Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 1–5)
To read all 5 parts of the article, click on the links below:
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 1.) (2018)
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 2.)(2018)
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 3.) LGBTQ FILMS/ INFLUENCES (2018)
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 5.) CONCLUSION (2018)
Or read the article in its’ entirely by clicking on the link below:
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 1–5) (2018)
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INTRO
In the 1970s and 80s, growing up in a small town (Voorschoten) not far from Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, there were no lesbian films that I knew of. They simply didn’t exist, at all, that I knew of anyway. My inner reality, my feelings towards women and the idea I had of myself, in terms of my gender identity, had no correlation to the reality around me, to the world of heteronormative, heterosexual, working class people in my neighborhood.
And as a result I lived in a complete fantasy world, as if to unconsciously shield myself from depression somehow, and I was always creative, always inspired. I was always watching films, listening to music, reading, writing, drawing, but nothing I saw truly reflected my inner feelings and fantasy world. I didn’t really consciously know this though, and absorbed films with a passion.
Years later I realized films weren’t only not made for LGBTQ people, but also not told from women’s points of view. This did not bother me as a kid, since I didn’t know what LGBTQ people were and I didn’t feel like a woman myself, but more like a straight guy, and so the films felt as if made for me.
I was inspired by how some actors and musicians and writers acted, what they wore, what they drove, how they lived, what they smoked and drank, what they read and listened to and in turn were inspired by, and chose people like James Dean and Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac as my role models, not thinking twice these were heterosexual cis-men, (with the exception of James Dean, maybe, as he was allegedly bi-sexual, but I certainly had never heard of “being in the closet,” let alone Hollywood’s “glass closet,”) and certainly not ever thinking people would simply not accept that someone like me could look to them, male artists, for true inspiration.
I had always looked androgynous, was routinely “mistaken” for a guy, was continuously confronted with the invasive question “are you a boy or a girl,” to which my answer today, as a gender nonconforming lesbian, would be “both.” And so it came completely natural to me to emanate my film and music heroes in hairstyles and clothes, etc., and would be extremely offended when people thought I couldn’t have possibly truly liked these people, except for maybe having crushes on them, which I of course did not have at all, or that I would have been influenced by men, “boyfriends,” in my tastes. (My father did initially introduce me to a lot of 70’s classics but I ultimately did my own picking and choosing and we would often differ in tastes, Jack Nicholson was an absolute favorite of his, while Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were favorites of mine.)
But I found all of this “gender role projecting” onto me by society out years later, on a more conscious level that is, and realized that that was what had frustrated me all throughout my youth, not my own perception of myself. It frustrated me because I grew up with these people as role models for as long as I can remember, routinely traveling to Paris to visit Jim Morrison’s grave at Pere Lachaise throughout my youth as if it was the Holy Grail. And so no wonder I had felt very offended when at some point some guy thought I’d gotten into the Doors through a boyfriend, or how else could I have discovered Jim Morrison. I was especially offended as every stranger on the street even took me for a guy, while those in my immediate environment, like this guy I worked with, somehow couldn’t recognize the obvious, that I was a straight guy, and would “therefore” be into Morrison.
Just as I’m still offended today if some guy, and it’s always a guy, projects feminine things onto me, and insists he knows my tastes better than me somehow, and despite the fact I only wear men’s clothes, as I’ve done all my life, and despite my shaved head and despite my muscle car, (which of course must belong to a boyfriend, and when they find out it doesn’t, out come the spits and coughs and homophobic remarks, which I actually prefer.)
This confusion about my gender representation rarely happens anymore, even though some will keep trying, but if I ever suffered from gender dysphoria, this would be how I experience it. I only ever experienced social gender dysphoria, false feminine gender roles projected on to me, (which are of course false for many cis-women as well, as they are socially constructed by men in order to control and own women, women’s minds and bodies that is.)
The absolute worst of gender role projections and expectation from primarily male society comes in the form of expecting me to want to have children, through giving childbirth of course, and with a man of course. It has absolutely never ever entered my mind to desire these things.
And as a trans-masculine, gender nonconforming lesbian myself I have never experienced body dysphoria, and would personally never resort to medical treatment to transition, but the pressure from society did make me question if I liked my body or not. (Only a female bodied individual is questioned on their body comfort if they choose not to give birth of course, which is pretty strange and off-putting.) Thank goodness I never succumbed to that pressure and was able to figure it all out and love myself for who I am completely. I have only ever experienced a disconnect between my mind and body, and was ultimately able to connect the two, philosophically.
