An Alternative Guide to LGBTQ Cinema by Fandor

L G B T Q

C I N E M A

Onscreen Representations and Misrepresentations

Presented by

BY D E N N I S H A R V E Y

Representations of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people go back to the earliest days of cinema, rare and unsympathetic as they usually were. Vito Russo’s 1981 book (and Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 1995 documentary feature) The Celluloid Closet amply chronicled the insulting biases of most portrayals from Hollywood and beyond in the medium’s first eight decades or so. But there’s also a history of LGBTQ imagery in foreign, independent, avant-garde and even exploitation film that gets less attention. It wasn’t always pretty, either. But these boundary-pushing films show how pieces of LGBTQ history eventually gathered the critical mass to break through. Longtime critic DENNIS HARVEY reviews films and covers festivals for many publications, including Variety, Film Comment and Keyframe. He is a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

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The Lusty Closet Michael Before Stonewall Un chant d’amour

5 6 7

Naughty Boys and Fiery Feminists Serious Charge Chained Girls The Secret of Wendel Samson !Women Art Revolution The Dangerous Stranger

9 10 11 12 13

Breakthroughs and Backlashes Score A Very Natural Thing I Just Wanted to Be Somebody We Were One Man Damned If You Don’t

15 16 17 18 19

Acting Up Parting Glances Virgin Machine Tongues Untied Poison

21 22 23 24

Love: Uncompromisingly Complicated Dakan Come Undone The Joy of Life XXY Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China Transgender Tuesdays Keep the Lights On

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

The Lusty Closet

Before Stonewall

Michael

directed by Carl Dreyer, 1924

Representations of gay people, let alone sympathetic ones, were rare indeed during the medium’s early decades. Yet years before world classics such as The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr established him as one of the screen’s great artists, Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer made this drama in Germany about a successful older artist who becomes infatuated with his opportunistic, much younger portrait model. This largely unreciprocated same-sex love brings him grief, but also great happiness. Luridly renamed Chained: The Story of the Third Sex for its brief U.S. release, this poignant, artful feature was received in a fashion that remained typical for decades: American audiences stayed away, while critics mostly “reviewed” their own distaste for the subject matter rather than the film’s own merits. Nonetheless, Michael was more fortunate than some other cinematic advocacy attempts. Every known print of 1919’s German Different from the Others, for example, was eventually destroyed by the Nazis, though a stray copy resurfaced some sixty years later. Watch Michael on Fandor

Before Stonewall

directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg, 1984

In the ensuing decades, such calls for tolerance were exceedingly unusual, however. For the most part, gays appeared onscreen in “pansy” and “mannish woman” stereotypes as objects of comedic relief or menace. The real lives of gays and lesbians remained a societal secret, shut behind a mandatory closet door. Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg’s landmark documentary draws on uncovered home movies, photos and other mementos to sketch the pre-“Gay Lib” existence of a substantial minority that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, dared not speak its name. It’s a very rich history of a subculture that managed to flourish despite extreme adversity. Watch Before Stonewall on Fandor

Un chant d’amour directed by Jean Genet, 1950

It took real rebels to ignore social and legal pressure (in the form of censorship), so unsurprisingly some of the most vivid pre-Stonewall depictions of homosexuality came from determined artistic outsiders. In the U.S., that meant doggedly avant-garde makers like James Broughton and Kenneth Anger. In France, it meant ex-con turned experimental literary icon Jean Genet, whose astonishing twenty-five-minute Un chant d’amour is still one of the most intensely erotic films ever made. Its silent, poetical portrait of unbridled lust among inmates and guards alike at a male prison was so shocking that it was still banned from public exhibition around the world many years later. Genet never made another film, though the medium marked his influence in later gay classics such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final feature Querelle (1982) and Todd Haynes’s first one, Poison (1991). Watch Un chant d’amour on Fandor

