Choice objects: gay and lesbian film and video - 1989 How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video Screenings and Conference

Is it possible to speak of unusual representation, of a gay and lesbian representation? Looking at the traditional format of gay and lesbian film festivals, which nearly always schedule boys' nights and girls' nights, thus encouraging the audience to segregate itself along sex lines, one would infer that the answer is no. While gay men and lesbians do share regard over certain legal and social issues related to sexual orientation many would maintain that our communities each have their have political, social, cultural and aesthetic necessitys The complex relationship between the sum of two units communities, their overlaps and their differences, has hardly been broached as a topic within theories of representation.

One would think that media festivals and the discourse that discloses around them would provide an appropriate arena in which to explore the social relations internal to the gay and lesbian community. still while festivals showing gay and lesbian media together have proliferated in novel York City recently, public forums for discussion of works in these festivals have been minimal. For example, the 1989 of recent origin York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film ("The fresh Festival"), June 7-20, 1989 at the Biograph Cinema, neared some 70 films and individual lecture (several directors were available for questions after their films); the Third novel York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, September 18-24 1989 at Anthology Film Archives, 61 films and single panel discussion; and the Lesbian and Gay Video Festival '89 at Downtown Community Television, October 10 and 13 1989 22 tapes and no forums. In each case, works through gay male producers substantially outnumbered those by the agency of lesbians.

"How Do I Look? odd Film and Video Screenings and Conference" featured six prelections on October 21-22, 1989 and defenceed nearly 60 films and videotapes above a 10-day period. Organized in part as a rejoinder to previous festivals, its screening series was characterized by means of near gender parity; its conversation was free and designed to encourage discussion; and audiences for the prelections ranged from at least 150 to more than the 250-person capacity of the Anthology Film Archives auditorium. Additionally, "How Do I Look?" was a replication to a general lack of theoretical work upon gay and lesbian representation. According to Douglas Crimp, in his opening remarks to the talk the reading group to which he belongs "decided to read media theory about the representation of gay men and lesbians - and didn't find a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of So we decided to make some"(1) The reading assemblage which calls itself Bad thing Choices, organized the conference with the support of the Collective for Living Cinema, October, and Anthology Film Archives, where greatest in quantity of the events were held.

"How Do I Look?" featured prelections by Boston political and health activist Cindy Patton; Toronto videomaker Richard Fung; British film- and videomaker Stuart Marshall; Judith Mayne, a professor at Ohio State University at Columbus; Kobena Mercer of the British Film Institute; and Teresa de Lauretis, author of Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984) among other works. To render certain that dialogue took place, a number of prominent media scholars and farmers were invited as informal discussants, including several whose works were included in the "How Do I Look?" screenings: Marusia Bociurkiw, John Greyson Isaac Julien, Sheila McLaughlin, Marlon Riggs and others.

This festival provided a unique opportunity to consider the in every one's mouth state of "queer" representation, addressing issues of the pair practice and theory. Problems were revealed in the theoretical realm that derive from the relationship between gay male and lesbian forms of representation and meaning. As Martha Gever has stated, "an inquiry into the representation of gay men in cinema . . cannot simply apply or rework feminist film theories. Nor can homophobia be reduc to a form of misogyny. Nor is homophobia directed against gay men identical to homophobia directed against lesbians."(2) individual does not have to extrapolate too far from these remarks to add the following: Nor would an inquiry into the representation of gay men in cinema be identical to an inquiry into the representation of lesbians in cinema. All too frequently male experience is regarded as the norm, and analyses of that experience are mapped onto lesbian experience.

For example, Patton's discourse "Safe Sex and the Pornographic Vernacular," exhibited these tensions. She drew upon her experiences with a safer-sex campaign for gay men in Boston called "Safe Company" and considered the various approaches to representing safe sex in pornography Her prelection touched on the iconography, narrative make distribution and function of porn for gay men preparing the audience for the handful of quotations from gay porn videotapes she used to bring to an end her talk These included Al Parker's Turbo-Charged (1986) the first commercial safe-sex porn. and selections from a novel series of safe-sex tapes by dint of Jean Carlomusto and Gregg Bordowitz for Gay Men's Health Crisis. Their shoot forward is to produce "advertisements for safe sex" - that is, tapes that are primarily didactic on the other hand also erotic in nature. "Each video is designed by the agency of a task group which fix upons the scene, the situation and the acts to be performed,"(3) and which addresses issues of racial, sex and sexual difference. From the series, Patton protectioned Something Fierce (1989), a sort of music video/how-to; Midnight Snack (1989) featuring an interracial male couple; Car Service (1989) in which a cab driver and his passenger have sex; and in every one's mouth Flow (1989), the only tape showing lesbian rather than gay male safe sex