I am in no way invalidating anyone’s experience with dysphoria however and this is my personal experience only. And it also doesn’t mean dysphoria equates the need for transitioning, as some people can just as well transition without experiencing dysphoria. Transgenderism and gender nonconformity have a lot to do with sex hormone distribution, in prenatal development, as I understand it, (from a scientific and non-political point of view,) and is experienced differently from person to person. I just happen to love my body as is, but take issue with the way society perceives me.
In 1991, at 18 years old, and just months away from immigrating to the US to go to Film School in Los Angeles, I saw Philip Kaufman’s ‘Henry and June,’ based on Anais Nin’s journal from 1932, in an arthouse theater in Leiden upon theatrical release. I guess you could say this was my first lesbian film, (it wasn’t really a lesbian film but lesbianism featured prominently,) and I started defining myself as a lesbian, reconciling that therefore I must be a woman.
(The film was an absolute revelation for me and I became pleasantly hooked on Anais Nin’s journals from thereon, scouring her writings for every lesbian passage that I could find, and of which there weren’t nearly enough. I had never cared for female writers before discovering Nin though. I started keeping a journal myself because of her.)
I much later realized I was not exactly a woman, but am trans-masculine and gender nonconforming, and still a lesbian, as I have no desire to transition whatsoever. I never experienced any real dysphoria, except for socially, since looking very androgynous and constantly being asked what gender or sex I am, but I did experience my mind and body as somehow being disconnected from each other, and myself as disconnected from girls and women around me, as well as from boys and men ultimately.
It felt as if girls and women spoke a different language altogether and I was the only one who couldn’t understand it. It felt as if boys and men did speak my language, but thought I didn’t speak theirs, and so excluded me from conversation.
So really, before 1991 I just never looked for lesbian content in films, and after ‘Henry and June’ I just couldn’t find any more of it and slowly started letting it go and settled for just quality, heteronormative, heterosexual films again. As long as they were well made and had emotional depth I basically was interested. I did start noticing gay male films, which started popping up at regular intervals at the art house theater chain in Los Angeles, when I worked there throughout the 1990s, but really didn’t see any female equivalent, save for one film here and there.
It’s as if lesbians didn’t exist and therefore my feelings for women weren’t real, even if they were the most real thing I’d ever felt in my life, and I was most alive and creative when in love with a woman exactly. As a result I only withdrew into my creative inner world more, and became consistently both more productive and isolated.
When going to Film School from 1992 through 1994 there were simply no words for the kind of films I wanted to make. The term New Queer Cinema had just been coined, in ’92, but I hadn’t heard it quite yet, and even when I did, the focus seemed to be primarily on gay male films.
I did not know that all along what I was meant to make were lesbian films, gender nonconforming films.
I had no idea that was the direction I was supposed to go in when admiring Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Terrence Malick and John Cassavetes. I just knew I wanted to make independent films, low-budget films, cool, intense films, like ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Badlands.’
A new crop of filmmakers came up in the 1990s and I figured I was supposed to make films like them, like Gus Van Sant, Soderbergh, Linklater, Todd Haynes, Julian Schnabel, and like the new crop of independent films I’d been inspired by, ‘Drugstore Cowboy,’ ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape,’ ‘Basquiat.’
It took me all of my 26 years of working and living in Los Angeles, and at 45 years old, after finding and losing numerous apartments, cars, jobs, cameras, computers and just general belongings, to really fully comprehend I was meant to make lesbian, gender nonconforming, independent films.
And I actually have known all my life I wanted to be a filmmaker, or at least since I was about 12 years old. I never once wavered in my filmmaking goals, despite having been destitute on numerous occasions, even homeless for an extended period of time. I have been motivated and passionate all along, have been producing material all along, am a relatively fast learner, and have been coming up with all kinds of creative ideas from the moment I got off the plane in the summer of 1992, buying my first Super 8 camera and typewriter at a Santa Monica pawnshop within weeks, and I never ever stopped.
(I even tried to get a group of people together from film class in the early 90s, to all pitch in on a used 16mm camera, and to collectively shoot a bunch of black and white shorts and edit them together to make a feature for festival submission, to no avail.)
And yet it took me this long to really find my complete voice, purpose, mission, target audience, etc., simply because lesbianism, and so lesbian filmmaking, has not been encouraged, and worse, erased, from history, and so consequently from film history.
It is with this background in mind that I wrote the following thoughts down.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE STATE OF LESBIAN FILMMAKING IN THE US
I have a bit of a confession to make and that is that I’m not entirely satisfied with the state of lesbian filmmaking. I haven’t seen everything that’s out there, and certainly not on an international level, or else my views on that would probably be a little different. But from a lot of what I do see I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that a lot of lesbian fare tends to be rather lighthearted and comedic in tone, and I really don’t understand why. (This is also fare mostly produced by white women, not so incidentally.)