Naughty Boys and Fiery Feminists

!Women Art Revolution

Serious Charge directed by Terence Young, 1959

Censorship had kept homosexuality from being directly referenced in mainstream films for decades. But as a new “frankness” about “social ills” crept into popular discourse, the movies tried to keep pace. A striking effort in that regard is this 1959 British program from (of all people) Terence Young, who went on to direct several classic building-blocks in the most vehemently heterosexual of all franchises. (Meaning Bond. James Bond.) Here, a popular, progressive new vicar in a town plagued by juvenile delinquency sees his reputation tarnished by “inappropriate behavior” accusations not only from the “evil” boy he can’t salvage, but by a local spinster stung by his lack of romantic interest. His parting speech is a stunner. Just two years later, a better-known U.K. feature, Victim, had its protagonist Dirk Bogarde as an actual closeted gay man who refuses to fall prey to a young serial blackmailer. Watch Serious Charge on Fandor

Chained Girls

directed by Joseph Mawra, 1965

While gay men remained mostly an object of ridicule or fear onscreen, lesbians were appropriated as sexual fantasy fodder in exploitation cinema. This howler of a quasi-documentary screams panic at the alleged “complex problem of female homosexuality.” It starts out in a reasonably sober, educational fashion, but soon enough veers into a series of lurid vignettes in which comely lingerie-clad performers leer, seduce and make out with one another. Before hardcore porn became legal, it was movies like these that played to the “raincoat crowd” of male customers seeking a little titillation in the dark at sketchy downtown theaters. Needless to say, actual women, let alone lesbians, were seldom seen offscreen in these settings. Chained Girls’ now little-remembered auteur was a regular contributor to that circuit, directing equally classy joints such as White Slaves of Chinatown, The Peek Snatchers and Shanty Tramp. The voiceover narration here provides a litany of outdated “scientific” data on homosexuality as a sort of neurotic disease. Watch Chained Girls on Fandor

The Secret of Wendel Samson directed by Mike Kuchar, 1966

As 1960s “underground” cinema developed, several of its primary voices were gay ones. Acknowledged influences on Andy Warhol and John Waters, Bronx twins George and Mike Kuchar began making high-camp melodramas as teenagers wielding an 8mm camera in the mid-1950s. In the brothers’ 16mm glory a decade later, Mike made this typically over-the-top exercise in which artist Red Grooms plays a flame-haired bisexual torn between relationships with men and women, neither of which are fulfilling. For his transgressions, he finally faces a heterosexual firing squad (including sibling George). While the Kuchars could parody the torments of the closeted life for hip urban and college audiences, Hollywood took all too seriously the notion that homosexuality equaled despair in starry studies of self-loathing such as The Children’s Hour, The Sergeant and The Killing of Sister George. Watch The Secret of Wendel Samson on Fandor

!Women Art Revolution directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2010

Of all the drastic social changes that arose in the 1960s, the women’s and gay liberation movements proved among the most enduring and impactful. They also overlapped to a considerable, sometimes controversial degree. Some mainstream feminist leaders worried that the presence of lesbians in their ranks might “frighten away” broader acceptance of goals like the Equal Rights Amendment. But to a large extent, the match between an emerging “out” lesbian community and feminism was inevitable. A part of that story is told in this documentary, directed by veteran visual artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson who was there throughout this period “when art and politics fused.” It chronicles the persistent, often ingenious methods of women artists to storm the overwhelmingly white male art world approved by museums, galleries and academia. This “secret history” extends from pioneers like Carolee Schneemann, Rachel Rosenthal, Yvonne Rainer and Judy Chicago to later luminaries such as Miranda July and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, who provides the film’s original score. Watch !Women Art Revolution on Fandor

