The Out Take: Pride Month and the Need for a Queer Film Canon

The Out Take is a biweekly column about LGBT cinema. It runs on alternating Thursdays. 

Happy Pride Month! As I write this in San Francisco, the city is beginning to get ready for their big event on the last Sunday of the month. New York will join them that same weekend, with the usual three-day bash. Chicago kicks off its festival tomorrow, Los Angeles and Philadelphia have already paraded, and the list goes on. An increasingly unfathomable number of cities hold LGBT pride events, all over the world. The world’s largest is in Sao Paolo, while the smallest is (according to Wikipedia) in little Sligo, Ireland. It’s come a long way since 1970, from risky revolutionary march to international phenomenon.

And, of course, it’s a good time to make lists of movies. Out.com put together 10 Pride Pregame ideas on Netflix instant, Flavorwire has their list of “50 Essential LGBT Films,” and iTunes is directing uses to a gay pride rental channel. Pride Month is a good opportunity to recommend in bulk. As the queer community enters the spotlight in a jubilant, colorful and positive way, our movies have the chance to follow suit. LGBT films often have trouble finding an audience, even the best of them, so this is a moment to cherish.

It’s also an opportunity to get incredibly nerdy about lists and categorization. If you look at these two lists and compare them to last year’s Huffington Post list, for example, there is very little crossover. The overall trend similarity is striking, but they almost never cite the same individual films. I would hazard a guess that no matter how many different critics and LGBT movie fans you put together, you would get similar results. There is, simply put, no such thing as a Queer Cinema Canon. There is no definitive list of films, and even a smallish group of universally loved works would be almost impossible to put together. This is, for the sake of Pride Month list making, a bit of a double-edged sword.

The one problem is that even though these lists are full of different films, two trends often emerge. There are always an awful lot of films about white gay men, and there tends to be an overabundance of straight, white, male Hollywood directors. The Out.com list is full of the former, while the Flavorwire list is brimming with the latter. “Brokeback Mountain” is great, and the repression of “The Children’s Hour” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” should be reappraised, but it’s 2013. We’ve come too far to keep raving about the cultural importance of Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia” over exciting new films about lesbian or transgender characters.

See, this is the 44th year of Gay Pride. 1970 was the first, when events were held for the first time in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In those four and a half decades, LGBT culture and cinema has gone through change after change. “Paris Is Burning” is now over 20 years old. Back in 1970, it would be hard to imagine LGBT films popping up all over the world. Now I can go to the opening night of Frameline, the oldest LGBT film festival in the world, and catch a new gay noir from South Korea. It’s a good time to love queer movies.

What does Pride represent? In some cities, in a superficial way, it’s represents the ability of a lot of upwardly mobile men to celebrate themselves and their sex lives. Yet it’s so much more than that, in America’s major metropolises and around the world. Pride is a celebration of an open community, a shared love of love that stretches well beyond the boundaries of nations. We’ve passed the point at which we can think of LGBT culture as something containable. On the one hand the American gay community has begun to assimilate into the straight society around it. However, connections need to be made with others around the world. It may be crucial for the struggling queer people of Uganda and Cameroon, Russia and Serbia. Pride is what connects.

In a way, then, the lack of a canonical collection of international LGBT films that we talk about incessantly is a bit of a weakness. It can make us err in the direction of ignorance, forgetting about those not represented in our simpler films or even fellow members of our own acronym. Even when the battle over marriage is over, we’ll need to continue fighting for equality under the law for transgender people. Recognizing and embracing transgender narratives is crucial in that respect. Films like “Orlando” and “The Mouth of the Wolf” should be seen, discussed and remembered.

Of course, at the end of the day the lack of a canon is a strength. The LGBT films that rise to the top are those that we hold dear personally, not necessarily those with the most gravitas. For the queer spectator, the love of film comes alongside the act of self-discovery. We love those films that made an impression on us as we discovered who we are, that we know back-to-front from fevered re-watching in the excitement of identification. For one friend of mine that’s what sends “Maurice” to the top. For another it’s “High Art,” for yet another it’s “Trick.” For me, the formative films were “Bad Education,” “My Beautiful Laundrette,” and “Party Monster.”

So, let’s make a canon. It’s open and mutable, so anything counts. No judgment on whether it has the gilded glamor of a “Sight and Sound” list topper or even the requisite self-seriousness. This is a canon with camp, remember. Make your own Pride must-watch list, and then dive into some LGBT movies that have nothing at all to do with your own experience. Start with Oliver Hermanus’s “Beauty,” Aurora Guerrero’s “Mosquita Y Mari,” and Xavier Dolan’s upcoming “Laurence Anyways” and get back to me.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Brokeback Mountain, Daniel Walber, Laurence Anyways, Pride Month, The Out Take

The Out Take: ‘Portrait of Jason’ and the Genesis of Queer Cinema

“The Out Take,” is a bi-weekly column dedicated to queer cinema.

