Ira Sachs | Lady / 1993

eve’s apple pie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominque Dibbell (screenplay/performer), Ira Sachs (director) Lady / 1993

 

I have to say that I was truly offended by the IMDb teaser for Ira Sachs 1993 28-minute film about Dominique Dibell: “Camp portrait of a performer. Is she a woman playing a gay man playing a women?”

     I think these are questions that might only have been asked in the early 1990s, a time far less open to various gender trajectories that it pretended to be. It was, after all, still struggling with the issues of AIDS and the terrifying blacklash that the gay community had suffered throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and certainly had little time to devote to issues of transvestitism of transgender behavior.

     Without delimiting the possibilities, I’d simply describe the intelligent, quite beautiful Dibbell in her red wig as a gay man who openly behaves as a transvestite, in love with gay men, such as her Dwayne, or even straight men who love transvestites, but can’t deal with them without the attempting to control their behavior, as she explains to the camera and her best friend who lovingly pulls the truth of her own sadness from her, awarding her a beautiful Indian “sari.”

     He is so loving and open about his love for this lady that we wish Dibbell could more fully express her own appreciations, although she does admit that she loves it. But that is part of her unstated despondency, her inability to “go out” to the bars, her refusal to be controlled by her lover Dwayne, the confusion in a society that demands definitions, that requires a determination and full expression about love.

      Dibbell is also attracted to women in a kind of notion of a lesbian relationship, but realizes the impossibility of such a deep love. As she herself recognizes, she keeps herself and her lovers far away, purposely, in her real indefiniteness of who she actually is. At one point in front of Sach’s omnipresent but yet respectful camera—at one point near a breakdown, Sachs suggests that he and his cameraman will simply leave to see her to revisit her the next day, as she falls into a necessary sleep—she says that she could have “wept,” her gay friend suggesting that perhaps she should weep, she responding quite intelligently: “I could weep. But I wept. I wept already today,” one of the most beautiful admissions of confusion and grief that still attempts to distance the self from the act of sexual desire. As the two cuddle up in true friendship, she talks about her dog Lulu, and how much she loves her.

      Her friend Lavinia suggests they have to go out more, Dibbell responding that she’s not about to go to Miami with him, the man she perceives as a jetsetter. He suggests, the Limelight, the Roxy, we could “go to that other place that does just disco. A mixed club. We could go and have fun.” It’s so touching in how he tries to get her to come out of her surface of depression.

      Dibbell may be a true lady, even something of a princess, but she does lie to herself, in some of the last segments expressing her position quite clearly and openly as a sort of prayer, set against the music of Grieg’s Per Gynt: “Please god, make my desire tiny. Make it small. Don’t take it away from me, God, but make it small so that no one will see it, especially she God, who is my object of desire.”

      At the end of the film, when she’s asked if she’s seeing anyone now, she reveals herself even more fully. “No, she responds. No. I have these certain people I tend to keep gravitating backwards towards. And I do mean backwards. Well you know when you’re positive, then people…it becomes a whole big issue. …I’d really like someone who would just commit with me for the future and let that be whatever it would be.”

    “I have a prayer for the future,” she declares. “And that is that there will be no more shame prayers for all the little children. I got news for you. That is, you ain’t got nothing on me that I didn’t know already. Oh, I’m a big perve, from way back. I’m soiled. I’m a victim of sexual humiliation many times over. …And I’m a homosexual. I’m a homosexual. I’m a homosexual. And I’m sick up to here with it. So I declare from this day forward that I will swallow my sweet tooth towards whatever decay it may lead. …Which means when a friend brings over an apple pie, goddammit I’m going to eat it. Which means I haven’t been to the dentist for three years, and I may need a filing. I don’t think I’ve said it any plainer, Ira.!”

     This is no sexually confused performer, no camp actor here. Dibbell has expressed the deep pushes and pulls of a gender conflicted life in a world that is not yet willing to accept it. She knows who she is, who she has been, and terrifying what is even in store for her, now inflicted with AIDS. But she isn’t playing out a camp role. She presents herself, after all, in complete honesty, despite the camera’s constant presence. This true lady is one of the most honest figures, I feel, of that impossible decade.

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.