subject: Ending Gaysploitation [print this page] In July, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Outfest, celebrated its twenty-six years of LGBT cinema. Outfest is one of the premiere film festivals that focuses on the LGBT community and the filmmakers who supply it with its programming. With Hollywood A-gays, agents, buyers, and the penniless filmmakers sipping goblets of sponsored liquor and targeted corporate advertising aimed at that urban myth of gay disposable income, films will be screened that are hardly anything to be proud of, much less celebrate.
Films like Boys in the Band, Longtime Companion, and the recently restored Parting Glances were a queer America's response in dealing with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. We didn't know what was killing us at first and then when we started going to more funerals than birthdays, the discourse permeated throughout the community to take action. Filmmakers, armed with cellophane, documented and scripted some of the most moving stories of our times. Films of the late 1980s and early 1990s had purpose and crossed many demographic barriers, even if there always seemed to be a death in the end.
Studios still seem intent on financing gay-themed films only if the homosexual dies in the last reel, but the real death you see on the screen these days is the suicide of the LGBT film. Recently, Gregg Goldstein with The Hollywood Reporter observed at this year's twentieth anniversary of New York's gay and lesbian film fest, Newfest, "For despite breakthroughs like Brokeback,' gay films already are well down the same path as 1970s black films, where quality projects like Sounder' were the exception and blaxploitation flicks were the rule. Cable's demand for cheaply made gay movies has ushered in an era of gaysploitation that only the most talented filmmakers and daring companies are likely to resist." (2008)
As the democratization of filmmaking continues with cheap camcorders and DIY editing, anyone can be in Best Buy today and come out a "filmmaker" tomorrow; begging the question, just because you can, should you? Who can blame them when the LGBT community has turned itself into a marginalized affinity market of lemmings over the years? There's no near-term justification to invest in more modest budgets that brought us films like Trick, Broken Hearts Club, or Boys Don't Cry (all films made for around $500K to $1m respectively) when you can make ten or fifteen flicks at $25,000 a piece and turn a quick buck.
Distributors of these arguably questionable works put these films out into a theater for a day as a publicity stunt and then quickly rush them to television or DVD so the title is fresh in the memory of the gay cinema junkie looking for their next fix. Film festivals are left with programming the best they can given the saturation of poor quality content arriving by the truckloads. Filmmakers who aspire to make actual films (the ones actually shot on film and use bona fide actors) find themselves lost to find the financing in a world of diversified hedge funds where the bottom line of next year outweighs the profit of the long-term investment. The justification that distributors give to filmmakers trying to raise enough capital to make their films is the calculation of the break-even point based on domestic box office receipts rather than ancillary DVD or on-demand sales; however, if the distributor is releasing a low-quality film for one day or a week, then the financial performance is a self-fulfilled prophecy. Based on this Shylockian algorithm, the real auteur directors are being robbed the opportunity to make films that will actually inspire the LGBT community and mainstream audiences to get up off the couch and actually see a film worth one's two hours. We've gotten so comfortable with ourselves that we've been making films with inside jokes and juvenile stories for our inner-teenager rather than reaching for more universal aspirations. There's always room for a B-movie here and there, but as a community we are maturing from the rainbow-waving gay adolescence of 1995 and it is time to show that we are contributing members of a society ready for the responsibilities like marriage, children, and family. While it is important to maintain our identity, we will need to elevate ourselves to show that we're much more than fodder about two twenty-something's repeating the word "gay" over and over again.
Goldstein's comparison of blaxploitation to our gaysploitation is a deft one. It took the black community almost twenty-years for a Do The Right Thing; let's hope it doesn't take that long for LGBT filmmakers.
