The queer(ed) hotel in film

This article asks after alternative genealogies that might appear, through the lens of Hollywood and arthouse cinema, if one were to trace queer (non) belonging in relation to the hotel rather than the closet. For sexual margin-dwellers, the hotel room has historically served as a haven, but the availability of the hotel room for non-normative intimacy also signals the transience of this connection, offering hope against the backdrop of the inevitable endpoint, the checkout time. Such a conjuncture that both invites and thwarts possibility means that the hotel room is ontologically a queer space, even before queer subjects come to occupy it. Once they do, however, the queer(ed) hotel room is
charged with ambivalence, both comically and tragically, constituting a Foucauldian ‘heterotopia of deviation’ that is weighted by the melancholic affect of holding onto a disappearing moment in the face of future uncertainty.
Tracing these spaces across four backward-looking films – Some Like It Hot, My Own Private Idaho, Desert Hearts and Carol – this article argues that the queer-(ed) hotel room is a site where something thrillingly illicit can happen or at least be dreamed of, even though – and precisely because – this dream can never be
brought ‘home’.