Queer Intimacy and the Impasse: Reconsidering My Beautiful

Laundrette

Vinh Nguyen

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Volume 48, Number 2,

April 2017, pp. 155-166 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2017.0018

For additional information about this article

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 ariel: a review of international english literature
Vol. 48 No. 2 Pages 155–166
Copyright © 2017 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Calgary

Pe r s p e c t i v e s

Queer Intimacy and the Impasse:

Reconsidering My Beautiful Laundrette
Vinh Nguyen


Abstract: This essay reconsiders the queer interracial relationship
in Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears’ seminal film My Beautiful
Laundrette (1985). Rather than analyze the romance between the
main protagonists as a national and personal union that resolves
complex racial issues, I argue that Omar and Johnny’s relation-
ship makes room for the possibility of connection and contact,
however fraught and tenuous, without denying histories of racial
violence or flattening out forms of difference. As an “impasse”
(Berlant), their queer relationship suggests the potential for coex-
istence that does not offer reconciliation between the nation and
racialized subjects. Through a reading of the film, I suggest that
intimacy is not broken by the accommodation of past and present
racial injury within its plane of desire. Instead, queer desire defers
interracial resolution but does not deny the possibility of intimacy,
of something yet to come.

Keywords: Black British cinema, South Asian diaspora, queer


sexuality, interracial relations, affect

Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

concludes with a scene of queer sensuality in which Omar lathers soap
on Johnny’s bare chest before the two playfully splash each other with
water in the back room of the laundrette they operate together. The
distinctive bubbling music of the movie’s soundtrack is heard before
a door closes to conceal the lovers from our prying eyes. While critics
initially praised the film for its groundbreaking depiction of race and
sexuality, scholars have subsequently interpreted this final note of queer

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pleasure and presumed coupling as a foreclosure of the film’s transgres-

sive potential. The gay interracial relationship between Omar, a British-
born Pakistani entrepreneur, and Johnny, a white working-class punk,
has been read predominantly as a relationship that unites, as a “clean”
romance of racial and national union. Commenting on this relation-
ship generally and the final scene specifically, Gayatri Spivak writes
that the queer potential is “kept in one place: the development of the
solution to interracial problems” (83). While recognizing the lyricism
of the gay relationship, Spivak finds it to be more “overtly didactic”
than Kureishi and Frears’ later film, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987):
“So the protagonist says he doesn’t want to fight and gets beaten up.
And then at the end you have all the splashing-water ablution with the
music welling up as dirt is erased, so they are cleansed” (83). Spivak’s
dismissal of the film’s ending identifies the moment of intimacy as one
in which a sense of resolution is achieved, as if the cleansing of dirt and
blood from queer bodies is symbolic of or tantamount to the erasure of
a history of racism, contemporary racial and class tensions, and other
forms of difference.
The kind of reading that ascribes a reconciliatory politics or amnesic
historicity to the queer interracial romance in the film fails to consider
the complex ways in which queer desire and race intersect; it fails, in
effect, to consider the potentialities of queerness. In her analysis of the
film, Gayatri Gopinath argues that “the barely submerged histories of
colonialism and racism erupt into the present at the very moment when
queer sexuality is being articulated. Queer desire does not transcend
or remain peripheral to these histories but instead it becomes central
to their telling and remembering” (2). Rather than producing a sense
of closure or a healing of the wounds inflicted by colonialism and
racism, the queer desire shared between the two main protagonists cre-
ates space—a kind of corporeal, sensorial opening—for painful pasts
to be acknowledged and remembered. It is a space in which such pasts
may have bearing on (but not prevent) present intimacies. Queer desire,
then, enables a melancholic relation to the past that does not “let go” of
the injury of racism so that everyone involved can “move on.” Yet how
do melancholic attachments to, or “eruptions” of, racist histories and

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racial grief affect the development of interpersonal, romantic intimacy?

