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It's time for yet more queer film, week two of the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
Some documentaries detailed the lives of famous queers: Gore Vidal, Bayard Rustin, Luchino Visconti. Others reflected the international scope of the festival: Patricio Hernandez's Jucitan, Queer Paradise visits a Mexican town where homos and drag queens are everywhere and no one, from the mayor on down, seems to mind much, while For Straights Only deals with the struggles of East Indian queers. Back here at home, a couple of interesting films dealt with highly controversial issues. Hooked takes on the world of gay online cruising. An hour of, basically, talking heads, the film works as well as it does because a number of the guys interviewed are insightful and amusing. ("How many people have I met over the Internet?" one fellow asks. "Was I supposed to keep count?") Still, it never deeply explored the whole dubious notion of "sex addiction." And from the film's title to moody landscape shots accompanied by moodier music, the film wore its subjectivity on its cinematic sleeve.
And on a more inspirational note, Gay Cops: Pride Behind the Badge tells the stories of queer police officers, their struggles against job-based homophobia, and their attractiveness to uniform fetishists. It may be yet another talking-head documentary, but the reactions of queer cops to 9/11 is genuinely heart-tugging. And what about fucking? Frameline, the sponsoring organization, lost its NEA grant some years back because the fest included—gasp! —sexually explicit imagery. This year, a lot of the overt sex is seen in subversive, smart, post-queer-theory short films. While there is, heaven knows, nothing at all wrong with sex for sex's sake, these films pursue radical agendas, both political and aesthetic, while showing enough hard dick to give John Ashcroft a stroke. Porno Picture of Dorian Gray is a smartly made mockumentary about a pornstar who never seems to age, though the image on his old films...well, you get the idea. In Late Night Visitor, Michael Barry pays entertaining, sexy homage to the campy, great "physique" films of yore, while KeriOkie's Phineas Slipped is a tale of lust in boy's school, replete with quotations from A Separate Peace and a gender-blurring cast. Stephen Remington's Dissolve asks tricky questions about the hot-button issue of intergenerational sex. Even better is The Milkman, a striking little film about the attraction between a cute young guy and a homely, obese, middle-aged man; surprising and touching, it lingered in the memory long after the final credits rolled. But my favorite—certainly one of the strongest films in the festival—is The Salivation Army, director Scott Treleaven's brilliantly edgy story of a trio of zine-publishing radicals and the queer anarchist cult they (sort of) create. Bracingly subversive in both content and form, it's a little bit William Burroughs, a little bit Dennis Cooper, and a whole lot in-your-face, uncompromisingly queer.
This will forever be entered in LGBT history as the-year-the-Supreme-Court-said-queer-sex-was-okay. And on the very afternoon the decision came down, what better way to celebrate than to take in the delightfully wacked-out Yes Nurse, No Nurse, a well-crafted Dutch musical comedy about a rest home full of singing, dancing eccentrics and the nasty landlord that wants them evicted. Though only a couple of the characters are explicitly gay, the whole giddy film exhibits as queer a sensibility as you can find (at least in a Dutch musical comedy). And just as exhilarating as the film itself was the moment festival co-director Michael Lumpkin came out on stage and called out "Hi there, sodomites!" The applause was deafening. And so went another Queer Film Festival, in all its glorious variety. Trends? Trans is still hot. Sex films are getting smarter. Coming out stories will be with us as long as the closet persists. And there's still room for more good films about AIDS. Some of the festival's films, like Party Monster, in which Home Alone innocent Macaulay Culkin grows up into a drug-soaked club kid, will gain wide release. Others, like the mopey story of a teenage crush in Kuala Lumpur, will never be seen beyond the festival circuit. And that's all right, too. The survival and growth of the SF Festival, and all the other queer film festivals that have followed its path, are testimony to the continuing vibrancy of queer culture. Whether Antonin Scalia likes it or not.
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