A Note To Hollywood

If there was ever a book that deserved to be turned into a documentary, it is Christopher Bram's unputdownable Eminent Outlaws, a nonfiction book profiling such gay literary luminaries as Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal. Such a film would be a perfect companion to another documentary, The Celluloid Closet, which was based on film scholar Vito Russo's classic (and equally unputdownable) gay film history book of the same name. Many of the writers discussed in Eminent Outlaws had a connection to Tinseltown (either as screenwriters or because a book or play of theirs was made into a movie). So Hollywood, please take note.

The Ups And Downs Of A Gay & Lesbian Film Festival

The New York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Films, the culmination of a two-year search and acquisition project, comes at a most timely moment--the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village (in which dozens of gay men, many of them drag queens, fought the police back in a raid on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn) out of which emerged the gay liberation movement.

The festival, an outgrowth of that movement, and the first of its kind in nearly two and a half years, will screen 45 movies, in 77 screenings, during its June 7-20 [1989 ] run at the Biograph Cinema (255 West 57th Street, at Broadway). "We planned it for the month of June," said festival producer Susan Horowitz, the owner of Tower Press, a printing firm that publishes the annual Gay Pride Guide, "to tie into the other cultural emphasis around Stonewall."

While she busied herself with the task of lining up financial backers for the festival within the gay community, her partner John Lewis, who, quipped Horowitz, calls himself "an old movie queen" because of "his passion" for film, "traveled to Berlin and to other film festivals, and was able to see a lot of material."

One of the gems acquired is the 1989 British documentary Desire by Stuart Marshall which discusses through on-camera interviews, stills, and archival footage homosexuality in Germany before and during the Nazi period. (It will be shown opening night for a special screening to benefit the Gay Community Center on 13th Street.)

Said Horowitz: "We had a commitment about a film on Langston Hughes's life by an English filmmaker [Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston] that we were very excited about being able to find on such short notice but it was taken away from us because they decided to hold out for the New York Film Festival which is certainly their prerogative."

The painstaking efforts of Susan Horowitz and John Lewis have paid off in media attention and positive feedback from "the gay community at large," beamed Horowitz. However, there is a downside, too. The New Festival, the sponsors of the event, have sent out via mail, 25,000 copies of the catalogue. Only 32 have been returned requesting that the recipient be removed from the mailing list because they felt that the catalogue--which others have praised for its graphic design--was "disgusting." Horowitz and her cohorts were dismayed to the point of shedding tears, despite the fact that this manifestation of gay self-hatred represented only "a very small percentage."  It became evident to Horowitz that 20 years after Stonewall, there was still "a long way to go" in bolstering gay pride. "That's why a film festival is essential, a community center is essential in every city of every type."


This slightly condensed article was originally published in the Philadelphia Gay News (June 9, 1989).

"Victoria Mix": Queer Cinema Comes To Harlem

For five days in November [1996], Harlem became not just a place filmmakers like Spike Lee come to when they have a movie to shoot. This time the world-famous community was the site of a film festival called "Victoria Mix" that showcased dozens of "queer African Diasporic film and video" in the elegant Victoria 5 Theatre on 125th Street, down the street from the Apollo Theatre.

The uptown screenings were part of the 10th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, which had two other Manhattan venues screening different groups of films. (The film festival proudly claims to have "premiered more works by queer filmmakers of color than any other film festival in the world.") And for the first time, Harlem was the site of a gay and lesbian film festival, an historic event that Shari Frilot, the festival director, was "very excited about." Frilot, who is of African-American and Puerto Rican heritage, is  a filmmaker herself.

"Victoria Mix" consisted of more than 50 films and videos by both well-known and lesser-known filmmakers and was divided into eight programs" "Fire!" (the first evening of film, which was hosted by Gay Men of African Descent); "Harlem Stories"; "Let's Talk About Sex"; "The House That Identity Built"; "Oh Yes It's Ladies Night"; "Taboo Subjects"; "City Lore"; and "Family Drama."

On the night of the "Fire!" screenings, which like the other three programs I attended drew a small audience, there was the smell of smoke in the theatre;that seemed to emphasize the theme of the program. (There had been a fire next door a few hours earlier.) The program took its name from the 1926 Harlem Renaissance magazine co-edited by Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, in commemoration of "the same creative intensity" that has been passed down and continues to thrive within the current generation.

