1992: The Year of Gay Films

Out Magazine
February 1992

Swoon

Do gay filmmakers have a responsibility to produce positive images of gay life?

This question, posed by lesbian media critic B. Ruby Rich, ignited a passionate discussion among gay and lesbian filmmakers at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, last month… She moderated a panel which could not have existed even three years ago, when only a handful of gay and lesbian filmmakers attended the prestigious film event. But, after the success of Paris Is Burning and Poison (both prize-winners at last year’s festival) and the commercial release of films by gay directors (My Own Private Idaho, Young Soul Rebels), gay and lesbian filmmaking is thriving.

The most outspoken participant was probably Tom Kallin, director of Swoon, slated for release in the spring. The film retells the story of the famous 1922 Leopold/Loeb case, in which two lovers who had abducted and killed a child were pumped up by the media as “homosexual killers.”

In Kallin’s opinion, when gay community leaders demand positive gay images, they are “using the same arguments as [US Senator and anti-homosexual] Jesse Helms. The notion that representations can recruit must be interrupted. Helms uses it to say that if I’m exposed to [controversial photographer Robert] Mapplethorpe’s pictures, I’m going to turn into a paedophile. Gay people use it when discussing a film like Basic Instinct, which includes a lesbian serial killer. As reprehensible as its representation of a lesbian may be, projecting the film is unlikely to provoke anti-gay violence.”

Kallin was supported by director Isaac Julien (Young Soul Rebels, OUT 15), who stated that “any discourse that demands positive imagery is part of a neo-conservative agenda,” and wondered why “we expect filmmakers to act like elected politicians. Filmmakers should not be political representatives.”

Lisa Kennedy, film editor of the Village Voice, said that the burden falls on journalists to interrupt these notions of positive and negative imagery.” Kennedy recently devoted an entire film sectionof the Voice to a debate on the representation of the gay murderer (“Buffalo Bill”) in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.

She also questioned how we go about constructing our “gay community,” which we want to see accurately and positively depicted. In her view, even if such a solidly unified community exists, we shouldn’t bother spending so much energy cleaning up our image on TV and in movies. “Everyone wants to define and assure our image through media. But, in the process, we ignore our own lives.” Several other panellists echoed her sentiment that gay and lesbian viewers should be encouraging diversity and choice instead of discipline and assimilation to mythical community standards.

In an earlier interview, panellist Derek Jarman (Caravaggio) took a stronger position. “We have to grow out of this notion of community in which everybody is equally lovely. The fact of the matter is that there isn’t a community, but the idea of one was politically very useful at a certain point in the early ’70s... I think what we can say is that, by the ’90s, we can abandon this notion because we are in a stronger position to disagree. What I find more valuable are the public battles as to how things are to be imaged and how politics are to be conducted.”

Participants did, however, express support for groups like Queer Nation, which take direct political action against Hollywood. They felt it was important to remind Hollywood that it has a special responsibility to break apart stereotypes and make fuller, deeper characters appear on the screen.

Such a project is already underway, judging by the work of the panel members. The key to their strategy involves uncovering and reclaiming gay history to create substantial and significant characters.

In the case of Swoon, Tom Kallin’s strategy is overt: gay historical figures Leopold and Loeb have been traditionally made over into heterosexual provocateurs (see Hitchcock’s Rope, based on the same case) or depraved fags (by, for example, equating homosexuality and paedophilia). By rebooting the story through his own (gay) eyes, Kallin shifts narrative attention to the complexities of the relationship between Leopold and Loeb, and away from the heterosexual who “breaks the case” (Jimmy Stewart’s characterin Rope).

Derek Jarman also reclaims and rejigs historical figures in his brilliant adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. King Edward—just a fool in love, really—is caught between an arrogant boyfriend and (turning the stereotypes around completely) completely depraved heterosexuals.

Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels reclaims an historical age rather than its personalities. For most people, the London of 1977 represents either the Queen’s Silver Jubilee or the birth of punk rock. But neither of these events historically includes the British gay black man. Julien asks what the gay black man is doing at this time, and why has he been written out of history? Young Soul Rebels finds that archetype and tells his story, reintegrating his voice into a history that has for- gotten him.

Another strategy for gay filmmakers is, in Julien’s words, “outing the gossip of gay history.” This approach takes gay lore about celebrities and puts it on film, thus legitimizing and giving substantial meaning to gay iconography. Examples include Julien’s construction of a gay paradise set during the Harlem Renaissance (in Looking for Langston) and Christopher Munch’s examination of Brian Epstein and John Lennon’s near-affair in The Hours and Times.

Poison reclaims pop cultural notions of “the construction of a homo.” Thus “A Current Affair” on spanking, spitting gang rape and “Twilight Zone” AIDS metaphors serve to remind us of how we have been contained and constricted by heterosexual society. More importantly, Poison shows us how we can reclaim the forms of the stories told about us, and transform them into our own property.

Through the power of their work, these filmmakers answer B. Ruby Rich’s initial question. Don’t demand “positive” representations of gays and lesbians; demand instead a cinema seen through queer eyes. It is finally far more subversive to integrate gay politics into the structure of filmmaking than through the interjection of one or two “nice guys” into a banal Hollywood plot.

Once we recognize that our own stories are important and substantial, the battle over our media representation becomes increasingly less urgent, and expressing our own creativity that much more. Fight Hollywood by example. Queers make movies now.