In framing this crucial problem raised by the film, Alexandra Barron
writes that it explores “how individuals, and by extension communi-
ties, can connect in spite of the violence, resentments, and past wrongs
which threaten to divide them” (15).
I argue that Omar and Johnny’s “union” does not bring about an un-
complicated reconciliation—personal, national, or otherwise. Instead,
it makes room for the possibility of connection and contact, however
fraught and tenuous, without denying or flattening out the messiness—
overlapping violent collisions, tender moments, past grief, present pain,
and future feelings—of an encounter. Their queer relationship suggests
the potential of coexistence (and, perhaps, even love) that does not offer
solutions to racial issues. Intimacy is not broken by the accommoda-
tion of past and present racial injury within its plane of desire. Rather,
queer desire defers interracial resolution but does not deny the possibil-
ity of intimate propinquity. It resembles what Lauren Berlant calls an
“impasse,” where lived temporality has no “narrative genre” or prede-
termined ways of articulating/being-in the present. She writes: “[A]n
impasse is a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out
into anxiety, that dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain
obscure. An impasse is decompositional—in the unbound temporality
of the stretch of time, it marks a delay that demands activity. The activ-
ity can produce impacts and events, but one does not know where they
are leading” (199). As a “temporary housing” (Berlant 5), the impasse
is a site of pause (but not stagnation) that does not guarantee what is
or will be. In thinking through Omar and Johnny’s relationship as an
impasse, I suggest that ordinary interactions of affection and quarrel,
love and struggle, and allegiance and betrayal between two individuals
do not aggregate to produce forms of ontological certainty or narrative
teleology. The two men coming together can be seen as a temporary but
not insubstantial relation, an attachment that is always in negotiation.
Omar and Johnny occupy a queer impasse in which there is a holding
out for something as yet undetermined, where pleasure does not cancel
violence and “together” does not mean “one.”
In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed argues that heterosexuality

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promises to overcome the injury or damage of racism. The ac-

ceptance of interracial heterosexual love is a conventional nar-
rative of reconciliation, as if love can overcome past antago-
nism and create what I would call hybrid familiarity: white
with color, white with another. Such fantasies of proximity as
premised on the following belief: if only we could be closer, we
would be as one. (145)

Heterosexual interracial union can thus come to symbolize the easing of

racial tensions and the promise of multicultural happiness—the fantasy
of a harmonious nation. Racialized (and often feminized) subjects, and
by extension their communities, gain access to and share in prescribed
national ideals through proximity to and romantic intimacy with
“proper” white national subjects.1 It is presumably the reproduction of
this heterosexual narrative of national union, albeit in the guise of a
homosexual relationship, that some view as a weakness in My Beautiful
Laundrette. Spivak’s critique of the film, for example, claims that “the
gay love had all the kind of erotic furniture that one associates with ro-
mantic heterosexual love” (82). Echoing Spivak, Rahul K. Gairola writes
that “the young mens’ [sic] desires, in some ways, invoke the ending of
a heteronormative ‘happily-ever-after’ ending” (46). This prevalent line
of interpretation, which reads Omar and Johnny’s homosexual relation-
ship as replicating the structures and characteristics of heterosexuality,
understands their relationship as one in which the imperial nation and
the postcolonial subject come together in a sort of conjugal relation that
reconciles the racist past with an enlightened, multicultural present. The
relationship’s queer or transgressive potential is consequently limited by
its resemblance to a kind of heteronormativity (or homonormativity)
that underlies the concept of legitimate nationhood.
However, arguments regarding the homonormativity of the film’s in-
terracial romance, or what Jasbir Puar calls “homonationalism,” are too
quick to make the link between the lyrical ending, with its promise
of capitalist success and romantic pleasure, and forms of normativity
without taking into account the fact that Omar’s desire is directed spe-
cifically at Johnny, a queer, punk, working-class subject marginalized by

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the emerging forces of neoliberalism that shaped discourses of belong-

ing and national citizenship in Thatcher-era Britain. In other words,
the postcolonial Pakistani subject does not pledge allegiance to an ideal
neoliberal British subject. To come close to Johnny is not to be “one”
with the British nation of the 1980s. Johnny cannot guarantee Omar
social belonging because he himself does not possess such an unmiti-
gated privilege. To read Johnny as a stand-in for the nation and the
dominant white group elides the implications of his class and sexual
positioning and how they might complicate the alignment of white
subjects with the nation-state. Indeed, the film opens by underscoring
the precarity that marks Johnny’s material condition: Salim, a business
associate of Omar’s uncle, and his black henchmen drive Johnny and
his friend Genghis out of an unoccupied tenement building. Johnny’s
material circumstances—his homelessness, unemployment, association
with a delinquent skinhead gang, punk aesthetics, and queer sexuality—
disrupt any uncomplicated attempt to figure him as representative of
British whiteness in relation to Omar’s postcolonial otherness. It bears
remembering that whiteness is not discrete, but works in conjunction
with other identity categories such as class, gender, and sexuality to ac-
quire its purchase.
Furthermore, Johnny eventually rejects the white supremacist ide-
ologies and claims to the nation that his skinhead friends assert against
racial others as a way of ameliorating their economic and social mar-
ginalization. In one scene, the gang confronts Johnny and questions
him about his economic (but not romantic) involvement with Omar.
Genghis, one of the gang members, asks him: “Why are you working
for them? For these people? You were with us once. For England . . .
I don’t like to see one of our men groveling to Pakis. They came here
to work for us. That’s why we brought them over. OK? . . . Don’t cut
yourself off from your own people” (Kureishi 38). Genghis’ comments
reveal how Johnny had once subscribed to notions of white domination
and believed that he unproblematically belonged in England because of
the whiteness of his skin. However, such an understanding of citizen-
ship is no longer tenable for Johnny as he realizes that his class alter-
ity precludes full participation within the economic and socio-political

