Gay Cinema Comes Out of the Closet

There’s always been a gay cinema – but, like much of gay and lesbian culture, it’s been largely unknown and virtually invisible.

But within the last decade, gay cinema has gone from being an underground presence to holding a lead position on the art house and film festival circuit. This weekend, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which sparked the gay rights movement, three of the most acclaimed – and, in some cases, the most controversial – gay documentaries of the past year will be presented in an inadvertent marathon of the New “Queer” Cinema.

Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sex Is… and Fast Trip, Long Drop are radically divergent works, but they share a common defiance of a decrepit taboo on gay and lesbian culture that still simmers behind the right-wing cultural wars of the ‘90s.

A few pockets of society still decry the very existence of gays and lesbians, let alone the expression of their various lifestyles. Not surprisingly, this position has been historically supported in many aspects of our society, including the movie industry. Section Two, line four of the Motion Picture Production Code (adopted in March, 1930) simply states: “Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.” Though the word “perversion” was changed in 1961 to “aberration,” the extensive and exclusionary meaning of these few words banned the subject of homosexuality from the American screen for nearly 40 years. Or at least it tried. The Production Code policy was a form of tyranny that was occasionally overcome by filmmakers’ cleverness and the industry’s stupidity.

During the 1930s, such foreign films as Maedchen in Uniform and Vampyr were able to slip lesbian subplots under the low radars of the censors through a combination of vague suggestiveness and difficult symbolism. In Hollywood, Marlene Dietrich got to wear men’s clothes and kiss the ladies in Morocco, as long as it was a ploy to attract Gary Cooper’s attention. But it took the B movie Dracula’s Daughter to extensively breach the code, as the title femme fatale expressed a surprisingly strong interest in bohemian lifestyles and other women.

But the gay subterfuge of old Hollywood was never more than a slightly subversive crack within the stonewall of straight mainstream pictures. It wasn’t until the American experimental movement of the 1950s that some major fissures surfaced in the national sexual zeitgeist. The overt homosexual subject matter that dominated the movies of such avante-garde filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, James Broughton and Jack Smith forced the issue to the forefront through a combination of shock (Scorpio Rising and Flaming Creatures) and lyrical artistry (The Golden Position).

Despite their limited audiences, these experimental movies gradually influenced Hollywood. “The mainstream always co-opts what is fashionable in the avante-garde,” observes Melodie Calvert, Assistant Curator of Media at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Scorpio Rising, in part, became the inspiration for the drive-in hit The Wild Angels, which in turn helped to promulgate the leather-and-chain biker look.

The emergence of the gay rights movement in the ‘70s created a political agenda as well as a sudden sense of public visibility that helped to pave the way for such ground-breaking documentaries as The Word is Out and Gay U.S.A.. The idea that being gay was a social statement struck like a lightning bolt in dim parts of the film industry. Such independent-themed features such as Lianna and Deserts Hearts were mild at best, but they succeeded in making their subject viable at the box office.

“But in the early ‘80s, there still weren’t that many gay features around,” explains Calvert. “It was with the AIDS movement that the gay community became very active and, in the process, they made the independent circuit more open to gay film making.”

Ironically, the grim threat of the modern plague also served as the catalyst for a flurry of tightly focused and increasingly audacious films and videos. The new queer cinema is a mix of forces that, literally, are composed of the most elementary factors – life and death. That a positive message can be found in the struggle is the theme of Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness. The movie profiles the long-term AIDS survivors who were the subject of a recent photo book, Living Proof, and who discovered that testing positive doesn’t mean that one’s attitude must be negative.

Sex Is… goes for the nitty gritty through graphic footage and surprisingly candid interviews. It covers a range of gay male experiences from monogamous bliss to bath house orgies, and takes a risk of getting stuck on director Mark Huestis’ fascination with S&M technology. But Sex Is… also takes a valiant stand in defense of life over death as it offers a vivid chronicle of gay life before and after the virus.

The most interesting and complex of the three is the video Fast Trip, Long Drop by Gregg Bordowitz. Its wild mix of experimental visuals, angry satire and psycho-drama role playing gives Bordowitz ample room to vent against everything from his HIV status to the medical community, TV talk shows and his family. Bordowitz is determined to do a number on your head, but he has a point and he makes it well.