What’s up with lesbians?
Them’s fightin’ words!
Okay, at the risk of pissing off some people, I do have some questions that I would like answered. This weekend I attended the 4th Annual Gay Orlando Film Festival. This year there were some fine films which I enjoyed for the most part and I may write separately about them, but the films are not really what this post is about.
Out of the four films, the last film was billed as a lesbian film. The first film, Another Gay Movie, while having a couple of lesbian roles, it was really a young gay man’s coming of age movie similar Porky’s or American Pie. The audience was mostly gay men, though we were there with two very dear friends, a female couple, and most everyone seemed to enjoy the rather irreverent, light hearted, toilet humored romp.
The second film was Camp Out and was a documentary about gay youth that were attending a bible camp. The subjects of the film were fairly evenly divided between gays and lesbians, however the audience was again almost all gay men.
The third film was 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous, a film from New Zealand. It was about a couple of young boys dealing with confusing sexual feelings that they don’t completely understand. While the film had quite a bit of potential, it really wasn’t my cup of tea. The audience was again mostly gay men.
That brings us to the last film Loving Annabelle. This film was a brilliant tale of a teacher at an all-girl Catholic boarding school. She has a rather unfulfilled relationship with a man who teaches at a boy’s school, but seems to be longing for something more. When an aggressive new student transfers to the boarding school, she is forced to come to terms with some long ago buried feelings and to reconsider things about her sexuality. The director took pains to develop the characters and the interpersonal interactions, and did so wonderfully.
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So, what’s my gripe? For this film, there were still many men, but this time many women showed up and the theater was filled to capacity. Where were they for the rest of the festival? We went to all four films, as much to see the movies as to support the festival, the art, and the community. Is it just because this film was specifically about lesbians that the lesbians chose to support it?
The first three films started on time, with everyone in their seats well in advance of the starting time. For the fourth film, at 1:30PM, the time the film should have started, less than one half of the people were seated. The organizers spent over ten minutes helping people find seats and accommodating special table arrangements, etc. The impression was that the men understood the start time and arrived early so as to get their seats and be considerate of the other moviegoers, but the women didn’t seem to find a similar sense of urgency in the matter and instead some were still dragging tables and chairs around at 1:40PM. To me that just seems rude.
Loving Annabelle had some very poignant and moving scenes that I felt were relevant to the film. During any of the scenes that were of this nature, there was considerable “tittering” through out the audience–like the kind we heard in junior high school during sex education class. Is that just a lack of maturity or is there something deeper?
Along the same lines, during one scene the male romantic interest was pouring out his heart in a touching scene, but I couldn’t even hear most of it from the women laughing out loud at this man’s hurt. Is that just man hatred that causes that behavior? If so, what precipitates that level of hatred of men? There was no evidence in the film that this guy had ever done anything to wrong anyone and he certainly seemed to be willing to let the female teacher control the relationship and dictate the speed at which they progressed. What has he done to deserve being made fun of? I have to say it made it fairly uncomfortable.
How is this different from any other type of discrimination? Isn’t judging all men by some past experience just plain wrong? Wouldn’t that be the same as judging all of a particular race by watching three minutes of a newscast? Especially with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people–don’t we have enough obstacles to overcome without adding to them by being segregated and derisive?
I realize that by the very nature of this post, I may just be inviting flames, but that really is not my intention. What I would really like is to see some intelligent discussion about why things seem to be so different. I’m sincerely wondering why?
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