The Dangerous Stranger directed by Sid Davis, 1972

While newly empowered, politicized gay and lesbian communities began to flourish in some urban pockets during the 1970s, what message was “Average Joe and Jane” America getting onscreen? A very different one. Despite occasional mainstream pleas for tolerance (like the landmark 1972 TV movie That Certain Summer), most mainstream entertainment persisted in painting gays as either comic stereotypes or hostile, often psychopathic ones. Even children weren’t spared alarmist messages. King of classroom cautionary tales Sid Davis made the notorious 1961 Boys Beware, in which our kindly narrator chides an adolescent at risk of molestation with, “What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual.” He dialed down that inflammatory message somewhat for The Dangerous Stranger, a remake of his 1950 debut educational short. Here, rather than the parade of pervs tempting underage innocents to a fate worse than (but often including) death with offers of candy and car rides, only one young man lures a boy with the promise of free baseball cards. Then as now, warnings of “stranger danger” are always valid. But at the time, there were precious few images of gay people in popular media beyond predatory ones. Watch The Dangerous Stranger on Fandor

Breakthroughs and Backlashes

Score

directed by Radley Metzger, 1973

In the swinging wonderland of the 1970s, some optimistic souls imagined the day was nigh when lines would blur between porn and mainstream cinema, and everyone could freely slide up and down the Kinsey Scale. That did not come to pass. But the passing mood left behind some interesting relics, including this bisexual roundelay from a director whose stylish erotica extended from artsy softcore epics (1970’s The Lickerish Quartet) to exceedingly artful triple-X hits (1976’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven). Based on an off-Broadway play that had featured young Sylvester Stallone, Score finds a couple of jaded swingers seducing newlyweds (cult exploitation actress Lynn Lowry and Calvin Culver a.k.a. Casey Donovan, a gay porn icon). It’s pretty steamy stuff even now. But released in both “hardcore” and “softcore” versions, Score ran into the same roadblock that crashed other cinematic bisexual advocacy efforts: straight audiences didn’t want to see “gay stuff” (fantasy “lipstick lesbians” aside), and gay audiences weren’t much interested in the reverse, either. Metzger also directed another bisexual classic, 1975’s The Image, in which a young woman willingly submits to both a male “master” and a female “mistress” in a sadomasochistic fantasy. Watch Score on Fandor

A Very Natural Thing directed by Christopher Larkin, 1974

Though there were underground antecedents like the western Song of the Loon (1970) and the extravagantly campy Pink Narcissus (1971), A Very Natural Thing was the first U.S. feature to portray contemporary gay life through a gay filmmaker’s lens. A little-remembered landmark mixing documentary and dramatic elements, it was (like Michael a half-century earlier) largely savaged by critics who felt compelled to air their disgust toward the subject matter. But Larkin’s only film (sadly, he committed suicide fifteen years after its commercial failure) survives as a poignant and invaluable timepiece. Its protagonist is an “out” Manhattan shy guy, a former monk turned high school teacher, who falls for a shallow, hunky player incapable of fully reciprocating his feelings. It’s a sweet, playful meditation on the tension between sexual attraction and romantic love. Other breakthrough indie features greeted by similar box-office silence included Saturday Night at the Baths (1975) and the U.K.’s Nighthawks (1978), directed by Ron Peck and Paul Hallam. Watch A Very Natural Thing on Fandor

I Just Wanted to Be Somebody directed by Jay Rosenblatt, 2006

While the 1970s was the watershed decade for gay liberation, it was greeted by an equally forceful pushback. Onetime Miss America runner-up, minor singing star and Florida orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant appointed herself queen of that reactionary movement when she spearheaded a 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign to counter gay rights advocacy. Jay Rosenblatt’s short documentary memorializes a time when this warbling messenger of “family values” won national attention with the dubious message that activist gays were somehow “recruiting” the youth of America. Despite initial political success, Bryant played the victim role when her controversial stances rendered her less employable. Watch I Just Wanted to Be Somebody on Fandor

We Were One Man directed by Philippe Vallois, 1979

Predictably, European cinema leapt ahead of the international pack in casting positive gay images in relatively high-budget, mainstream films. One example was Philippe Vallois’s drama We Were One Man about a French peasant farmer who rescues a wounded Nazi soldier in the waning days of World War II. Their union (which eventually becomes a bisexual trio) is doomed not strictly because it’s homosexual but because wartime politics and the need for secrecy render it impossible to sustain. Around the same time, some extraordinary “out” gay directors were pushing the envelope around the globe, including England’s Derek Jarman (Sebastiane, Caravaggio), Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Fox and His Friends, Querelle), Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar (Labyrinth of Passion, Law of Desire), the Philippines’ Lino Brocka (Macho Dancer) and others. Watch We Were One Man on Fandor

