The San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival's finale has a slew of memorable documentaries, three of which I'm proud to recommend.
The Freedom to Marry Eddie Rosenstein's informative, moving doc traces the history of the queer right-to-marry movement back to a then-obscure Harvard Law School student. Dubbed "the Marriage Guy" by the filmmakers, Evan Wolfson doggedly pursued marriage equality even while friends and colleagues were far more concerned with HIV/AIDS.
One of the many historical ironies in this decades-long struggle is the role unwittingly played by President Ronald Reagan. Reagan's choice of a lawyer dubbed "a liquor lobbyist from Sacramento," Anthony Kennedy, would later translate into four significant pro-LGBTQ decisions, including the right to marry. The language of Justice Kennedy's majority opinion upholding a universal right to marry has proved so moving that many queer couples have opted to include its wording as part of their marriage vows: "No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were." (Castro, 6/25)
The Celluloid Closet Back in the early 1970s, a New Jersey-born Italian American film scholar began researching the gay community's longstanding ambivalent relationship to the iconic American film industry. Received as a cultural bombshell in two bestselling editions, by 1995 the word became an incisive film documentary, modeled after the entertaining slideshow lectures author Vito Russo had been delivering to a worldwide audience (directors: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman).
Narrator: "Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gays, and gay people what to think about themselves."
Quentin Crisp: "Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can't help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. There's that famous joke: I don't like peas, and I'm glad I don't like them, because if I liked them I would eat them, and I hate them."
The Celluloid Closet even provided a forum for famous film stars to make amends for past sins, as Shirley MacLaine did for her role as a suicidal lesbian in a 1961 remake of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, where MacLaine's unmarried schoolteacher is accused of having an affair with her teacher best friend (Audrey Hepburn).
MacLaine: "None of us were really aware. We might have been forerunners, but we weren't really, because we didn't do the picture right. We were in the mindset of not understanding what we were basically doing. These days, there would be a tremendous outcry, as well there should be. Why would Martha break down and say, 'Oh my god, what's wrong with me? I'm so polluted, I've ruined you.' She would fight! She would fight for her budding preference. And when you look at it, to have Martha play that scene �" and no one questioned it, what that meant, or what the alternatives could have been underneath the dialogue �" it's mind-boggling. The profundity of this subject was not in the lexicon of our rehearsal period. Audrey and I never talked about this. Isn't that amazing? Truly amazing."
Susan Sarandon: "You wouldn't have to get drunk to bed Catherine Deneuve, I don't care what your sexual history to that point had been."
Arthur Laurents: "You must pay. You must suffer. If you're a woman who commits adultery, you're only put out in the storm. If you're a woman who has another woman, you better go hang yourself. It's a question of degree, and certainly if you're gay, you have to do real penance �" die!"
Susie Bright, referring to Nicholas Ray's Joan Crawford-starring "kinky Western": "It's amazing how, if you're a gay audience and you're accustomed to crumbs, how you will watch an entire movie just to see somebody wear an outfit that you think means that they are homosexual. The whole movie can be a dud, but you're just sitting there waiting for Joan Crawford to put on her black cowboy shirt again." (Castro, 6/24)
Tongues Untied In 1989, during the height of the cultural wars over the explicit photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, filmgoers gay and straight alike were forced to examine their souls and determine the depth of their ability to take on a poetic if brutally frank dialogue on race, sexuality and sexual orientation. That dialogue was marked by vicious and explicitly homophobic attacks on the arts community and government funding of free expression, by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. African American filmmaker Marlon Riggs laid down the gauntlet in the opening frames of his 55-minute manifesto Tongues Untied. Its opening moments recalled the racial slurs hurled during his Southern childhood by ignorant white age-peers: "Motherfucking coon! Motherfucking coon!"
Combining the words of black gay poet Essex Hemphill with blunt if beautiful images, Tongues Untied's retrospective screening should remind audiences of why it won a top prize in Berlin with such on-screen rhetorical flourishes as, "Black men loving black men is a revolutionary act." (Castro, 6/23)
Info: frameline.org.