But we are some of the most marginalized people on earth, both as women and as LGBTQ members, and yet there is all this emphasis on comedy. Now I don’t personally subscribe to the idea that film is entertainment and view this as a quintessential American idea, for in Europe (and surely other places as well) the medium of film is just another extension of art, and therefore viewed as art.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that if you have enough problems in your life you just want to relax, or worse, escape, when watching films. I’m sorry but that is what weed is there for, relaxing that is. If you want to escape the realities of life you have something else going on entirely.
Film is supposed to be an art form, and art is not there for you to relax or escape through. Film, as any art form, if done well, is there to clarify the problems of your daily life, to take the sprawling, seemingly disconnected, experiences, and all over the place emotions and thoughts you have in your day to day existence and bring some order to it all, and so to confirm the validity of your existence.
This does not mean that art is supposed to be humorless or that good comedy does not exist but there is so much room for all kinds of emotions in a single film and so why reduce it to this very simplified view of things? (I have similar misgivings about the horror genre as well, and find the idea of a whole film dedicated to the idea of scaring an audience a cheap trick, even unethical. Again, I am not saying that the emotion of fear is not valid and shouldn’t be touched upon, it should, and I’m not even claiming no good horror films exist, but overall I find it to be a cheap trope.)
Great films and art contain a combination of comedy and tragedy and everything in between, are supposed to engage your thoughts and emotions actively, and be life affirming as well.
I could never stand the American overemphasis on superhero stuff either and find it simply propaganda, for the whole world to view and fear America as the number one super power in the world. And being a world superpower by the way has absolutely nothing to do with being a leader of the free world.
A leader of the free world ensures the rights of its’ citizens are protected, and sets an example for the world to see and follow that way, and I have always viewed my own country, the Netherlands, as coming much closer to this definition than the US has ever been. A superpower apparently spreads “democracy” through invasion and war all over the world.
(It’s also not coincidental that it was the Netherlands that brought democracy as well as the constitutional principles of individual rights to the US to begin but the US ended up siding with its’ very enemy England instead and reverted from Dutch Protestantism to English Puritanism. There’s much more to this of course but this the underlying reason why capitalism does not work in the US, and that in the US religion overpowered the government. The Dutch brought the idea of the separation of powers to the US, including separation of state and church and separation of state and economics but the US just mixed everything up freely in the name of greed and control and this is basically why we are in the mess that we are in today.)
Essentially a hero is simply a fairly ordinary person being challenged by conflict of extraordinary circumstances and overcoming them somehow, (even if losing or dying in the process,) having the courage to challenge the status quo, not because of being fearless but despite fear. A hero is someone who dares to love in a world full of hate.
I have no idea what a superhero is really, besides America propaganda. (Super powers are unnatural powers, and so a superhero is an unnatural person, closer to the demi-gods of mythology than a real flesh and blood human being with human fears and desires to deal with.)
And so this isn’t a critique of lesbians in particular and has much more to do with the way America in general views art, as well as philosophy by the way, writing them both of as pretentious at best and laughable and immature at worst. Both art and philosophy are actually indispensable in life and it is no wonder that the US revers both entertainment and religion at the cost of science because of this very attitude.
We should aim for, and get accustomed to, Low-Budget and meaningful filmmaking, instead of hoping for a Lesbian/ Queer super hero to come along. But I find it a real shame that there aren’t more choices of mature, complex lesbian fare out for us to see.
(It’s bad enough that lesbian bars have closed up all over the country, including in West Hollywood. And West Hollywood had one lesbian coffeehouse back in the mid-90s, Little Frida’s, and one LGBTQ bookstore, A Different Light, and they are both long gone. And seriously, why isn’t there an LGBTQ movie theater in West Hollywood? I don’t mean an X-rated theater neither, obviously, but maybe a tiny, little art house of sorts. The place to go to for LGBTQ films has only ever been the Laemmle’s Sunset 5, not an official LGBTQ art house, just part of an art house chain that fortunately played a lot of LGBTQ fare because of it’s particular location on the border of West Hollywood and Hollywood, and they are also long gone.
There are a bunch of sunglasses and yogurt stores, dog grooming places, tanning salons and gyms, and sex toy stores and gay male bars. Is a little LGBTQ art house to keep our history and art alive really too much to ask for? This is of course pretty telling of who really runs West Hollywood and what their priorities are. It’s nearly impossible to get lesbian financing in place for just about anything, since men, heterosexual and homosexual, have the real spending money, but won’t get “a piece of it.”)
