Despite the screenings and the books, attracting younger — and straighter — audiences to gay film history remains a challenge. Matthew Hays, who edits the Queer Film Classic series with Thomas Waugh, said that for many of the students in the film classes he teaches at Concordia University in Montreal, “Brokeback Mountain” is an old movie, and ancient history “is Britney Spears’s first album.”http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/movies/queer-art-film-series-at-ifc-center.html
Keepers of the Gay Film Legacy
By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Published: March 16, 2012 
Mostefa Djadjam, left, and Antonio Orlando in "The Rose King." IN front of the IFC Center in the West Village on a recent Monday night a largely gay crowd waited in line for a sold-out screening. It wasn’t the latest gay rom-com that had packed them in but rather
“Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” Robert Altman’s 1982 film, based on
Ed Graczyk’s 1976 play, about female friends who reunite at a Texas Woolworth’s on the 20th anniversary of
James Dean’s death. The film’s gay cred is considerable: besides starring
Cher — goddess to drag queens everywhere — it features
Karen Black as a sympathetic transsexual character.
The screening was part of the monthly
Queer/Art/Film series started in 2009 by the filmmakers
Adam Baran and
Ira Sachs, whose
“Keep the Lights On,” about a closeted lawyer and his lover, had its premiere at the
Sundance Film Festival this year. Each month Mr. Baran and Mr. Sachs ask a notable figure to pick an inspirational film. “Come Back to the Five and Dime” was chosen by
Jack Pierson, part of the Boston School of photographers whose work has been heavily influenced by gay culture.
Jack Pierson, in scarf, and Ira Sachs, far right, at IFC, after seeing "Come Back to the Five and
Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean."On Monday the director
Rose Troche (
“Go Fish”) will introduce her choice,
“Postcards From America” (1984), about the artist
David Wojnarowicz. And on Thursday the actor
John Cameron Mitchell will host the opening of a Los Angeles outpost of the series at the
Cinefamily at the
Silent Movie Theater. His selections are
Jean Vigo’s
“Zero de Conduite,” a 1933 French teenage rebellion film, and the 1973 made-for-TV movie
“The Girl Most Likely To...”.
If the stereotype is true, without gay rescuers the Victorian homes of San Francisco and the belfries of Savannah would be as good as firewood. Likewise gay men and women are also, to borrow a phrase from the author
Will Fellows, “keepers of culture” when it comes to films and the filmgoing experience. Through series like Queer/Art/Film as well as several new movies and books, they are serving as cinematic caregivers at a time when young gay audiences and mainstream Hollywood alike don’t seem interested in film’s gay past.
A flurry of little-known or rarely screened movies in New York this spring suggests that interest is robust among repertory programmers. This month
BAMcinématek is spotlighting
Terence Davies, whose semiautobiographical
“Terence Davies Trilogy” (1983) and
“Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988) resonate with their themes of sexual repression and schoolyard bullying. Though Mr. Davies has a new film,
“The Deep Blue Sea,” opening this week, the BAMcinématek series is a chance to experience the work of a living gay director whose early movies, while not totally forgotten, are ripe for rediscovery.
In May the
Museum of Modern Art will hold a monthlong retrospective devoted to the German director
Werner Schroeter, whose influences included
Jean Genet, Jack Smith and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Among the 25 films to be screened, few of which had theatrical releases in the United States, is
“The Rose King“ (1986), a homoerotic tale about a boy, his mother and a young male farm hand. The
Filmmakers Cooperative, a distributor of independent and avant-garde films, is raising funds to digitize
Jose Rodriguez-Soltero’s rarely shown 1966 film
“Lupe,” based on the Mexican-American actress
Lupe Velez and starring the drag queen
Mario Montez, a
Warhol favorite.
The drag queen Mario Montez in "Lupe," a 1966 film directed by José Rodriguez-Soltero.“It’s a cliché, but I think gay people really do have special relationships with movies,” said the filmmaker
Jeffrey Schwarz, whose new documentary,
“Vito,” about the gay film historian and AIDS activist
Vito Russo, played at the
New York Film Festival last year and is scheduled to be shown on
HBO later this year.
Mr. Baran said the impetus for his series was to give new life to what mobile technology and the Internet have nearly destroyed: a communal filmgoing experience in which gay people get together to watch classic gay movies on the big screen.
“You can sit at home and watch a movie and then go online and read film journals or blogs or get onto
imdb.com and post what you thought of the movie and have online discussions, and that’s great,” said Mr. Baran, who is the programming coordinator for this year’s
Outfest, the Los Angeles gay and lesbian film festival. “What you lack is the chance to talk about what the film meant. This series gives everybody a shared experience.”