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economy of Thatcherite Britain. Johnny replies to Genghis: “It’s work. I

want to work. I’m fed up of hanging about” (Kureishi 38). Interestingly,
his association with Omar and the opportunity for wage labour that
it provides brings Johnny, the white subject, closer to the neoliberal
nation. Interracial romance in the film demonstrates how whiteness is
not the only or primary force of national affiliation; rather, proximity to
capital can be an important means of moving toward (and fulfilling) the
“happiness” imperative of national belonging (Ahmed).
The economic dimension of Johnny’s decision to enter into a part-
nership with Omar, and, according to his friends, “switch sides,” points
not only to the class privilege Omar possesses but also to the com-
plicated power dynamics that mark their relationship. Just as Johnny
cannot be neatly made to represent the white nation, Omar cannot
stand in for the marginalized black population in Britain. Omar’s sub-
scription to neoliberal tenets—like his uncle Nasser and Salim, who are
good entrepreneurial subjects—makes him a more desirable capitalist
citizen and brings him closer to the nation proper. While this close-
ness does not guarantee unconditional belonging, it is different from
Johnny’s working-class positioning. Omar tells Johnny: “I want big
money. I’m not gonna be beat down by this country” (Kureishi 51).
His capitalist aspiration suggests that one way for racialized subjects to
avoid being “beat down” by England is to partake in and profit from
the nation’s quickly privatizing economy. The film suggests that class
and economic success can mitigate the forces of racial control and
racism that structure British colonial and national governance. The
racial power dynamic is reconfigured as Johnny becomes dependent
on Omar for economic survival—Johnny is less a partner than a paid
employee in the laundrette venture. In the same scene in which Omar
describes his economic ambition to Johnny, after Johnny had left the
laundrette on its opening day to go drinking with his “old mates,” he
also says: “When we were at school, you and your lot kicked me all
around the place. And what are you doing now? Washing my floor.
That’s how I like it. Now get to work I said. Or you’re fired!” (Kureishi
51). In response, Johnny silently acquiesces to Omar’s command and
returns to work.

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This telling scene conjures up past moments of racial injury that

Omar continues to carry with him. It thus illuminates another aspect of
Omar’s entrepreneurship: economic success as a way to address experi-
ences of racial grief. For Omar, the power accrued through the posses-
sion of capital in the present moment becomes a way of correcting the
inequality of the past. Capital affords Omar the possibility of seeking
“revenge” on those who once “kicked him around.” In the role of busi-
ness owner, Omar sees an opportunity to upturn the colonial relation-
ship of white master and colored servant, a desire that Franz Fanon
describes as marking the psyche of colonized subjects. In the same
scene, Omar forcefully grabs Johnny while ordering him to get dressed
for work. The violence of Omar’s action is fueled by a history of hurt
and made possible by money. Johnny’s silent compliance with Omar’s
vengeful command is a complex response to racial resentment. Johnny
must follow Omar’s orders because he is economically dependent on
Omar, but I suggest that his acquiescence is also a recognition of the
painful and long-lasting effects of racism. Johnny’s wordless compliance
displays a perception of how racism can harm racialized subjects like
Omar, similar to how neoliberalism renders Johnny and his working-
class friends economically precarious. His compliance can be read as an
acknowledgement of his racist actions and their detrimental impact on
Omar. Johnny’s response is not to defend himself or deny his racist past
but to reach out for physical intimacy. The close-up shot, immediately
after the exchange, of Omar’s face in profile and Johnny’s approaching
body from behind (at one point their heads seem to merge) visualizes
the queer intimacy that Johnny seeks to establish in a moment of ten-
sion and pain. Intimacy becomes a response, a way of addressing but not
resolving racial violence and grief.
In My Beautiful Laundrette, moments of racial violence and recollec-
tions of the pain that this violence produces precede moments of queer
intimacy and physical touch. A pivotal scene in the film dramatizes the
function of queer intimacy in the midst of grief. On the opening day of
the newly renovated laundrette, Omar and Johnny are excited to reveal
the space to the public as well as to members of Omar’s family. As a
crowd of customers gathers outside to await the grand opening, the two

