Talkin’ about a revolution

How queer does a movie have to be to open a queer movie festival? Our annual Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival opened this week and I was there in all my finery (not) to celebrate with the gays, lesbians, drag queens and kings, moffies, dykes, bisexuals, trans men and women, and the intersexed (I think). Of course there were straight people there too, as friends, family and associates of the above, along with “straight” people who identify as human first, labels second. Pigeon holes are for pigeons, right?

So what a smorgasbord of descriptors. If you can’t find something there that works for you, then you’re terribly fussy. And I mean by “works for you” that it works right now, because identities are fluid, no? The concept of fluid identities has always fascinate me because I do believe that who we are, what we like in bed, who we are attracted to, the things that define us, change over our lives and in different contexts.

I was in a doctor’s waiting room this week (such dreary and slightly ominous places – I’m sure there’s a clever designer somewhere who can take the waiting room style beyond the corporate blandness they seem to depict these days) and three other men were similarly trapped in the grey, magazine’d interior. But they were so loud and macho in a male bonding kind of way that I found myself shrinking into my Hello magazine and avoiding eye contact. They’d cornered a kind of maleness that made me feel so un-male. Suddenly my shoes seemed camp, my pants too tights, my shirt too blousy. There were surreptitious glances at me (and no not the flirting kind) and any minute I felt I was going to be asked for my passport to the kingdom of maleness, finding that I’d left it at home!

So yes sometimes I feel more or less male (or white or homosexual or African) depending on the context I’m in, but essentially I feel that my identity as a gay man is cemented in me and perhaps not so fluid after all.  And this is the basis from which I go out into the world – and into the bedroom too I suppose. It was from this vantage point, then, that I was confronted by the festival opening night movie: Spinnin’ (6 Billion Different People) by Eusebio Pastrana. It tells the story of a gay couple who want to have a child, and their quest to do so with a range of gay and straight women.

Along the way we meet a host of “queer” people: a man who accepts his wife’s male lover into their home, the father of one of the gay protagonists who feels guilt for making enjoyable love to a woman some years after his wife’s death, the HIV positive widow of a man who had died of an AIDS-related illness saying she became positive so as not to lose him, a couple who exchange furtive and explosive kisses when stealing away from their respective partners. In many ways a frivolous homage to love and warmth and connection in all its splendid ways, the movie manages to say something quite serious about our need as humans to hook up and find meaning in whatever way works for us.

One rather moving subplot tells the story of a lesbian woman who struggles to let go of the daughter of her deceased partner – the state has decreed the child should go to live with her biological father. And we see here the power of ties that go beyond blood: this theme is echoed when the HIV positive woman kills herself and leaves her child in the care of the gay couple. The child is not “theirs” in the biological sense, but it is very much theirs because they love, cherish and raise him.

So what’s really queer about this movie is that it goes beyond stereotypes and does not judge its characters, rather it celebrates that indefinable yearning in all of us to love and belong (this may find expression in making and raising children) in a range of household arrangements. And that seems queer enough for me to open a queer film festival: a celebration of love in all its forms. Now that’s revolutionary.