cinema into his other film studies classes.

With Chris Vargas, an assistant professor of Art and Art History, he also hosts a monthly film series called “The Queen’s Vernacular” at the Pickford Film Center.

“We show all sorts of films but it does lean toward the non-mainstream. We are trying to nurture that community on campus as well,” Youmans said.

For more information on his future book, contact Youmans at greg.youmans@wwu.edu