If there are two main things that QUEERGURU cares about passionately, it is queers and cinema. So we are still in mourning over the passing of the cult periodical Little Joe, that published as a limited-edition zine from 2010 to 2021. It challenged the mainstream narrative of film history with a rebellious, queer perspective. Rather than reviewing new releases, it explored forgotten and overlooked films and celebrated a diverse spectrum of cinema 
– from obscure art films to porn to Hollywood classics – as worthy of critical debate. Stubbornly print-only, Little Joe was notoriously hard to find, privileging word-of-mouth distribution akin to the films it championed. This new volume, compiled by editor-in-chief Sam Ashby, brings together the best of its previously elusive texts and proposes a new, alternative cinematic canon drawn from the fringes of taste and style.
It features essays, in-depth conversations, short stories and archival discoveries from a host of queer and allied writers, artists, filmmakers, and academics, including John Waters, Sarah Schulman, Douglas Crimp, William E. Jones, Erika Balsom, Jeremy Atherton Lin, John Greyson, Elizabeth Purchell, Liz Rosenfeld, Peter Strickland, Ira Sachs, Terence Davies, Shu Lea Cheang, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Abdellah Taïa, Marlene McCarty, John Cameron Mitchell, Rosa von Praunheim, Stuart Comer, Ed Halter, Jenni Olson, A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, Desiree Akhavan, and Andrew Haigh.
PS. Editor Sam Ashby is also an artist and filmmaker. His first film, The Colour of His Hair (2017) was based on an examination of the Lesbian and Gay News Media Archive in London interspersed with recollections of the Homosexual Law Reform Society and a meditation on life under discriminatory law in the UK in the 1950s/1960s It premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam and won the Best Documentary prize at London Short Film Festival 2018. It features one of the very first screen appearances of Irish actor (and heartthrob) Josh O’Connor who has established himself as one of the best go-to straight actors who have given such authentic performances playing queer https://vimeo.com/198909579.
(Also in 2017 O’Connor gave a multi-award winning turn for his screen breakthrough in God’s Own County)
