Relax, it's just film.

ImageOut: 6th Annual Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival Rochester, New York October 16-24, 1998

With subzero winter temperatures, a total of two gay bars and a baby-boom emphasis on the nuclear family and material gain, Rochester, New York is not a hot travel ticket for most gay movie aficionados. Yet, Rochester's Kodak/Xerox/Bausch & Lomb industrial base spells enough capital overflow for a consistent patronage of the arts. It's the kind of patronage that not only provides endowments for a premiere music conservatory and an internationally lauded symphony - in this case, it also supports the ImageOut Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival.

Since the festival's inception six years ago, the seven-person ImageOut curatorial board and more than 35 volunteers have persevered in bringing more and better quality gay films to the community. ImageOut has expanded from 18 original screenings in 1993 to 36 programs of both feature and short films in 1998. Films were screened this year at the alternative Little Theatre and the historic Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography and Film. One benefit of sharing proximity with Eastman Kodak has been access to the film archive at the Eastman House which allows curators to exhume and reclaim gay classics for the Archive Night such as this year's Caged (1950) by John Cromwell and German filmmaker Leontine Sagan's 1931 epic Madchen in Uniform, screened at the festival in 1997.

A continuing issue that has arisen at recent national gay and lesbian festivals also proved to be problematic for ImageOut: curatorial selections influenced by ticket sales. Due to Hollywood mainstreaming of gay culture in such films as Philadelphia (1993, by Jonathan Demme) and In and Out (1997, by Frank Oz), gay and lesbian film festivals are no longer the only alternative for gay audiences. If a festival includes too many obscure or experimental films, audience members with less artistic sentiments will stop buying tickets in favor of catching high-production-value presentations at their local 16-screen megaplex. In a worst-case scenario, the audience controls the programming - an all-too-real danger when a substantial section of your audience consists of well-heeled gay urban professionals from Xerox and Kodak. (ImageOut curators deny ever hearing the word "guppie.") Conversely, it is the benevolent wallets of guppies and their ilk that provide the financial backing for festivals such as ImageOut. On the other hand, if a festival turns tame for the sake of protecting the sensibilities of more conservative audience members, it will lose the enthusiasm of university students who supply the volunteer flesh and blood needed to tackle the festival's labor and logistical requirements. Once festival selection boards get past the nagging reality of exposure (any gay exposure in a predominantly straight community is better than no exposure at all), curators must grapple with the fact that dialogue between various tentacles of "the gay community" is perennially renegotiating and redefining its political territory. The ensuing demographic arbitration inevitably leads to the issue of authorship: not only who authors the films and why, but who authors the film festival and who calculates its agenda.

So what do festival curators blend into their gay and lesbian film festival to account for these issues: a little camp, some lesbian documentaries, gay male porno, experimental videos, multicultural themes? It is impossible to deny that the praxis of curating a gay and lesbian film festival has become a veritable glass onion, the "correct" peeling of which is still very much in contention.

As the ImageOut festival illustrates, conflicting audience demands can lead to a mixed curatorial bag of tricks. If total audience capacity is any relevant gauge of customer demand, the biggest ImageOut ticket seller continues to be male vanilla porn - typified by lingering close-ups of oily boys in white shorts. This year's ImageOut curators harnessed the masculine libidinal vehicle to drive home several important political messages. "Bare Chests," a collection of nine short films, was a case in point. "As promised, there's plenty of naked flesh on display in this diverse collection of boys' shorts to please just about everyone," touted the ImageOut program. Once inside the theater, however, viewers in search of naked naughties were confronted by films such as Johnny Symons's documentary Beauty Before Age (1997), an analysis of the consequences of gay culture's obsession with beauty and youth. Yet, if Beauty Before Age left flesh-hungry moviegoers craving more, they were not left unsated: films such as Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe (1998, by Steve Kokker) is a video montage of Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro that ensured everybody got their fill of beefcake.

ImageOut curators also went beyond a simple juxtaposition of porn with politics, as evidenced in the screening of "Lovebirds," a selection of six short films and videos by international artists. "Lovebirds" took up the recent critical battle cry that eroticism and politics can often be found in the same film at the same time. One such hybrid example was Fish Belly White (1998, by Michael Burke). In this feature-style narrative, a young southern boy whose best friend is a scruffy white chicken has an unexpected underwear experience beneath a rickety railroad trestle with his studly neighbor. As Burke's film draws to its bloody climax, the neighbor coaxes the protagonist to prove his manliness by biting the head off his favorite hen. By driving a sexual stake into the heart of a pastoral Faulkneresque narrative, Burke interrogates both the danger and the thrill of sexuality on the periphery of established order. Now, substituting politics for pornography in the context of box office draw might normally be considered a sexual bait and switch - especially if narrative alone is the element that challenges the hegemony of gay film festivals, and gay culture at large - but such was not the case at ImageOut. "We are conscious of the fact that bare-chested white boys will sell out a show," said Joe Wlodarz, ImageOut film selection co-chair. "Yet we are also aware of the exclusions of that erotic investment." These politics of exclusion serve to underscore more subtle issues of the aforementioned question of authorship, resulting in a complicated impasse that is only resolved by screening as many types of films as possible.