Of the 15 films I saw, the most noteworthy were: British filmmaker Isaac Julien's beautifully photographed, although at times didactic, feature-length study of race, sex,and class bias called The Passion of Remembrance (1985), Black Nations/Queer Nations? (1995), Shari Frilot's documentary of the March 1995 conference, One Moment in Time (1992), Felix Rodriquez's short film about an Hispanic drag queen's decision to have a sex change operation to please a straight? lover, and Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself: An Autobiography (1995), Yvonne Welbon's documentary about her six-year sojourn in Taiwan.

Frilot, who had three of her films in the festival, told me that she had "every intention of not making it our last year" at the Victoria 5 Theatre. In fact, she plans to do non-"Mix" business there as well.

This article was submitted to the New York Amsterdam News on November 18, 1996 and to Whazzup! magazine (Oakland, California) on December 31, 1996. Neither publication ran it.

Book Review: "The Lavender Screen"

The Lavender Screen by Boze Hadleigh (Citadel Press, 256 pages), illustrated with photographs.

Although Hollywood releases very few films that are gay-focused, the silver screen nevertheless, writes Boze Hadleigh in his study of gay and lesbian-themed films, The Lavender Screen, is a cornucopia of "minor gay characters, references, and plots."

In its discussion of more than 100 such films, The Lavender Screen emphasizes the period after 1959 when gay and lesbian characters became more visible when the Production code's gay ban was lifted in 1961 following "the success of Suddenly Last Summer and big budget movies like The Children's Hour, Advise and Consent, and Walk On the Wild Side, which had gay themes or subplots and were already completed." (All of these movies are included in the book.)

Each chapter, grouped around a single theme such as "Hunks," "Older Men, Younger Men," "Lesbians You Love To/Or Hate," and "Dress Reversal," ends with critical comments from the gay and mainstream press, both American and foreign.

For those who have not seen all or any of the films under scrutiny, there is one problem: Hadleigh tells too much of the plotlines, often giving away the endings.

But aside from that drawback, The Lavender Screen, deserves a place on the bookshelf or near the DVD player for quick reference, even though it is not as scholarly, opinionated, and comprehensive as its predecessor, The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo's magnum opus. This book was written with the layman in mind.

Three highlights of The Lavender Screen are Hadleigh's willingness to name gay names, the behind-the-scenes anecdotes (like the one about Henry Fonda, supposedly a liberal, who during a rehearsal for the play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, insulted its director, Charles Laughton, with the remark, "What do you know about men, you fat, ugly homosexual."), and its extensive bibliography.

TV Movie Review: Serving in Silence

The following is a previously unpublished TV movie review I wrote in 1995. It was assigned by the late Mel Tapley, who was the arts and entertainment editor at the New York Amsterdam News. No reason was ever given for why it never ran. The review is still timely because of the continuing controversy about gays in the military.

Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995)
Directed by Jeff Bleckner
Written by Alison Cross
Reviewed by Charles Michael Smith

"Controversial" and "television's first lesbian love story" are the words the press has used to describe NBC's two-hour movie, Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, which aired recently.

Such descriptions would have caused viewers to believe they were going to see steamy bedroom scenes and other forms of titillation. Serving in Silence is not a movie about lust and sexual conquest. Instead it is about discrimination ,intolerance, hate, fear, and prejudice in the U.S. military toward its gay and lesbian members. The movie is an attempt to "humanize this issue," says Donald Suggs of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which is organizing a postcard campaign to thank those companies that bought advertising time in the movie's time slot.

Serving in Silence is based on Cammermeyer's autobiography of the same name. The film traces her rise to colonel in a career that spans nearly 30 years. As a combat nurse in Vietnam, she received numerous medals, including a Bronze Star, "a rare achievement for a woman in those days," writes Randy Shilts in his book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military. Married with four sons, she later divorced her army husband of 15 years. As she (portrayed by Glenn Close) says in the film, she always knew she was a lesbian, she just found it hard to come out to herself.

