111001

Jerry Tartaglia

(This article was distributed on the net in October, 2001)

Twenty five years ago I wrote a brief essay entitled, “The Gay Sensibility in the American Avant Garde Cinema,” which appeared in the Millennium Film Journal (#4/5). At the time of its writing, about five years prior to the emergence of the epidemic, gay identity had crystallized around the authenticity of Homo sex. A gay cultural identity had begun to generate an awareness among lesbians and gay men that a cultural usurpation had been the norm for centuries in the West. We had come to realize that many of the cultural products, institutions, works of art, theories and discoveries were the result of the vision and labor of men and women who stood as outsiders to the “normal” sexually generated elements of culture.

The worst fears of the destroyers of life had finally surfaced in Collective Thought: the very foundations of culture rest upon homo-generated vision. The Lesbian/Gay Liberation Movement was pressing towards a new Millennium in which all that is good, right, just, true, and beautiful in same-gender love would liberate the mechanisms of social intercourse from the clutches of the vampiric, heterocentric death-culture.

Lesbian and Gay philosophers like Harry Hay and Judy Grahn helped to articulate the language of a new paradigm: Queer was not simply a matter of “alternative sexual practices.” Queer became a point of view, a perspective on life, gender, justice, beauty, and truth that is accessible to those who consciously and willfully transgress the boundaries of the normative.

This vision of change served as the seed ground for many new groups with divergent ideas: among men, the Radical Faeries, among women, the so called “separatist” lesbians, whose position was articulated by women like Mary Day in Beyond God the Father.

It was within this context that I wrote the article on the Gay sensibility in Avant-Garde film. There were few A.G. filmmakers whose work seemed to bear any link to the emerging paradigm. However, as a young filmmaker I naturally brought to my films and to my research the influences of my sphere of development. The formalist cinema, which was widely popular in Avant-Garde film circles at the time, was also deeply engaging to me, and I saw it as one of many different ways of Cinema. While there were a number of contradictory problems in Avant Garde film practice at the time, one truth was clear to me. I wanted nothing to do with mainstream narrative cinema. This feeling was echoed from various sides of my self: as a filmmaker, as a gay man, as a non-consumer of media.

Mainstream cinema was both a cultural product and a motivational tool of the teleculture. Its purpose was and is to reinforce the mechanisms of social control by saturating a self-hypnotized audience with the images and sounds of the heterocentric death culture. The fact that there are mechanisms that provide support for “alternative media”, does not prove the openness of the media industry. It proves the hegemonic nature of that beast and its willingness to buy out Queer vision by consuming the Queer spirit for the price of a few dollars and some false hopes for glitter and fame.

It was around this same time that the phenomenon of Lesbian/Gay Film Festivals began to surface in the U.S. A great debt is owed to the Queer film historian, Vito Russo for his work in unmasking the closeted and oppressive representations of lesbians and gay men in mainstream cinema. He showed us that the task of the hack image-makers of heterocentric Hollywood has always been to promote the values of the death culture by reinforcing the oppressions expressed in its story telling. The energies of the human orgasm will out, however, and Vito detected and identified the sometimes coded expressions of Queerness in films which purported to glorify normative heterosexualism and its economic and political support mechanisms.

At first, the lesbian and gay film festivals were basking in a newly discovered openness. They were somewhat small events, held over a weekend, with word of mouth advertising and news in the lesbian gay network. The festivals flourished through the sense of lesbian/gay cultural production. People were excited that we were making and owning our own images. One of the primary thrusts of these festivals was to promote a “positive” image of lesbians and gay men in movies. Gay America wanted to see its life stories reflected on the silver screen.

Like all products of the culture industry, these positive images are the result of an artificially created need: the need to belong to the heterocentric culture. The fulfillment of that “need” successfully ensures the eradication of reclaiming Queer Culture. It reinforces the usurpation of Queer Culture by the mainstream.

It is within this framework that the A.I.D.S. epidemic began. At the outset, the epidemic decimated the gay male community, eradicated the feeling of hope for a new social/sexual environment, wiped out gay artists and the budding gay culture, and through the psychological terrorism enacted under the genocidal leadership of Ronald Reagan and his cohorts, effectively de-sexualized gay culture. Gay and disease were once again synonymous. The lies, obfuscations, and violence generated by the heterocentric death culture and its death worshipping religious cults, ran wildly through this nation, propelled by the instruments of the media industry.

By mid decade, the community had recovered its voice by reclaiming its desire and articulating its rage. A.I.D.S. Activism kept hope alive. Activist media functioned as a means of resistance against the giant. Today, however, we are no closer to a cure, nor to a vaccine, although the disease can apparently be managed.

“Funds are limited,” yet 30 billion dollars could be mobilized within two days notice for a military operation.

The mainstream media, including much of what passes for Queer media, work as instruments of the prevailing social order. Lesbian and Gay cinema has as its “purpose” the promotion of a normative view of lesbian/gay life. The mainstream Queer cinema, supported by “alternative” arms of the media industry seeks to promote the image of Queers as “just like everybody else except for what we do in bed.” We would do well to ponder Harry Hay’s assertion that we are completely different from straight people EXCEPT for what we do in bed.

Last month I announced that I am withdrawing my work from distribution in this country. That has happened. My work is now available only through the New York Public Library System, where it is free from the agendas of people who have lost sight of the possibility for a Queer world. I will continue to make films and video, and I will continue to show my work in places which welcome me and which stand counter to the media industry and its valueless products.

I reject the showcasing of work in the lesbian/gay festivals. Cinema – the art of the moving image – the art of vision - of Queer vision – should have been the purpose of the festivals. Instead, the festivals gave way to a gay media industry that derives its values from the worst of American culture. This gay media industry is built upon a consumerist ethic, tossing aside works of art after one screening, always glorifying the new, the novel, and the irrelevant, divorcing itself from the genuine community which can only exist through a painstakingly honest historical perspective. It is ageist, anti-intellectual, fame obsessed, careerist, and money hungry.

As this nation rises up to “defend our way of life,” I adjure all Queers to question the mechanisms of the media industries and stand against the death culture which offers us only the satisfaction of “belonging” in exchange for our Queer spirit.