Pride Film Festival
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I
recall my first LA Pride. I was startled that Pride
Fest commanded an entrance fee, but when I encountered of-age areas
for liquor and sexuality, I understood. I have always enjoyed LAPride Fest, but I have to agree with the criticisms of it. It is too
oriented to a circuit party; too exclusive to youth. While my generation and more importantly those before fought for these young
LGBTQIA* people to be open about who they are and do so without so
much as a thought that there is anything wrong with them, I worry
that it is at the expense of acknowledging the sacrifices that gavethem that security. A Pride that is a non-stop party is limited and,
frankly, disrespectful. I firmly believe that it isn't Pride if
resources of time, attention, and space aren't given to remembering,
honoring, and recognizing our history – not parenthetically, but
first and foremost. Yes, Pride is for dancing, but in some ways it is
grave dancing, for it was at significant sacrifice and in honor of
those memories that we have the party. It has always been understood
that Pride is a party in memoriam as well as a challenge to present
and future struggles. Pride battles are not over for everyone. Pride
is as serious as it is celebratory, and it must ever remain so.
Since
its inception, Pride month has included setting some time aside for
gay cultural awareness. We support our community and enrich our lives with gay arts and letters, from visiting the jewelry- and flag booth to
lectures and performances, from reading about our history to
discussing it in circles. Pride film festivals have long been a bedrock of Pride
month. I remember sitting on folding chairs in a common space on 14th
street to screen early films by such incipient queer voices as Bruce
LaBruce and Reno Dakota. I attended receptions at Film Forum and TheQuad where we twiddled wine glasses and conversed about screenings of
The Queen and Zero Patience. A Different Light and Oscar Wilde held
shelves for queer film commentary and scripts, and upon the
community boards hung flyers for gay film clubs. In fact, for city Pride
guides I covered screenings held in those bookstore basements,
presented as community service to share and preserve our legacies. Here is a history lesson rendered in the most LA of all
ways: movies. We all gotta recharge, even during a holiday month, even
if its just one evening to catch up on laundry. Stream one of these
or get the dvd from the library. Invite friends over for dinner and discussion. Learn where you came from and
remember it, and then hit those Pride activities hard, proud, and
empowered as a knowledgeable and reverent member of our tribe.
Pride Film Festival
Urban Home Blog has plenty of snacks for movie night, including curried popcorn and red-hot popcorn balls, artichoke dip, fondue, and of course, cocktails.
It
may be surprising to today's generation of gay men how revolutionary
The Boys in the Band was for its generation, or how vital. Mart
Crowley's play premiered at the beginning of what was then called gay lib, in a
tiny theatre in Greenwich Village, to packed houses that proved how
hungry gay men were for representations that authenticized, even just
acknowledged, their world, their existence, their spirit. The boys in
the band are a ragtag group of friends who form a family of choice in
the cosmopolitan, dirty world of New York City in the seventies. As
they gather for a Saturday night potluck to celebrate a birthday, the
usual storytelling tricks unwind: secrets come out in the open, with
the drama impelled by the collection of individual stories that makes
these friends a collective of the gay experience of the time. Each
character is a type and a trope and that has generated its fair share
of criticism. Fair enough, but during the renaissance of gay letters
that was part of gay lib, writing about type was credited as a
legitimate form of the greater mission of recording our own history.
PC culture in that day was much different from the contemporary
policing of sensitivities; at the time, gay arts were claiming their
own space with some expressions that would be difficult today. Whereas
today a producer might hesitate to tell a story about a camp queen
who is still in love with a high school athlete, or a professional
man who is in conflict about his sexuality, in the day, telling those
stories was vital, because those lives existed absent acknowledgment.
The playwright understood that and the audience responded with
overwhelming appreciation. The correct response to anyone who states
that The Boys in the Band is dated is: yes, exactly. The audience
responded with affirmation upon seeing themselves onstage and
onscreen, and that was exactly the mission of the boys in this band.
Other
than porn, it’s difficult to imagine any artform gayer than camp.
Camp resides at an intersection of worship and blasphemy that speaks
to queer life through the magic of style. Fifties melodramas embody
camp, as slyly as Rock Hudson’s posturing of American manhood in
All That Heaven Allows, as grandly as Gloria Swanson’s epically
wrecked soul in Sunset Boulevard, as brashly as Jan Sterling’s
slattern in Ace in the Hole. Douglas Sirk notwithstanding, no single
entity dwells more centrally in the excesses of fifties camp than
Joan Crawford. Her turns in Queen Bee and Harriet Craig reveal a Joan
radiating a ruthless monstrosity that doesn’t just set the stage
for the Grand Guignol of sixties hagsploitation but shunts it aside
as unworthy of a star. Joan is at her most silken, villainous, and
outlandish in Torch Song. Torch Song tries to be a Technicolormusical that combines backstage storytelling with an unlikely,
redemptive love story, but winds up as a master lesson on camp by
checking off every one of its hallmarks. In that respect, every
element is there, from lavish production numbers of shocking
tastelessness (warning: one is done in blackface) to an Oscar nominated turn by the marvelous actress Marjorie Rambeau as Joan’s
beer-swilling, scrapbook-keeping mama. Joan’s wardrobe of women’s
clothes made from menswear fabrics provides more drag inspiration
than anything until Bob Mackie started dressing Carol Burnett and
Cher. But the centerpiece of this masterpiece is, as it should be, as
it must be, Miss Joan Crawford: the ultimate melodrama player, the
ultimate bitch in heels, the ultimate movie star,. With Torch Song,
Joan accomplishes a singular act of defiance, not elevating trashy
material but sinking to its level in order to drag it up to, and then
blast it beyond, its own limitations.
If
you want to know / remember what it was like for many of us to be gaymen in New York City in the 1990s, then cue up Jeffrey. At any given
moment a spoof, a satire, a sketch comedy, Jeffrey is sly social
commentary based upon a successful off-Broadway play. The title
character Jeffrey feels robbed of the most basic of his freedoms as a
young gay man – sexual expression – and so decides to pursue
celibacy. Experientially, Jeffrey is an infant from the earliest
years of the post-AIDS generation, his story told against the
backdrop of Stonewall 25. The film is a document of its time and
place, a mid-nineties New York City of gyms overlooking the Chelsea
bustle, of Sheridan Square park and Upper East Side fundraisers, of
the Great Lawn in Central Park on Pride Weekend. Paul Rudnick's
mastery of The Queen's English provides dialogue in its way verging
upon Shakespearean, staged to deliver moments side-splittingly funny
and achingly true. The simple premise is told with just the right
touch of theatricality to deliver the greater truth upon which the
story rests: these are the times of a community that just navigated a
crossroads only to arrive at another, that of identity. Through
Jeffrey, Rudnick gently nudges his community, one he clearly loves,
to evolve, doing so with wit but not at the expense of harsh
realities. When one character dies a death largely unthinkable today,
a style queen mourns “the limits of luxury.” Jeffrey uses style to convey substance, and as important its lessons were for gay men of
Jeffrey's generation, it is hard to imagine a dialogue more relevant to gay lives today.
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