Obsessed with sex yet haunted by mortality, the early films of Los Angeles icon Gregg Araki are among the most daring works of the New Queer Cinema. Like other independent filmmakers of that 1990s movement, Araki messed with the homophobia dominant in America—insulting clichés, persistent taboos—and told uninhibited, often outrageous stories of queer life. Rejecting the policing of...