A mixed and mixed up community

Are gay and lesbian film festivals still necessary in 2008? I attended one recently and was struck by the incredible diversity of the opening night audience.

We were a motley bunch of all races, colours, shapes, sizes and persuasions. An elegantly put together air hostess stood out in her powder blue 50s outfit, topped with a jaunty pillbox hat. What was really striking about her was her height – at 1.85 metres she would stand taller than most overhead compartments (actually most planes) and struggle to offer us “chicken or beef”.

So yes, the drag contingent was there, some intentional, while others just adopted a hit or miss approach to gender presentation. I spotted a trans man of my acquaintance and he’s looking amazingly butch right now – I swear I want some of those testosterone shots he’s been getting.

I was especially flustered, though, when he hit on me. Normally yours truly is quite good at being hit on – if my long term memory serves me well. But when a good-looking person who used to be a woman who liked women is now a man also occasionally into men, my brain starts to smoke. Oh come on, I know he’s entitled to be bi, or fluid in his sexuality, but I still got awkward and embarrassed.

Maybe when my closet straight self (well, closet straight moment, more like it) is secretly outed, I feel I’m letting my 100% queer friends down. But I suppose the point I’m making, and yes there is one embedded somewhere in here, is that our queer world is an amazing place.

Lesbian women who look disconcertingly handsome, gay men who missed the gay gene (and so could not star in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy because they need all the help they can get themselves in the clothes department), couples intertwined as if their lives depended on it, others steadfastly pretending they are not a couple (sorry guys the matching outfits/hair/facial expression give it away), variations of onesomes, twosomes and threesomes, the political, the partygoers, the believers, the agnostics, we were all there in some weird sense of “community”.

This feeling of community is, I know, more an expression of faith and desire than a reflection of reality. Gay and lesbian solidarity, in my experience, is often quite transient and gender politics usually get in the way.

Even getting black and white queers together can be a challenge. Throw class differences into the mix and you get a seething mass of missed meanings, stubborn stereotyping and crass curiosity. So, not to be too heady and “intellectual” about this, I do believe the idea of community is quite a contested one.

Appeals to the gay “community” to rally around a cause don’t easily work because a lot of the time we are just too damned interested in ourselves, the next club experience, a trip to an exotic clime, even survival sometimes, to get involved in the lives of others.

But I do think we need to stretch ourselves to shift our comfort zones. And that’s what gay and lesbian film festivals can do – extend us, provoke us, tease us, annoy us and entertain us.

Let’s be honest, we queers can be as parochial and judgmental as any other sector of society. We need to see movies about lesbian women making babies, lesbian women being attacked for being lesbian, gay men being crooked (as opposed to just bent), gay men making babies, trans men and women navigating the vagaries of gender and stereotyping, intersexed people fighting for their rights (or fighting with their lovers), and bisexuals being, well, bisexual.

If all we take from this is the idea that we are as mixed and mixed up, as amazing and banal, as any other “community”, we might walk away with a sense of affection for those around us and, most importantly, for ourselves.