In addition to programming, gay people are sometimes the ones doing the actual archival work.
The Legacy Project, a collaboration between Outfest and the
UCLA Film & Television Archive, is focused on restoring and preserving independent gay films that more mainstream archival organizations (and Hollywood) perceive as having little commercial value.
“In any community the priority is often what comes tomorrow,” said
Shannon Kelley, who is openly gay and the head of public programs for the UCLA archive. “But one of the aspects of a community coming into its maturity is taking care of its history, because no one else is going to do it.”
Kristin Pepe, the manager of the Legacy Project, said her interest in preservation was sparked during a screening of her organization’s first feature film restoration job:
Bill Sherwood’s 1986 film,
“Parting Glances,” about a group of young gay men (one of them played by
Steve Buscemi) dealing with AIDS.
“I sat in the room with 600 people watching this story, which unfolded in the ‘80s, when AIDS was a death sentence, with people who had lived through it,” said Ms. Pepe, who identifies herself as a lesbian. “I couldn’t help but feel its impact. I thought, ‘I’d like to focus on these kinds of films.’ “
The Legacy Project is devoting part of 2012 to films of the
New Queer Cinema, a term coined in 1992 by the critic
B. Ruby Rich to denote the independent, transgressive-minded gay films emerging then, like
Todd Haynes’s
“Poison” and
Tom Kalin’s
“Swoon” Next Sunday the group will present a digitally remastered version of
Gregg Araki’s
“Living End” (1992) about two HIV-positive gay men on a violent road trip.
Gay-specific series are also a throwback to the early, post-
Stonewall days of gay liberation when movie stars were objects of worship, and their films could be seen only in theaters. It’s an experience akin to that at
Chelsea Classics, a weekly series at the
Chelsea Cinema hosted by
Steven Polito (drag name:
Hedda Lettuce), where the fare is campy and more focused on film divas, like
“Female on the Beach” with
Joan Crawford or
“Airport ’75.” These are the kinds of films Mr. Polito grew up loving and that gay men, he contended, react to most strongly. (On Thursday he’s showing
“Eyes of Laura Mars,” from 1978, with
Faye Dunaway.)
“These are tough broads,” Mr. Polito said. “You want to drink with them. You think gay men are going to respond to
Julia Roberts?”
Mr. Polito said that for many young gay men these screenings are their first chances to see
Barbara Stanwyck or
Bette Davis on the big screen, turning the evening into a gay cultural initiation. “You get these kids coming to the theater to see this stuff, and they develop an appreciation for it,” he said.
In his book
“Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo” (2011)
Michael Schiavi describes raucous screenings at
Firehouse Flicks, all-gay viewing parties in New York City started by Mr. Russo in 1970. For Mr. Russo showing dramas like
“The Battle of Algiers” and campy horror like
“The Blob” was more than just a cinematic endeavor.
“Vito adored Hollywood,” Mr. Schiavi said. “But he also realized that mainstream movies weren’t representing him and his kind. He realized that the more negative images of gay people on film, the harder it was for them to get rights.”
In addition to
“Celluloid Activist,” several new books are trying to keep gay film history relevant. In November the artist and filmmaker
William E. Jones released
“Halsted Plays Himself,” a biography of the gay director
Fred Halsted, whose pornographic
“L.A. Plays Itself” was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and eventually made its way into that institution’s permanent collection. This month
Arsenal Pulp Press, a small publisher in
Vancouver, British Columbia, will release new books about the groundbreaking 1977 documentary
“Word Is Out,” a collection of first-person accounts of gay life;
“Zero Patience,” John Greyson ’s darkly comic AIDS musical from 1993; and
Luchino Visconti ’s provocative drama
“Death in Venice” (1971), based on the
Thomas Mann novel. The titles are part of Arsenal’s
Queer Film Classic series of monographs.
Despite the screenings and the books, attracting younger — and straighter — audiences to gay film history remains a challenge.
Matthew Hays, who edits the Queer Film Classic series with
Thomas Waugh, said that for many of the students in the film classes he teaches at
Concordia University in
Montreal,
“Brokeback Mountain” is an old movie, and ancient history “is
Britney Spears’s first album.”
“The irony is that a lot of gay culture of the past is available on YouTube, but young people don’t tap into it,” Mr. Hays said. “They are steeped in
‘Glee,’ but if you talk to them about
‘Death in Venice,’ and that wasn’t that long ago, they don’t know anything about it.”