On that score, the selection board's decision to curate the festival in compartmentalized screenings resulted in the ghettoization of certain films under headings such as "Touch Me In the Morning" (a.k.a.: Evening of Dyke Films) and "Dragtime" (a.k.a.: Transgender Hour). Under these demographic umbrellas, the curators attempted to include as many cultures and subcultures as possible. Nonetheless, the transgendered community was clearly underrepresented in this year's festival, perhaps because the Rochester gay community does not include a large transgendered population, or that Rochester's transgendered community is not very vocal. Whatever the case, the films screened on the topic of transgender and cross-dressing were relatively uninspiring, and for the most part fell in the realm of MTV lip-synching or "well informed documentary." One problematic example is The Brandon Teena Story (1997, by Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir), a documentary about the rape and murder of a 20-year-old Nebraska female-to-male transsexual. Although The Brandon Teena Story was described in the program as "a fascinating and painfully candid documentary that goes beyond a mere report of a homophobic crime and reminds us that the fight for queer rights is far from over," the documentary scarcely lived up to its hype - in fact, one viewer described The Brandon Teena Story as reminiscent of the television show Hard Copy. Instead of exploring the implications of Brandon Teena's sexuality, the film instead focused on the sensationalistic details of his murder. By essentially fetishizing Teena's victimhood, the filmmakers only serve to underscore the pathological stereotypes concerning transsexuals that exist in both the hetero and homo communities.

This "true story" representation of transsexuals is only exacerbated by the queer community's seeming fetishization of drag queens, who present a "safe" expression of alternative sexuality for the whole family - the suggestion being that beneath it all, they're just homosexual males who like to have a good time. Perhaps, there is also the magnanimous sentiment that no gay and lesbian festival can be complete without profuse camping and vamping. The pedestrian Dragtime (1997, by Patti Kaplan), for example, featured lots of pink feather boas and blue Barbarella wigs, but provided little substance or insight into the identity or politics of cross-dressing. Once again, in keeping with the tradition of Paris is Burning (1991, by Jennie Livingston), female filmmakers obsessed with drag queens stage their own brand of anthropological documentary, chronicling the behind-the-scenes antics of a group of transvestite showmen. Such representations of transvestite lifestyles always come off as unreal. Although they are drag queens, the characters in such videos are rarely ever seen in weak or unsteady moments, but instead are valorized as heroic protagonists in wigs and platform shoes. Taken as a whole, the curatorial practice of baiting transvestite against transsexual only serves to emphasize the illusion that drag queens are merely gay boys who want to dance to "Swan Lake," while transsexuals are psychotic personalities whose daring exploits often earn them an early grave.

Experimental films proved the biggest challenge to the established gay hegemony because they examined the question of authorship. What components does it take to make a film a gay film? Does the person making the film about HIV have HIV? Is a movie about lesbians made by lesbians? Are there enough gay characters in the film to make it homosexually oriented and what does it mean if that is not the case? There are numerous political agendas within the gay community, but aside from an anatomic libidinal preference, what does it mean to make gay films?

In terms of questioning gay cultural hegemony, The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997, by Hilary Brougher) was one of the more successful films at ImageOut. A complex narrative about lesbianism, noir and time travel filmed in 35mm, The Sticky Fingers of Time relies on a fluid postmodern timeline and punchy hard-cut style to bring out the humorously noir aspects of cosmopolitan lesbian intrigue. Using tight camera angles and affording her actresses little sensuous latitude, Brougher combines a deft palate of cinematic genre interpretation with her skillful cast of gay and straight characters to raise the question: what is more important in life, to be a cutting-edge lesbian, to time-travel across the galaxy, or both? In this sense The Sticky Fingers of Time establishes its singularity of voice foremost, as opposed to the popularly established voice that signifies "gay identity." The Sticky Fingers of Time raises the much-needed question: do subcultures grow more definitive and complex as the greater subculture (queer culture) becomes assimilated into the overall cultural hegemony?

