In May I attended Inside Out, Toronto premiere LGBT film festival. Over the festival’s ten days I attended thirteen screenings and stood in as many lineups for hours. In the end, it was a most satisfying experience. Had I been in Halifax in June, I would have blocked off the middle weekend to take in the inaugural OUTeast queer film festival.
I attended the countdown launch last year and I hear the festival was a success. Perhaps next year I’ll make it back east. I failed to include a coming-out story in my Inside Out choices. There were some in the lineup but the checkmarks in my program fell outside that subject. It wasn’t deliberate; would that I could split myself in five and attend every screening!
Andrew Murphy, the festival’s Director of Programming (and Atlantic Film Festival alumnus), indicated in a recent interview with CBC that queer film is “… moving away from the taboo of homosexuality, as well as moving away from that coming-out story. “I think queer film and TV is growing up. It’s scary, but we’re looking into but we're looking into what happens after that: what happens in our day-to-day lives.”
I agree with Andrew’s sentiments. Queer lives are as rich and diverse as any to be explored in film—each life is just as interesting (or not) as the next. Our storytellers have barely scratched the surface of this ready-for-tapping reservoir. I also believe that within a wider exploration of queer lives there’s still a need for coming-out stories. The Coming-Out Narrative is a well-established form in the queer canon, a relatively simple story on the outside, with infinite variations throughout.
No matter what equalities we gain and how society’s perceptions of us change and improve, the actual event of coming out, the point where each individual crosses the threshold from one side of the closet door to the other, is a singularly important milestone in the queer life journey. I’m simplifying the process. For most of us there’s no single, discernible single transition point from 100% in to 100% out. It’s not that simple and no life event that important can be wrapped up in a tidy 90-odd minute package. Coming out is the culmination of questions asked, answers sought, experiences gathered—many take years to arrive at this milestone; others never make it.
After the closet door has been breached it’s still just the beginning of something new, whether it’s an adventure or a cross to bear. My coming-out story is not film-worthy. My questioning process began early, knowing I was “different” from other boys at a young age. Ironically, growing up in a rural Maritime village, through the bullying and church condemnation I never struggled with my gay self. The shame was the secrecy; that I had to keep something so important a deeply buried secret.
The first person I came out to was my prom date; the last people were my parents. Friends were easy; family was not. At age 21 I came out to my mother in anger, during a fight over some trivial thing. The result was a damaged relationship—my only real regret in life is that I could have handled it differently.
There was nobody there to call “Cut,” reset the scene, re-block, set up new lighting and start the camera again. But for every hundred run-of-the-mill coming-out stories that’d never work on the screen there’s one that seems tailor-made made for Cinemascope… in one case I know someone who gave his mother a gay porn video to watch after he came out to her.
I wondered if he did it as a joke, given his off-beat sense of humour, or if he did it to stem the tide of questions she asked about what two men might do in bed. Now that’s cinematic: something I would love to have been a fly on the wall to observe. Or watching the feed from a hidden camera.
Genie award, anyone? the416er@gmail.com
