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Strand Releasing
Strand Releasing was formed between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1989, when Marcus Hu, then a programmer at the Strand Theater in San Francisco, showed Macho Dancer (1988), a Filipino film without US distribution. This film about gay prostitution in Manila was popular with the theater audience, which encouraged Hu and the Strand Theater manager, Mike Thomas, to work with Macho Dancer's director, Lino Brocka, to independently distribute the film in the United States. Its success then allowed Hu, Thomas, and Jon Gerrans to launch a distribution company called Strand Releasing. The company became associated with New Queer Cinema through Strand's production (although not distribution, at the time) of Gregg Araki's The Living End (1992), as well as Hu's involvement with the famed "Barbed-Wire Kisses" panel at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, a panel that B. Ruby Rich describes as having "so many queer filmmakers in the audience that a roll call had to be read" (17).
Although Strand has distributed—and even produced—plenty of films with LGBT content and has many cultural associations with LGBT film, the company has always had an ambivalent relationship to the actual category of "LGBT," even in the years just following its 1989 formation: in a 1994 interview, cofounder Marcus Hu stated, "[A] lot of filmmakers come to us thinking that we'll be an automatic outlet for their films. But the thing is, we look for quality films, and just because it's gay doesn't mean we're going to handle it. It has to be a good movie before we'll take care of it" (qtd. in Lally). Strand's relationship to "goodness" and "badness" is itself worth analysis, but here I want to use Strand as an example of a company decentering the LGBT content in its films and LGBT "identity" in its company image. Alfred Martin calls such a strategy "queer dispersal," whereby rather than offering "an entirely queer space," an institution "offer[s] content with a 'queer sensibility,'" possibly in response to a disappointing return on investment in this market ("Queer [In]frequencies" 12). Martin warns that any assumption that "queerness no longer needs a dedicated space, but can be subsumed into mainstream spaces," undervalues the specificity of particular queer venues, especially for those with limited access...