Queer Film: A New Perspective of LGBTQ Cinema
by Douglas Messerli
A Prelude
In late 2019 I realized that over the years I
had written about a wide variety, from many different countries, about LGBTQ
films, and I perceived that although several such volumes had been collected in
the past, that perhaps, given my “reading into” what otherwise might have
seemed straight films, might be an interesting project. I have been actively
gay since my early 20s and lived for several years as a nightly participant in
the gay communities of Madison, Wisconsin and New York City before I met my
now-husband Howard N. Fox.
Howard and I, however, lived in a kind of special bubble as first
university students, and later a professor and art curator, in which we were so
accepted by our peers that we basically stopped going to gay bars or even
associating ourselves with our fellow gay community members.
Of
course, there were exceptions, but our deep commitment to a basically
monogamous relationship meant that we not only saved ourselves from the
terrible scourge of AIDS, but we were somewhat isolated from the sufferings of
the rest of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and gender unidentified
friends. Over the years, Howard and I have given money to support the
wonderfully active Los Angeles LGBTQ community, and, as I have written
elsewhere, our very openness about our sexuality and our refusal to submit to homophobic concepts, did help change many individuals’ perception, I believe, of what it
meant to be gay.
I
think that the Washington Post article about our leaving
that city for Los Angeles, which identified me as Howard’s "companion," might
have been one of the first of that paper’s open recognition of a gay
relationship.
And,
when upon our first major evening at an event to celebrate Howard’s arrival as
the new curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art Howard announced me as his mate, the heterosexual crowd
was forced to recognize us in a manner many of them had never before
encountered. Our first outing at LACMA’s rather Brahmin director, Earl “Rusty”
Powell’s, dinner parties seated me, as is standard in such gatherings, next to
the director, while Howard was seated next to Rusty’s wife, the typical
husband/wife / male/female placement.
Over that first year, moreover, we were invited out almost every night
to all the wealthy Beverly Hills and Westside homes as a couple. And in that
process I believe we lost our connections to the gay world. Yes, there were
friends, present and past, who were gay, but they almost faded into the
distance as we were so utterly accepted and apparently appreciated in the
heterosexual communities into which we had now entered.
While there was something warming and transformative about this new
communal relationship, I also felt, deep down, we were losing something as
well. Howard and I had very few friends who died of AIDS, while all around us
LGBTQ people were dying of the disease. I believe we only once visited a gay
bar in the then vibrant West Hollywood community, and this with a wealthy gay
patron; at another time we visited a gay restaurant with another art patron,
Bob Halff. But we had hardly any
involvement with the larger Los Angeles gay community. I am certain my straight
editor Pablo Capra knows more about the history of regional LA gay bars than
Howard and I do.
But
perhaps while we effected a significant change in the heterosexual perception
of gays of which we were both proud, I also missed the literal connections with
the LGBTQ community, which I think I secretly sought out in attending and
reviewing so many works of queer theater, literature, and film.
Complete
assimilation has its drawbacks. Although I may have hated the somewhat nasty,
often self-hating gatherings of gay men in the late 1960s, there is something I
still miss about them: the clever language and quick-thinking it demanded, the
separation it enforced from the general society, and just the camaraderie it
offered with always, just behind the screen, the opportunity to enjoy sexual
pleasures, it proffered.
So
when I realized that I might put together a rather large volume of queer film,
I felt it not just as a contribution but as a duty to the community I felt we
had lost. More importantly, I realized suddenly that I needed to publish this volume, as much for myself perhaps rather
than any palliative commitment to the LGBTQ community which I’d inexplicably
lost.
It’s fascinating that this volume was being created at the very same
moment in which I was composing a My Year
volume centered around Trump’s horrifying vision of “Them and Us.” I realized
that, in this situation, I was both an insider and outsider simultaneously, a
critic looking outside but living within. I could be somewhat objective while
still attending to the intricacies of what it meant and had meant to be seen by
the general society as an outsider.
I
am sure, despite our easy acceptance into the endless societal events we
attended, there were, behind our backs, numerous aspersions and homebound
dismissals, and I also recognized that those loving Howard’s curatorial
ventures sometimes treated me as if I was his “hair-dresser” husband, not as a
formidable thinker I truly was. Only at the tough age of 72 have some of these
now elderly folks perceived me for who I then was. Many of them, unfortunately,
never read. Yet the longevity of our commitment to one another, now 50 years,
speaks to them more strongly.
I
needed to put these queer film essays together to help express my own identity.
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