Gregg Araki’s erotic thriller The Doom Generation (1995) has become somewhat of a queer crucifix. Set in a world where 3 months is considered a long term relationship, the film follows Jordan (James Duval), a sensitive, puppy-boy who is overly eager to please his perpetually dissatisfied mistress Amy (Rose McGowan). During a Slowdive make out sesh, the couple encounter Xavier (Johnathon Schaech) nicknamed ‘X,’ a bisexual reimagining of James Dean, and are pulled into his amorous orbit. They soon configure into a friends-who-fuck trio, with Amy at the head of the sexual altar. 

Out of Araki’s entire ‘Teenage Apocalypse’ trilogy, The Doom Generation is the least gay. Despite Jordan and X’s intense gazing, which pleasure and penetrate deeper than the penis ever could, homosexuality is never actualized onscreen. Sweat and fluid miscegenate only between man and woman. But to call this a straight film since no gay act occurs completely misses the point. The poly-fluid relationships, ‘platonic’ male touches loaded with subtext, Amy’s femdom experimentation with anal fingering — all speak to the film’s non-fixed idea of sex and gender, untethered from the restrictive dynamics of heterosociality. It is so flamingly queer. This is precisely what earns Araki’s vision its progressive appeal; The Doom Generation understands that queerness does not exist solely in opposition to being straight, and to essentialize gayness as men sleeping with men or women sleeping with women fails to apprehend the complexity and contingency of desire. 

Later in the film, a murderous blunder in a convenience store results in a beheading, a cash register that reads 666, and the trio’s names on a wanted list. Only seventeen, Amy, Jordan, and X thus become outcasts, hopping around motel to motel, and burning around L.A in a beat-up, vintage car. In many ways, The Doom Generation feels like the 60s/70s travelling beatnik film restaged in a queer terrain. Except, unlike Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Pierrot le Fou (1965), which are set before the omnipresence of neoliberalism, there is no end destination for Araki’s cabal of misfits. For miles, the only sights are gravelled industrial sites or empty parking lots — decayed landscapes which embody the eeriness of being a postmodern subject.

The intersection between criminality and marginality is a recurring theme. After the threesome flee the crime scene, a television broadcaster hypothesizes that the murder was likely committed by “homosexuals, satanists, and members of other dangerous cult groups.” The fact that queerness is mentioned in the same breath as Satan says a lot about how homophobia is generated in America, a white Christian-nationalist state, where being gay is conflated with being a sinner, and sexual liberation is framed as antithetical to what God is or represents. The moral panic surrounding queerness stems from an atavistic fear of the Devil, claims Araki. But rather than beating homophobic stereotypes, his characters embrace them. Amy, Jordan, and especially Xavier are ‘bad queers’: criminals, recalcitrant, ultra-selfish, hedonistic, uncouth, tawdry, feckless, slutty, addicts. They are every bible-thumper's worst nightmare. The three horsemen of the apocalypse. Not only do bad queers make for better (and hotter) cinema, but their aberrance is also deeply political. Being deviant means languidly basking in the margins, enjoying the shade in which queerness has been cast; it is to disregard, rather than assimilate to, the disciplinary rules that govern the heterosexual mainstream. From such irreverence comes the total freedom to be one’s truest self.

As with Araki’s other films, The Doom Generation is highly stylized. Saturated colours, plastic sets, deadpan performances which draw attention to itself, a blitzkrieg of pop culture references, and layers of irony and satire makes for an unmistakingly 90s post-punk viewing experience. The excess here is also uniquely queer. Whereas John Waters, Araki’s personal idol, popularized an iteration of camp which is florid and flamboyant — think chintzy wallpapers and queeny lisps — the sensibility here is one of the same. Edgier, no doubt, but still theatrical and playful in contrast to the ‘serious’ cinema being pumped out of heterosexual arthouse circles. 

The only time Araki’s campy veneer drops is near the end of the film. Amy, Jordan, and X are in the middle of a threesome when the lights abruptly go off. When they flicker back on, a band of white men, chests smeared with red swastikas, menacingly emerge from the darkness. Suddenly, the tone shifts from excitement and lust into one where that very eroticism becomes a source of fear. One of the belligerents lays down an American flag, on top of which he brutally rapes Amy to the beat of the national anthem. When he finishes, he grabs a pair of shears and violently attacks Jordan to death. The entire scene feels like a homage to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), an elliptically edited film about a homophobic assault between sailors. The implication in both films, obviously, is that there is a reactionary overlap between empire and prejudice. 

The film was released during the height of the AIDS epidemic, which is briefly alluded to at the beginning sequence: just before having sex with Amy, Jordan expresses his fear of being infected. The simple exchange is incredibly illuminating given that, for starters, it is a cisgender heterosexual couple who are perturbed about HIV/AIDS. During an era where the virus was widely considered a ‘gay illness’ — a statement which is medically untrue — Araki’s depiction projects the fluidity of the epidemic and, as such, subverts the revolting narratives used to ostracize LGBTQ+ communities. 

It is indeed a reality that many queer timelines have been cut short by AIDS. HIV is a retrovirus, meaning it compromises and insidiously controls the very body it attempts to destroy. Thus when T-cells attack, they not only kill the virus but the living vessel as well. It is the body’s attempt to save itself that results in its demise. Similarly, the disinformation surrounding AIDS in the 90s, and to this day, assumes that queer promiscuity is at the root of the epidemic: it is solely because gays, in the throes of lust and passion, have sinful sex that results in their deaths.

The Doom Generation’s ending challenges this crude assumption. It is not gays who kill each other, but rather the intolerant that do; the ones who withhold medical care, who socially ostracize the ill, or even, as the film so damningly declares, murder queer bodies before sickness can even take hold.