In 1989, she applied for chief nurse of the entire National Guard. This would raise her to the rank of general and require her to attend the War College. But she must first pass the security clearance interview. When she was asked about her sexual orientation, she admitted to being a lesbian. "I assumed that since I had been a good soldier and had been in the military so long," she says in an interview in the New York Daily News, "I couldn't possibly be seen as a security risk." From that point on, the army began taking steps to have her dismissed. She, on the other hand, was determined to fight them. Lawyers from a gay legal defense organization come to her aid.

Throughout the film we see the anguish and turmoil her public battle causes her family, most of whom nevertheless support her, and especially her artist/teacher lover Diane (Judy Davis), who would rather avoid the limelight and live a quiet domestic life.

Despite the hoopla from GLAAD, Serving in Silence is not all that controversial or groundbreaking . The Kiss much talked about comes during the last ten minutes when it is too late for viewers offended by such behavior between members of the same sex to change channels. Very brave, producers. (Barbra Streisand co-executive produced.)
Serving in Silence, like other gay films (Philadelphia and Making Love, to name two), emphasize the highly educated, upwardly mobile gays and lesbians because their makers are afraid straight audiences will be less willing to see these films otherwise.

I'm still waiting for the day when an ordinary hardscrabble black gay man from Harlem or Bedford -Stuyvesant with a minimum wage job and an unsympathetic family is depicted on television. That would be truly groundbreaking and, perhaps, controversial.

On the Movies

"Whether we realize it or not, movies often tell us what we think about ourselves. There's a contradiction in the way that we, as an audience, approach movies. They're made primarily for fantasy and yet we look to them to reflect our reality. They become a sort of wish fulfillment, a representation of a life that doesn't necessarily exist but one which we've been taught to want. On the one hand, you can always say 'It's only a movie.' On the other hand, it's a barometer of what we, as a people, think and believe about the ways in which we live."-- Film historian Vito Russo (1946-1990), from The Celluloid Closet (documentary, 1995).

Hooray For Hollywood and Its Screenwriters

In Hollywood, movies are considered a director's medium and so screenwriters are given second-class treatment. Newspapers and magazines, taking their cue from the suits at movie studios, have followed their example, ignoring the contributions of the writer and lionizing the director. It is refreshing to see that Entertainment Weekly in its Fall Movie Preview Special Double Issue (August 21-28, 2009) gives credit that's long overdue by including the names of those who have written the scripts for movies slated to be released in September, October, November, and December (including movies written and directed by the same person). Unfortunately, the movie reviews by Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum in the same issue neglect to give the writing credits of the movies under discussion.
While going over the fall movies, one story came to mind: a screenwriter, tired of being treated like the low man on a totem pole and knowing that without a script there is no movie, throws a handful of blank pages at a director, telling him: "Now let's see you try to direct that."

A Film History Book Worth Checking Out

I recently finished reading Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris (Penguin Press, 2008) an Entertainment Weekly writer. I had a hard time putting the book down. It is a behind-the-scenes look at five groundbreaking motion pictures released in 1967 that were nominated for an Academy Award: The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night,Doctor Dolittle, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and Bonnie and Clyde.The only one of the five I've never seen is Doctor Dolittle. The others I've seen on TV and/or VHS. Unfortunately, I never saw any of them when they made their theatrical premiere. (Doctor Dolittle is the only one of the five that was a box office flop.) Perhaps Symphony Space, the performance venue in New York City, will screen these films in a special series based on the book. Then I will get the opportunity to see them the way they were meant to be seen--on a wide screen with an audience. (I've seen several films that I missed the first time around like Boyz N the Hood that way at Symphony Space.)
One small complaint: On the back flap, the author bio states that Harris's husband is the playwright Tony Kushner. With so many smart men in the gay community, you would think that they could come up with a better nomenclature for such an intimate relationship. The words "husband" and "wife" have heterosexual connotations. If, as the late gay activist Harry Hay believed, gays and lesbians are different from their straight counterparts, shouldn't there be marriage rituals and affectional titles befitting that difference? Just asking. Other than that, Pictures at a Revolution is worth checking out by film buffs.
P.S. I would love to see someone do a biography of gay film historianVito Russo, whose Celluloid Closet, is another memorable and hard-to-put-downbook. This classic examines Hollywood's depiction of gays and lesbians since the beginning of the film industry. Mark Harris or William J. Mann would be the perfect ones to take on such a project. I hope one of them will consider it.