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men retreat to the back room, where a two-way mirror allows them to
see into the laundrette while concealed from view. Johnny wants to let
the customers in, but Omar refuses to do so until his Papa arrives. The
conversation then takes a turn to the past and Omar recounts how racist
events, in which Johnny is implicated, have impacted his family. Omar
walks away from Johnny, stares into the distance, and asks:
What were they [Omar’s white friends] doing on marches
through Lewisham? It was bricks and bottles and Union Jacks.
It was immigrants out. It was kill us. People we knew. And it
was you. He [Papa] saw you marching. You saw his face, watch-
ing you. Don’t deny it. We were there when you went past.
Papa hated himself and his job. He was afraid on the street
for me. And he took it out on her [Omar’s mother]. And she
couldn’t bear it. Oh, such failure, such emptiness. (Kureishi 43)

While Omar is talking, Johnny slowly walks over to him, rests his face
against Omar’s shoulder, and wraps his arm around him. He takes off
Omar’s jacket, inserts his hand underneath Omar’s button-up shirt, and
gently caresses his chest. Omar sighs, closes his eyes, and leans his head
backwards. The camera lingers for a few seconds before cutting away.
As Omar articulates the psychic pain that haunts him and his family,
Johnny, who had a hand in causing it, employs physical touch as a re-
sponse (but not a solution) to that pain. The scene suggests that the
psychic pain of others can be addressed not through verbalization but
through a corporeal intimacy that makes room for such pains to be
articulated, felt, and received. Johnny does not apologize to Omar or
respond with words to explain away and relegate his racism to the past.
As the two make love, Johnny whispers to Omar: “Nothing I can say to
make it up to you. There’s only things I can do to show that I am . . .
with you” (Kureishi 44). Physical intimacy does not absolve Johnny’s
guilt or shame. It does not, as do many personal and national apology
narratives, imply that he is a changed man free of prejudice and racism.
Rather, Johnny’s touch attempts to create space for (sexual) pleasure
alongside the pain of racial grief, as if intimacy might somehow amelio-
rate the intensity of that pain but not erase it completely from memory.

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In this scene, touch is a form of “being with” that does not require
or demand progress(ion)—a moving on and away from history—but
allows for a moment of recognition and understanding in which some-
thing else might be made possible.
Indeed, after the lovemaking scene in the laundrette, Omar’s pain-
ful past erupts again in the scene (mentioned previously) in which he
forces Johnny to return to work. As noted, Johnny once again responds
by seeking closeness and physical touch. In this way, queer intimacy is
not an equivalent to heterosexual union or a form of proximity that
heals and submerges the past. Instead, its contingency opens up the
possibility for a type of propinquity and contact that allows for com-
plex histories, power dynamics, and desires to be negotiated rather
than simply explicated or dramatized for us on screen. My Beautiful
Laundrette is conscious of this difference between heterosexual and
homosexual relations. In contrast to the heterosexual, interracial ro-
mance that Nasser and his white mistress, Rachel, represent, Omar and
Johnny’s queer intimacy does not provide any sort of visible or visual
reconciliation. While Omar and Johnny make love and, I argue, ne-
gotiate history, unseen in the back room on opening day, Nasser and
Rachel waltz and kiss in the front of the laundrette, on display for all
to see. In this moment of parallel interracial romances, the heterosexual
one makes visible, for the national public, a narrative of happy union
between white and other. While their affair is complicated by Nasser’s
marriage and Rachel’s class position, and cannot be viewed as fully “le-
gitimate” in the eyes of the nation, the heterosexual aspect of their rela-
tionship allows it to be displayed as a kind of unification. On the other
hand, Omar and Johnny’s private (but not closeted) act of queer inti-
macy resists public display and the narration of national union—they
prefer to see rather than be seen.
Instead of functioning as “an allegory through which communities in
conflict are united in the figure of a romantic union” (Barron 9), Omar
and Johnny’s queer intimacy is a fraught negotiation of multiple iden-
tificatory positions, allegiances, and histories that does not foreclose the
possibility of coexistence and intimacy despite difference. In the scenes
directly preceding the final one in which the two men wash each other,

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Johnny is badly beaten by the gang of skinheads as he comes to Salim’s

rescue. Omar returns to the laundrette to pull him away from the brawl.
In the back room, Omar tends to the bloody wounds on Johnny’s face,
and they have the following exchange:

Johnny: I better go. I think I had, yeah.