Damned If You Don’t directed by Su Friedrich, 1984

Gay film festivals began to flourish in the 1980s, heightening the exposure of works by gay filmmakers that hitherto had scarcely had a chance to reach any audience at all. Women justifiably cried foul at the overly male-focus of these early showcases, leading to gender diversification in programming. Increased exposure helped foster a new generation of lesbian filmmakers who valued personal content as much as the political. Notably pioneering that frontier was the marvelous Su Friedrich, who scrutinized her own Catholic upbringing in this experimental short feature. It wanders from a reexamination of the 1947 religious sexual-repression classic Black Narcissus to various other historical and cultural considerations of female sexuality. An accessible experimentalist, Friedrich (Sink or Swim, Hide and Seek) was one voice bridging the once-seemingly impassable chasm between indifferent, self-absorbed gay male and defiantly “separatist” lesbian audiences. Making an even larger impression were rare lesbian features of the era, including Lizzie Borden’s bold sci-fi allegory Born in Flames (1983) and Donna Deitch’s relatively mainstream romance Desert Hearts (1986). Watch Damned If You Don’t on Fandor

Acting Up

Tongues Untied

Parting Glances directed by Bill Sherwood, 1986

The sociopolitical gap between lesbians and gay men shrank in the 1980s as a matter of sheer compassion: many women became caregivers to a male populace suddenly afflicted by a fatal plague. The atmosphere of moral condemnation and ill-informed paranoia initially surrounding AIDS made many heterosexuals unwilling to offer any sympathy whatsoever (let alone hands-on assistance). Among the earliest dramatic treatments of the crisis was Bill Sherwoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only feature. Despite its relative success, he tried in vain for years to raise funding for a follow-up before his own death from AIDS complications in 1990. Shot in 1984 but only released after two years, Parting Glances chronicles a Manhattan gay coupleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last twenty-four hours together before a forced career separation. Most memorably, it has young Steve Buscemi as an arch, arty friend who is dying of AIDS. The epidemic was later chronicled in many moving documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated Common Threads (1989) and the compilation film Still Around (2011). Watch Parting Glances on Fandor

Virgin Machine directed by Monika Treut, 1988

Political adversity during the Reagan years only increased gay political and artistic activity. Outside the U.S., that rebelliousness flourished in liberal strongholds like Germany, where directors including Ulrike Ottinger, Rosa von Praunheim and Monika Treut regularly flung open the cinematic closet. The latter made a splash with her sophomore feature in which a lesbian writer moves from Hamburg to ultra-liberated San Francisco and experiences a whole new sexual world. With her typically humorous focus on fetishism, Treut made “extreme” lifestyles seem relatable, even charming. The 2009 documentary Mutantes chronicles this era of “pro-sex” feminism in art and porn in which Treut played a significant role. Watch Virgin Machine on Fandor

Tongues Untied directed by Marlon Riggs, 1989

Gay African American cinema was slow to develop, subject to the same racial discrimination as in every other aspect of society. Nonetheless, enterprising voices finally pushed their way from rare on-camera protagonists (as in Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason) to directorial empowerment. Chief among them were works by Cheryl Dunye (Vanilla Sex, The Potluck and the Passion, The Watermelon Woman) and the late Marlon Riggs. The latter’s poetical, unclassifiable hour-long meditation on black gay identity became a locus for conservatives who claimed its minimal showings at taxpayer-supported art venues meant the government was funding “pornographic art.” The extreme reaction only underlined Riggs’s thesis that black men loving one another was itself a “revolutionary act.” He made the even more impressive feature Black Is…Black Ain’t, which premiered two months after he died of AIDS in 1994 at age thirty-seven. Watch Tongues Untied on Fandor