"An Evening with Sadie Benning" crystallized the multitextual agenda of the ImageOut curatorship. Beginning with Me and Rubyfruit (1989) and Jollies (1990) Benning led the audience from early efforts to her most recent video Flat is Beautiful (1998). Although most biographies of Benning, who is now 25, attempt to "wow" readers with the fact that she began her career as a videographer with a pixelvision camera at the tender age of 16, that tidbit is hardly as remarkable as the breadth of her experimentation with the process of capturing images. Benning molds her subject matter from any material at hand: dolls, homemade masks, strips of scrap paper scrawled with sometimes illegible handwriting or roughly drawn cartoon characters. She appropriates sound from any ambient source and antagonizes it with tracks from scratched up Heart records, warped disco music and snaps of dialogue from faltering actors. In Flat is Beautiful Benning employs jittery over-exposed video and black and white paper masks to underscore the bleak malaise of an ambiguously-gendered existence in the American midwest. Such raw style emphasizes the despot of a pre-pubescent teenager whose "place" in gay culture is a continuation perhaps of an older battle, a larger societal conflict.

In fact it's often the enigmatic films that push the envelope of filmmaking and queer identity and lead to further discourse. The deceptively titled See the Sea (1997, Francois Ozon) was one such case in point. The ImageOut program described this film as presenting "an interesting relationship that explores the ambiguous and complicated area of unspoken attraction." After tantalizing the audience for half an hour with a luscious 35mm island pastiche, Ozon proceeds to slash at the audience's psyche with a cutlery set of lesbian psychosis, bisexual angst, murder, scat, kidnapping and sexual mutilation. At the end of the film, when the audience was left staring at a woman's vulva sewn up with a criss-cross of black thread, many of them booed, hissed and quickly left the theater. Yet, once the audience had a chance to breathe, the dialogue began: was this movie about the inherent relationship between violence and sex, an exaggeration of nocturnal lesbian courting rituals or the integrity of wickedness when virtue seems like hypocrisy?

Several of the films in "Cocktail Hour," a series of shorts about AIDS, challenged the politically correct line of discourse surrounding AIDS and HIV. What made many "Cocktail Hour" films singular was their refusal to tow a homogenous filmmaking line, challenging the culturally prescribed voice of HIV-positive filmmakers by questioning the role of soulful documentary and doleful narrative. The thin line between social pariah and cultural shaman, for example, was examined in the feisty Rubber Gloves (1998, by Tom E. Brown). Filmed in grainy black and white 35mm, Rubber Gloves plays off the melancholic tropes employed in early films about AIDS. Beginning with a shot of a desultory piece of jetsam bobbing down a dreary river, an equally bleak voice drones on. Then the narrator begins to mock cultural sensibility by remunerating the positive aspects of AIDS in his life. In fact, he says that the AIDS virus makes him one step quicker and one step smarter, The film concludes with the incendiary remark: "Mr. AIDS, I think I love you." Behind his shock tactics Brown seems to be wearing a directorial grin almost as if it's a chip on his shoulder, daring anyone to step between the virus and his humor. Similarly, in Negotiating Sex in an Age of Panic (1997), videomaker James Wentzy lambastes the politically correct code of conduct for gay men who yearn to "ride bareback" when they have been diagnosed as HIV-positive. Hammering the viewer with queasy anal sex close-ups shot in harsh color contrasts with jolting cuts, Wentzy criticizes stereotypes of sex that is permissible for HIV-positive men and questions who controls such sexual sanctions - not to mention who sanctions the content of films about HIV in general. Wentzy's aggressive approach to editing as well as his use of harsh monologues turns the victim into inquisitor. Wentzy becomes the authority of his own sexual practice and of his own film, without compromise.

In trying to maintain demographic harmony, the closing night of ImageOut seemed like a transparent attempt to draw together the factions of Rochester's gay community in a circle of happiness and light. Held in the expansive Dryden Theatre, cheerful presentations and witty banter blended eerily with the closing film Relax, It's Just Sex (1998), P.J. Castellaneta's attempt to make a 35mm crossover feature. As a festival metaphor Relax, It's Just Sex was more than appropriate in that it represented the best and worst of mainstream lifestyle films: fiat multicultural characters with trendy hair, intimate confessional scenes shot in grainy video, epic dialogues extolling the tragedy of HIV and plucky but politically correct "All In The Family"-style humor. Although the plot line was dearly queer, Castellaneta's attachment to epic narrative firmly cemented Relax, It's Just Sex. That said, the overall integrity in curating and selecting the works included in ImageOut's 1998 festival ultimately rivals many higher profile festivals, such as the San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which lately seems to be growing short of breath. ImageOut curators managed to simultaneously challenge the turbulent waters of mainstream gay culture, while keeping an eye on the roiling demands of their rapidly diversifying viewership.

JILL ST. JACQUES is an artist and freelance writer living in Rochester, NY.