gay gangs, drag queen lesbians, and indulgent
cross-dressing mothers
by Douglas Messerli
Bradford
Nordeen, curator Hardcore Home Movies /
Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at Disney Hall, March 2, 2015
The
crudely conceived, rough-cut, home-made quality of these gay and lesbian movies
from 1989-2001, attempt in their audacious characterizations and their
outré behavior to satirize, challenge, and explore sexual identity. Not all of
them succeed.
Jonesy’s Fiend, for instance, shot in Super 8, shows clips from a “legendary sex party” of 1994, as the members of the queerchord band, Fagbash, tear off their clothes and, in solitary shots, masturbate. Yes, there are moments here of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, particularly in the fact, despite the truly “hardcore” imagines there is nothing truly erotic about this film. Yet it also lacks the joyful innocence of Flaming Creatures, and in its presentation of such “solitary pleasures,” it participates, rather, in the 1990s sense of self-infatuation.
Greta Snider’s 1989 Hard-Core Home Movie, in fact, presents us with no hardcore images,
but rather features teenagers and numerous others expressing their opinions of
what hardcore images mean and why their of interest. Filmed in San Francisco,
the commentators are hardly able to express themselves, but are nearly all in
agreement that such images are appealing, alluring, and important as
expressions of societal disregard. Giggling, sticking out their tongues in
mockery and tease, these mostly young interviewees clearly see themselves as
part of the underground picture which Snider’s grainy images depicts.
Far more campy and wittily self-aware,
Jill Reiter’s The Birthday Party (1994)
depicts a sixteen year old girl celebrating her birthday with her only two friends,
one a Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizer and the other described as “a precocious
slut.” Presumably the 16-year old lesbian girl can find no other friends, for
which her “mother,” a hippie played by a drag queen compensates by requiring
her boyfriend to lasciviously deliver up a birthday cake while a male dancer
and female sex worker entertain them. Shot just like the 1960s homemade films,
in faded out colors, the film takes family life by the balls, overturning any
presumably “normal” conventions and forcing us to reconsider the whole concept
of motherly and fatherly love.
Perhaps the most disturbing and truly
conceptual of these films is Scott Treleaven’s The Salivation Army of 2001, which documents the director’s and his
friends fascination with outsider images of blood, sex, spit, and cult life.
These images, he suggests, are always appealing to the young who feel separated
from the world around them; and suddenly, through the early violent images of
the film, we cannot help but make connections with some of today’s youth who,
imexplicably to most, become attracted to murderous armies such as those of
ISIS.
To promote their counterculture “gang,”
Treleaven and his friends develop a zine, featuring events of mock violence and
a blood exchange between members. One young “recruit,” however demands that
they truly beat and rape him, which they somewhat unwillingly agree too,
filming the images. Suddenly, their popularity not only increases but they
begin to receive messages and films from others who take their violence seriously,
apparently doing actual harm to their recruits, some of whose members seem
determined to take their “mock” cult into true cult territory. The group, which
have determined to have no coherent manifesto nor dogma for their acts, were
suddenly faced with a dangerous usurpation of their purposely amorphous
activities and beliefs. Faced with the brutality they have accidently bred,
they are forced to close their zine and disband. And the film itself is
transformed into a kind of shamed confessional, helping to make The Salivation Army a far more important
document than the others included in this program.
The most
outrageous of these films, however, is Rick Castro’s “Dr. Chris Teen Sex
Surrogate,” the third part of his Three Faces
of Women—a kind of camp deconstruction of Joanne Woodward’s Three Faces of Eve. This portion of the
triptych from 1994 features Fonda LaBruce and Vaginal Davis as two drag queen
lesbians whose sex life has gone missing. Without telling David, LaBruce has
called in Dr. Chris Teen, a sex therapist, to reenergize their love, which Dr.
Chris proceeds to do with the introduction of several large dildos, foot-kissing
fetish activities, and slightly sadist aggressions. Not only does it seem to
work, but the hilarious, pyscho-babbling, cliché-spouting Dr. Chris joins them
in bed. In an after-event discussion, Castro commented that in 1994, when the
film was shot in Manhattan by the famed porn director, Bob Alvarez, they were
attempting to take identity in directions which had never before been
conceived, but which, today, have become quite ordinary.
Greta Snider’s Our Gay Brothers (1993), finally, takes found film footage from
porn movies, children’s instructional films, and sports scenes while various
gay men express their opinions about the opposite sex. Many of these are,
predictably, favorable, but an increasing number of their comments begin to
build up a huge chasm of hostility gays and women, as words such as “fish,” “sticky,”
“flabby,” etc. etc. begin to crackle through the air, while Snider closes out
the film with a recurring image, reversed in direction and pattern, of a woman
swimmer diving through mid-air that seems to contradict almost all the negative
assertions that are being expressed.
Surely contemporary theorists on gender and
queer studies will make enormous claims for these independent experiments. But,
unfortunately, they remain too raw, poorly conceived, and anti-intellectual to truly challenge our
cultural thinking. At the most they are titillating caricatures that suggest
directions rather than thoroughly exploring them.
Los Angeles,
March 5, 2015
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