Poison

directed by Todd Haynes, 1991

Prominent critic B. Ruby Rich identified an explosion of artistic invention when she invented the term “New Queer Cinema” in 1992. Her thinking wasn’t merely wishful. A rich cluster of features by Gregg Araki (The Living End), Isaac Julien (Young Soul Rebels), Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho), Tom Kalin (Swoon), Jennie Livingston (Paris Is Burning), Christopher Münch (The Hours and Times), John Greyson (Zero Patience), Rose Troche (Go Fish), Bruce LaBruce (Super 8 1/2) and Todd Verow (Frisk), among others, was stylistically and thematically bold enough to demand attention beyond the limited audiences for most indie gay features. Perhaps the most adventurous among them all was this debut feature by Haynes, whose narrative triptych apes different film genres (including a clear nod to Genet’s Un chant d’amour), offering an experimental yet accessible critique of “outsider” sexuality as a source of both stigma and pride. While his future grew crowded with Oscar nominations (notably for Far from Heaven and I’m Not There) and Emmys (Mildred Pierce), Poison won Haynes notoriety as well as praise. Like Tongues Untied, it was deemed “pornographic” by several public moralists who clearly hadn’t seen it. Watch Poison on Fandor

Love: Uncompromisingly Complicated

XXY

Dakan

directed by Mohamad Camara, 1997

While gay filmmakers were no longer a novelty in many Western nations, elsewhere making a gay-themed film could still be a fraught proposition. Guinean actor Mohamad Camara’s debut (and still only) feature as a writer-director was the first film from sub-Saharan Africa to deal seriously with homosexuality. Its protagonists are two teenage boys who fall in love. But when their families discover the relationship, they’re subject to every alleged “cure” from marriage to witchcraft. Arguing for tolerance, Dakan (a.k.a. “Destiny”) ran into plenty of intolerance itself, including local protests and revoked government funding when its subject matter became known. Watch Dakan on Fandor

Come Undone

directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, 2000

Pioneering movies about homosexuality from any nation, from 1919’s Different from the Others to Dakan, tended to have a somewhat educational, case-pleading tenor even eighty years later. But as the theme itself no longer needed to be “explained” to mainstream audiences, filmmakers were free to develop more complex and ambiguous narratives. Nor did gay audiences require exclusively “positive images” as strenuously as they once did. Leading gay French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz (along with more populist contemporary François Ozon) made no compromises in this drama of first love, whose content confounds the incongruously cheery, sexy Pierre et Gilles-style poster art. Mathieu is a somewhat withdrawn youth who blossoms during an affair with the more confident, outgoing Cedric during a summer at the beach. But the repercussions of this first involvement, combined with difficult family circumstances, are ultimately too much for Mathieu to handle. Different from the usual gay young-love story, Come Undone’s nonchronological, impressionistic storytelling has as much to say about depression and other mental ails as it does about sexual identity. Watch Come Undone on Fandor

The Joy of Life directed by Jenni Olson, 2005

Lesbian filmmakers have been particularly drawn toward experimental personal essays, from still-active “out” cinematic pioneer Barbara Hammer to distinctive next-generation talents such as Su Friedrich and Sadie Benning. It’s Benning’s father, James, whose tranquil yet mesmerizing landscape studies feel like the most obvious influence on gay film programmer and historian Olson’s unclassifiable first feature. Yet The Joy of Life’s meditatively beautiful 16mm images of the San Francisco Bay Area belie the narrator’s complicated personal, historic and social agenda. The film free-ranges from expressions of restless romantic longing to the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as a magnet for suicides. One of the latter was Mark Finch—Olson’s co-director at Frameline, the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival—whose presumed fatal jump (his body was never found) in 1995 shocked colleagues around the world. The Joy of Life is both a loving memorial and a plea for suicide prevention efforts at the bridge, not to mention better mental health care by society in general. Watch The Joy of Life on Fandor

