Before the movement had a name
Hammer had been making openly lesbian films for nearly twenty years when New Queer Cinema was named in 1992, the year of Nitrate Kisses.
When critic B. Ruby Rich named New Queer Cinema in 1992, she was describing a wave of defiant, formally inventive films about queer lives. Hammer's work since the early 1970s had been doing exactly that, on a fraction of the budget and visibility.
Nitrate Kisses, released that year, digs into a history that had been destroyed or never recorded. The movement would make that argument its own.
Historical context