Omar: You were always going, at school. Always running
about, you. Your hand is bad. I couldn’t pin you down then.
Johnny: And now I’m going again. Give me back my hand.
Omar: You’re dirty. You’re beautiful.
Johnny: I’m serious. Don’t keep touching me. (Kureishi 68)

In one of the film’s many reversals, Johnny becomes the injured victim
in a situation of racial violence. It is Omar’s turn to seek intimacy and
touch as a response to Johnny’s physical pain. It is also in this moment
that Omar recalls another memory of Johnny—not one of racial grief,
but of youth, joy, and playfulness. Omar remembers Johnny as a dy-
namic, “hard to pin down” young man whose magnetism continues
to draw him in. The memory does not cancel out the one of Johnny
marching in anti-immigrant protests, but it does provide a more com-
plex account of a man who is, in Omar’s eyes, both “dirty” and “beauti-
ful.” It demonstrates how queer intimacy accommodates complicated,
often divergent moments and memories and enables the critical remem-
brance and entangling of painful and joyous pasts, racism and desire,
and hurt and empathy.
Before the final scene, Johnny walks into the laundrette, which is scat-
tered with broken glass, and stares out the window. Omar comes up
behind him, holds him, and gently kisses his neck. The tableau visually
recalls an earlier moment in the same location, but this time the figures
are reversed. The gesture again illustrates how Omar also employs touch
as a way of “being with” the pain that Johnny experiences. The final
spoken words of the film—“Don’t keep touching me”—reject physi-
cal intimacy, while the final visual frames reassert its possibility. Erin
Manning reminds us that touching is “not simply the laying of hands”
(xiv). Rather, touch “is the act of reaching toward, of creating space-
time through the worlding that occurs when bodies move” (xiv). For

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her, touch is a relational sense, creating the processual body as it forms

that which is being touched and makes present a field of becoming and
possibility. Omar and Johnny’s act of touching can be seen as a building
of “space-time” for co-dwelling. This “worlding” of “being with” is both
intensely private, between two men, and capaciously social, seeking to
accommodate the histories that tear them apart, bind them together,
and make possible the conditions of their togetherness. Touch does not
simply occur in the impasse; rather, it creates the very temporality and
spatiality of the impasse. The playful splashing of water marks the final
scene as a site of erotic potentiality, where touching is a temporary home
that does not demand immediate answers to complicated personal and
socio-historical questions.
Queer intimacy in My Beautiful Laundrette cannot be easily assimi-
lated into the narrative of “happy” national union, but it also does not
foreclose the possibility of togetherness and coexistence. Instead, the
film presents a “being with” that can account for contradictions and
contingencies—its “happy ending” holds tensions, and its intimacy
is temporary and without guarantees. In his assessment of the film,
Stuart Hall praises My Beautiful Laundrette’s nuanced representations
of blackness:

My Beautiful Laundrette is one of the most riveting and im-

portant films produced by a black writer in recent years and
precisely for the reason that made it so controversial: its refusal
to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-
contained, sexually stabilized and always ‘right-on’—in a word,
always and only ‘positive’, or what Hanif Kureishi has called,
‘cheering fictions.’ (449)

While this assessment was written just a few years after the film’s release,
it is worth invoking because Hall articulates the need for a different
critical lens through which to view a film like My Beautiful Laundrette,
a lens that does not seek easy conclusions but instead sits with the dif-
ficulties of race and sexuality. Hall’s praise of the film reminds us to keep
reconsidering the details and impasses embedded in the film that might
destabilize our impulse to read for closure and certainty. It challenges

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us to see, in retrospect and differently, the queer potential in Omar and

Johnny’s relationship.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Chandrima Chakraborty and Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz for
their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes
1 “Proper” in this instance signifies that whiteness is not the only criterion for
national belonging, but that it requires intersections with the “right” kind of
sexuality, class, and politics to stand in for the nation.

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