XXY

directed by Lucia Puenzo, 2007

Movies rarely dealt with transgender issues until recently, apart from comic or horrifying portrayals (remember Psycho?) and the occasional “ripped from headlines!” exploitation shocker like the inimitable Doris Wishman’s 1978 Let Me Die a Woman. A landmark exception was Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, which dramatized the story of the real-life female-born transsexual man turned murder victim Brandon Teena and garnered Hilary Swank an Oscar. Another exception is Lucia Puenzo’s fine Argentine drama about the fifteen-year-old Alex, born with both male and female genitalia. Passing as a girl (with some effort), Alex (Inés Efron) is uncertain whether she wants to choose one gender over another, while her parents worry that there’s a lifetime of discrimination in store if not. Is it possible to override widespread stigma and live outside society’s strict gender boundaries? This strikingly self-possessed young intersex character is determined to find out. Watch XXY on Fandor

Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China directed by Cui Zi’en, 2008

Though the backlash from religious or political conservatives can be brutal, even fatal, LGBTQ people now agitate for rights and recognition in cultures where that would have been unimaginable not long ago. Documentarians have recorded the struggle around the world. Leading “out” mainland Chinese filmmaker Cui Zi’en chronicles his vast nation’s budding gay rights movement and its secret history in this hour-long survey of attitudes and activism. Other eye-opening views from unexpected places include Children of Srikandi (Indonesia), The Invisible Men (Israel), Not Quite the Taliban (United Arab Emirates) and Woubi Cheri (Ivory Coast). Watch Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China on Fandor

Transgender Tuesdays

directed by Mark Freeman and Nathaniel Walters-Koh, 2012

While a certain segment of American society seems to be permanently angered-up about gay marriage (in which the ultimate outsiders are trying to achieve the gold standard for “insider” behavior), the legal frontier continues to be conquered by dogged efforts to institute transgender rights. This rather wonderful documentary uses a wealth of archival footage as well as more current interviews to sketch out the highly marginalized lives most transgender folk have found themselves living in past decades . . . not that things are a whole lot better today. It focuses on a pioneering clinic in San Francisco’s skid row, where many transgender people landed after fleeing abusive upbringings elsewhere. “They came for the hormones but stayed for the healthcare” in the liberal California mecca. Begun in 1993 against municipal resistance, this extraordinarily forward-thinking program was the very first specifically aimed at addressing the needs of a population now estimated at more than one million in the U.S. alone. Watch Transgender Tuesdays on Fandor

Keep the Lights On directed by Ira Sachs, 2012

Despite the Oscar-laureled prestige and healthy box office of films like Brokeback Mountain and Milk, Hollywood chose to read these successes as aberrations, green-lighting barely more gay-themed projects for the big screen than before. So it’s left to stubborn independents like Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, The Kids Are Alright) and Ira Sachs to make movies that are high-profile art-house releases yet still exiled from major-studio funding because of their gay subject matter. The increasingly impressive Sachs (The Delta, Forty Shades of Blue) wrote and directed one of the best movies of 2014, Love Is Strange, whose older male couple facing sudden economic vulnerability can hardly be classified as merely “gay”—it’s the story of America’s shrinking middle-class. Less broadly appealing but in some ways even more remarkable is his prior loosely autobiographical drama in which a fictional filmmaker’s long-term boyfriend is living a massively self-destructive secret life. Dealing with issues of love, trust and addiction, Keep the Lights On is a gay movie, and it’s not. Its underlying themes and overall artistry are universal. Watch Keep the Lights On on Fandor

Fandor’s LGBTQ Collection The films in this guide are just a sample of the hundreds of handpicked LGBTQ films on Fandor. Like the guide, the genre collection contains films that document reality, and others that follow a coming-of-age trajectory. Some are not even LGBTQ in subject but in approach, offering a “queer” perspective or aesthetic to their visual and storytelling strategies. Don’t miss the biggest and best selection of films that bring visibility to all walks of life housed under the LGBTQ flag.

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I Killed My Mother directed by Xavier Dolan

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