Imagining Television as a Vital Queer Medium: <i>Riot</i>

Abstract The Australian gay liberation movement has been memorialized on-screen only relatively recently, with the production of the self-described telemovie Riot (dir. Jeffrey Walker, Australia, 2018). A fictional narrative based on the real-world activism that led to the first Sydney Mardi Gras, Riot authenticates the relation of its story to historical events in part by giving its characters the same names as some of the more prominent activists organizing in the seventies. Yet what is most striking about Riot is the way in which it privileges another kind of historical agent—television—in its story of queer activism. This article considers the significance that Riot accords television as a public, historically conscious, family-oriented, and nation-building medium that converges with and enables gay activism as well as new forms of sexual subjectivity and self-expression. Between its opening framing as televisual event and its riot sequence, the telemovie privileges television's past and future capacity to both document and dramatize historical events and also to broadcast queer visibility to the nation. Through its collage of archival effects and codes of liveness, Riot transmutes the televisual into a timeless medium of public vitality absorbed by its queer characters and made available to its contemporary queer audiences. Thus Riot, via its discourse of television, seeks to guarantee not only a narrative of liberal progress of public visibility and queer human rights, but also the existence of queer selves and communities—that is, queer social lives—across time and across generations.