On the third night of this year’s GAZE Film Festival, I listened to Queer historian Tonie Walsh introduce Gregg Araki’s 1992 film The Living End by listing historic events contemporaneous with its release around the city. He talked about how modern technologies changed the way gay communities were sustained, gendered political issues from access to contraception and safe sex supplies, to the shadow of institutions like the Magdalene laundries, and the fact that homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised in Ireland until 1993. The point of this introduction and his comments during the Q&A afterwards was clear, times had changed since the first GAZE film festival and, in many ways, that faded world has become de facto inaccessible for those of us who came after the normalisation of gay life.
The film itself is about youth. It follows two men, Luke (Mike Dytri) and Jon (Craig Gilmore), who are disaffected twenty-somethings that have recently been diagnosed as HIV positive at a time when there was no effective treatment for it. After Luke kills a cop, the two of them decide to become fugitives while they try to figure out what to do with their remaining, shortened lives. A consistent motif throughout the movie is the characters’ investment in cartoons and their merchandise. During a sex scene in a hotel, the TV is tuned into Wacky Races. While the men are on the run, Jon wears Snoopy slippers. While the movie references older, avant-garde gay media from Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, and Derek Jarman, it also questions whether the characters’ punk aesthetic is an expression of this legacy or a coping mechanism against the violence and disease which threatens them. It’s not only a movie about young people in impossible situations, but also their unique relationship to time.
On the fifth day, GAZE showed a collection of shorts called The Art of Experience focusing on the perspectives of older members of the community. One film entitled ‘Bar Stories from Queer Maine’ (dir. Betsy Carson and Wendy Chapkis) featured elderly gay Mainers talking about their favourite haunts from the past. As a Pine Tree Queer myself, I expected to find catharsis or nostalgia from hearing the jargon of my community spoken by voices from home, but I was left feeling angry at the history that was kept from me as a young person. On the screen, there were archival images of xeroxed posters, ACT UP Portland actions, and barred-up windows and plastic, rainbow awnings. I wasn’t frustrated because there were people like me in the past that I wasn’t aware of; I was upset because nobody told me there were people from that past still alive! Through the film, they spoke about everyday gay life from community fundraisers to the struggle of making our outcast community inclusive of everyone who has been cast out. I imagined the life I could have lived if I had grown up with those people, in a timeline where they had felt safe enough to entrust their legacies to me and my found family. Strangely, I didn’t feel younger than the interviewees, but like we were two, fresh oysters living in parallel, isolated tidepools.
Another documentary that stood out to me was called, ‘Where do the Old Gays Go? Experiences of the Older LGBTQIA+ Community in Ireland.’ (dir. Cathy Dunne) Each of the subjects reflected on how they met their partners, how they’d come out, and what they thought had changed since then. One speaker, a non-binary person, stood out not just because I am non-binary myself, but because after seeing them I realised I’d never known someone like me over sixty before. They said they came out in the 1970’s and expressed concern about obstacles they’d faced receiving medicine from our overwhelmingly binary healthcare system. In fact, all of the interviewees worried about the care they’d receive in their final years in a less-than-welcoming care home. A lot of these problems came from a root cause, that we don’t think about older gay people. If someone like me, who lives, studies, and organises every day in the Queer community, gets taken aback by a theatre full of post-middle-aged lesbians, imagine how far our hospices have to go before they can approach inclusivity? What the short film wouldn’t say aloud but certainly suggested is this: we haven’t thought about the old gays because we expect them to be dead already.
The festival’s closing film, Girl Picture (dir. Alli Haapasalo), was framed as a new kind of gay movie made to reflect us, the next generation. The movie was about three women and their experiences trying to find intimacy and personal fulfilment. Wonderfully, one of the main characters is asexual, an identity that the festival hadn’t discussed up to that point. In the narrative of progress the film’s placement in the program suggests that the struggle for young gays today comes from finding identity and intimacy, as opposed to navigating homophobic society or existential pandemics. We’re supposed to feel safe, enjoying the rewards of our parents’ and grandparents’ struggle, but between rising authoritarianism, the climate crisis, late-stage capitalism, and the ongoing conflicts within the community which haven’t been resolved as much as paved over, I still feel trapped by the same kinds of questions which haunted the final days of Jon and Luke.
We Queers have always had a difficult relationship with time. You’re supposed to follow the script: get a partner, get married, have kids and paint the nursery walls pink/blue, and make your kids do the same. We don’t. We tell our wives of thirty years that we’re actually a woman and have struggled with it for decades; we call young adults babies and show them how to ask out a girl for the very first time; and we meet in our twenties, have kids in our forties, and maybe, finally get married in our sixties when they finally give us the paper. At best we have chosen not to live that life, and at worst we’ve been forcibly denied a chance at it. In particular, being trans is essentially taking control of your relationship with linear time, making it something answerable to your sense of self and truth. The Russian filmmaker Andre Tarkovsky once called movies, with their meaningful arrangement of constant change, a “mosaic of time.” At GAZE, I used film to see and feel more personal works of time than I could ever have imagined possible.