So I’m thankful for all the screenings that Outfest organizes all over town however, and there’s thankfully certainly no shortage of great LGBTQ documentary films in general nowadays but it’s feature narrative films like Dee Rees’ ‘Pariah,’ Maryam Keshavarz’ ‘Circumstance,’ Todd Haynes’ ‘Carol,’ Stephen Daldry’s ‘The Hours,’ (yes, that’s a lesbian film,) and Kimberly Peirce’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ (not technically even a lesbian film,) the kinds of films I love and ache to see more of, that are in short supply. In the meantime I guess I have to contend with creating my own material and await the reboot of ‘The L Word.’
CONCLUSION
On a final note, if art, which is by nature idealistic, does not correspond to one’s sense of reality at all anymore, one can not relate to it. What’s worse, one becomes desensitized to reality, to truthfulness moreover, and the art itself, as well as one’s reaction to it, becomes delusional, which is actually dangerous. When art is no longer an inquiry into the true nature of things, of people, of our human condition, and is pure escapism, for escapism’s sake, we lose touch with reality and our purpose in life, which is to interpret reality so we can somehow live in it.
A good example is the current state of the US altogether. The US’ recent presidential election has shown us pretty clearly what happens when the rather elitist and liberal few, mostly on the West and East Coasts, have no sense of the reality of all others living in the rest of the US anymore. And now we are left to deal with the wreckage, and many of us feel overwhelmed and unprepared.
This is exactly what happens when we have been fed too many lies through entertainment, and the news itself has become a form of entertainment, and so biased.
We, as a whole, as a population, have lost our critical thinking skills and our desire to even think things through. We have been fed sarcasm, shock value, and real time “news,” on such a continuous basis, we cannot sit still, quiet our brains and our feelings, and understand life on a deeper level anymore. As a result we feel we need to log off from our electronic devices, unplug our entertainment and go back to nature for periods of time, in order to detox from all the delusional noise.
Art is supposed to do the opposite of this, it is supposed to bring us closer to ourselves and each other, to understand our universal dilemmas and our deepest insecurities, and to provide us some objective, universally understood knowledge and from that knowledge a sense of peace. Art should feel truthful, urgent and highly necessary, not mind numbing and desensitizing.
I am for a filmmaking art that fulfills this purpose.
I propose nothing less than a movement, a queer female filmmakers movement, if the state of lesbian and gender nonconforming film is to change for the better.
(But more on this some other time.)
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My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a Hollywood-based Writer, Filmmaker and Producer, currently in production of a Feature Documentary about LGBTQ US-Immigration Exclusion-Policy, including my personal story of US immigration discrimination during DOMA, (Defense Of Marriage Act, of 1996–2015,) titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ through my film production company Bregman Films.
The 2001 John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ at the Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles is a Bregman Films Production.
I am also the Founder of a Nonprofit Film Organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles — A Media Site & LA Film Mixers (2018.)
In 2018 I am publishing my story and essays in a book, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights & Other Essays.’
I identify as a Gender Nonconforming Lesbian, “non-op” Trans-Masculine, and Bi-Racial, from the Netherlands, Los Angeles-based.
My pronouns are: they/them/theirs.
Please check out my other articles on LGBTQ- and Immigration Issues, the State of Women and LGBTQ People in Film, and Lesbian/Queer Film as well as Queer Female Sexuality and Gender Identity at medium.com/@gabriellabregman
A few titles:
Resume/FILM BIO: Gabriella Bregman (2018) (2018)
2018 Update on Documentary ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights’ (2018)
A Note on the State of Women in Film (2016)
A Few Notes On LGBTQ Filmmaking (2017)
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 1 of 5) (2018)
John Cassavetes Film Retrospective (2001) (2018)
On ‘Moonlight’ and the Subject of Positive Representation (2017)
My 2018 Oscar Pick for Best Picture (2018)
In Defense of Rationality (2018)
In Defense of Individual Rights (2018)
A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBTQ Immigrants (2014)
The Root Cause Of Misogyny, And The Necessity Of Free Will (Gender Binary System notes, part 1 of 7) (2016)
The Male And Female Brain, And The “Cause” Of Transgenderism (Gender Binary System notes, part 2 of 7) (2016)
The Gender-Binary System Was Created For Population Control And Slavery, Including Sex Slavery (Gender Binary System notes, part 7 of 7)
All Articles Written by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Pictures Owned by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Rights Reserved (2018)
