The Objects of Our Affection

If there are noticeably fewer gay-themed films on the market these days than there have been in past years, that's because the residual damage of the prefab gay romantic comedies of the mid- to late '90s (e.g., The Object of My Affection, In & Out) is now being felt on television. With the popularity of shows like Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, television execs would have us believe that there's no such thing as "don't ask, don't tell." But what kind of progress is this? GLAAD has inexplicably lauded the makers of Queer as Folk for essentially promoting the worst elements of gay culture, while the utopian Queer Eye for the Straight Guy coddles gay stereotypes and encourages objectification. Bravo's dated Boy Meets Boy claimed to attack these very circus acts, but any social consequence was lost as soon as the show's star bachelor was made the butt of the producers' final joke. For the sake of entertainment, gay romance was dutifully trivialized.

Television isn't ahead of the times; it's actually several light years behind the more innovative works of the early New Queer Cinema. Which is bad for the gay community, but good for movie lovers. Now that the minstrel show has moved to television, gay filmmakers have been able to get down to the nitty-gritty. Today there's still a market for inconsequential trifles such as Fluffer and Km.0, but gay filmmakers are producing more subtle, cutting-edge works, everything from O Fantasma to Head On. Homosexuality is more implicit (behold the mystical allegory of Gus Van Sant's Gerry), and sometimes an area of serious critical study (as in Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven). If this year's refreshing Minneapolis/St. Paul LGBT Film Festival (November 13 through 20 at Oak Street Cinema) is any indication, the best in socially conscious gay cinema is still being imported from abroad, which may say less about gay filmmakers today than it probably says about America's insular society. From The Politics of Fur to Put the Camera on Me, the films and docs at this year's fest celebrate and subvert the sexual codes currently being exploited on network airwaves for big ratings.

Dee Mosbacher's documentary Radical Harmonies (screening Monday at 7:30 p.m.) pays homage to the lesbians who transplanted all sorts of sociopolitical frustrations into the underground "women's music" of the '70s. Their stories are candid, but this PBS-style documentary is nowhere near as radical as Karim Ainouz's Madame Satä (Thursday at 7:30 p.m.), an underplotted but sweltering portrait of the famous, paradoxical Brazilian queer Joao Francisco dos Santos (played in the film by Lázaro Ramos), whose many melodramas speak to the gay community's universal struggle to fight the power. Ainouz, who worked in various capacities on three of the most important films of the New Queer Cinema (Haynes's Poison, Tom Kalin's Swoon, and Steve McLean's Postcards from America), fascinatingly equates Santos's struggle for acceptance to performance art.

The shorts are a mixed bag. Andrew Hull's gorgeously shot "That Thing We Do" (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.) is your typical coming-out soap opera, except that it looks like Abercrombie & Fitch: The Movie. Emily Atef's lovely "XX to XY: Fighting to Be Jake" (Saturday at 5:30 p.m.) is fraught with one too many sight gags and animated flights of fancy, though its evocation of the transgender Jake's fight to fit into the world speaks to our need for acceptance. And Stefan J. Nadelman's "Terminal Bar" (Tuesday at 9:30 p.m.), a wee paean to a now-defunct bar in New York's Hell's Kitchen, is often compromised by its zippy, multimedia madness, but its curiosity about unearthing lost chapters in gay NYC history is humbling.

The features and docs are noticeably short on laughs: There's a nasty mean streak that runs throughout Gay Block's "Bertha Alyce" (Saturday at 3:30 p.m.), the famous photographer's overly scrutinizing jab at her deceased mother; and the feature that follows "Alyce," Joan E. Biren's educational No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, is a competent but stale homage to '50s lesbian activists. (Hey--at least it's better than The Hours.)

For the best of the fest, check out these four below.

 

Kiki + Tiger
(Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:45 p.m.)