The work of new queer documentary is often invoked, without clear distinctions, as forming a part of the movement labelled by B. Ruby Rich in 1992 as ‘new queer cinema’ (commonly abbreviated to NQC).
This paper aims to rethink a characterization of new queer documentary (or NQD) as a kind of sub-genre or sub-development within NQC and instead suggests that queer nonfiction filmmaking—while playing a central role in, and intersecting with, the emergence of NQC—evolved out of its own distinctive relations to the traditions of the documentary form its commonly-held social functions. As our own post-truth era intensifies pressures on documentary’s status as an established—as well as long-contested—authoritative factual medium, my approach stresses not just NQD’s ‘queerness’ in relation to mainstream or normative cinematic productions of the late-1980s and 1990s, but its complex interactions with perceptions of objectivity, factuality, and truth in media that have been uniquely associated with the documentary form.