In the beginning, there was Jason. Biblical metaphors are often somewhat trite and they haven’t always been friendly to the LGBT community, but in this case I think it’s more than warranted. Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason” is foundational in the grandest of terms. Like that opening verse of The Gospel of John, Jason Holiday’s testament feels like The Word, an origin moment for independent queer storytelling in cinema. And, like the first verses of Genesis, this brilliantly simple documentary feels like a series of creation acts. Jason’s honesty, defiant yet vulnerable, introduces just about every major theme that LGBT filmmakers have worked with ever since. To finish off this indulgent introduction with Whitman, Clarke’s revelatory documentary “contains multitudes.”

But first, what is “Portrait of Jason”? In late 1966 Shirley Clarke sat down with Jason Holiday, a 33-year old hustler. She interviewed him for twelve hours about his life, shying away from nothing. She asks about his family, his lovers, and his long career as a jack-of-all-trades, especially the under-the-table ones. Jason’s honesty is both defiant and vulnerable, and almost impossibly informative. He’s seen everything, been everywhere, met everyone. “I’ve been balling from Maine to Mexico,” he quips, “but I haven’t got a dollar to show for it.” He’s been a maid, a houseboy, anything to get by and avoid the humdrum 9 to 5. His life story is a kaleidoscope of the pre-Stonewall gay experience.

That’s right, pre-Stonewall. Let’s take a second to muse on that. This is 1966. That Clarke had the audacity to make a film on one of society’s most charismatic outcasts is impressive enough. That the resulting film is such an expansive collection of the ideas, themes and identities of queer art is downright miraculous. And, without fail, all of this extraordinary text is still relevant today.

“Portrait of Jason” begins with identity. “My name is Jason Holiday…My name is Aaron Payne.” The latter was Jason’s birth name, one which didn’t fit. Later on in life, in San Francisco, he was given the opportunity of a fresh start. “Jason Holiday was created in San Francisco. And San Francisco is a place to be created, believe me,” he explains. When you spend your early life being told not to be yourself, sometimes the best way out is to create a new self altogether. This comes up all over the place in queer cinema, running the gamut from Charles Busch’s “Die Mommie Die!” to the bewildering re-namings of Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bad Education.”

This radical way of retaking control is only the first step in a long journey through an irrepressibly fluid life. Jason has been a maid/butler for countless rich older women, most of them white. He embodies the classic duality of the servant’s role: docile on the surface but quick-witted and satirical when out of sight. His wisdom in matters of society and sexuality comes from having witnessed everything, or almost everything.

Meanwhile, his many sexual and domestic experiences with men across the country complement his wise knowledge of femininity. He is the wise outcast that knows everything, an empowering archetype of marginalized LGBT culture. As the years go on this trope may have gotten more magical, with characters like Jack Fairy in “Velvet Goldmine” and five Roses in “Laurence Anyways,” but the root is there.

In spite of all of this resourcefulness, however, there remains a real vulnerability. Clarke makes sure to sprinkle these more tender moments throughout the film, rather than solidly landing on Jason’s weaknesses with a thud. “I just want to be straight,” he lets slip. Another confession follows, “I’ve never, since I left home, really lived anywhere.” This unlikely combination of sheer charisma and raw frailty is at the essence of many a gay cultural emblem, from Judy Garland and the real queens of “Paris is Burning” to Julianne Moore’s roles in Todd Haynes’s “Safe” and “Far from Heaven.”

And, as Garland’s example illustrates, this conflict is often resolved through the act of performance. Jason’s spirited impersonations of Mae West and Butterfly McQueen are the most obvious example, allowing him to escape into a less conflicted character for a short while. Yet in many ways he is always performing, constantly shifting personas. In one moment he’s coy, insisting “I’ll never tell.” The next moment he’s the lush: “One more drink, I’ll tell all.” Later in the film, discussing his dreams of a cabaret act, he boasts that he could “play all the parts.”

Performance is perhaps the ultimate conduit of queer fluidity. Where can we still find that today? Forty-seven years after Clarke sat down with Jason, we’ve found ourselves in a precarious position. As the LGBT community (mostly the LG bit) becomes more accepted by the mainstream, from Hollywood to Middle America, reinventing ourselves seems less important. If we fit into the new idea of the modern family seamlessly, why would we bother to change our names, wander the country without aim and get dressed up like Dorothy Dandridge?

Well, it’s complicated. On the one hand, the community of transgender artists knows that in many ways this is old hat. Cabaret genius Justin Vivian Bond, for example, has moved beyond the gender binary altogether. Internationally, filmmakers like Almodóvar, Dolan, Sally Potter, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul get it. On cable TV there’s one notable outlier, “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” The show embraces the fluidity, emphasizes reinvention and taking control of your own narrative, and champions transgender characters and the irrelevance of traditional gender norms. Yet, while I’d argue that RuPaul is one of the most positive influences currently working in American culture, is that enough?

When it comes to the American mainstream, this fluidity seems to actually be on the wane in representations of queer characters. Hollywood is building a world for Aaron Payne, but doesn’t seem interested in Jason Holiday. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that gay kids across the country are being told that it’s ok to be who they are. But doesn’t it miss the point to not also say “Be whoever you want to be”?

“Portrait of Jason” is currently playing at The IFC Center in Manhattan.

Categories: Columns

Tags: LGBT Cinema, Portrait of Jason, The Out Take