Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette | Anatomy of Desire / 1995

what makes a homosexual queer?

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Wilson (screenplay), Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette (directors) Anatomy of Desire / 1995

 

Today we take a great deal of pride in defining and openly expressing our sexuality, particularly LGBTQ individuals. We are proud for being lesbians, gay men, transsexual or transgender individuals. And often we define ourselves in the world very strongly through our relationships to our sexuality and gender.

     But as Anne Fausto-Sterling (author of Myths of Gender),, in the short Canadian documentary film, Anatomy of Desire, directed by Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette points out, the notion of being a “homosexual” or a “transgender woman,” etc. occurred only in the 20th century. Before that there were simply “homosexual” acts that were part of one’s larger sexuality. One had heterosexual sex or committed sodomy not as a certain kind being but as desire dictated. As esteemed critic Martin Duberman adds, in near recent and ancient times a great number of men might be defined today as adjusted heterosexuals who went to bed on a regular basis with young boys. When speaking of homosexuals are we accounting for those men (we know less of women historically, he argues) who behaved in such a bisexual manner as being homosexual?

      The definition of homosexuals matters, of course, in determining whether or not it can be defined by the brain. Can something in the brain then be detected to describe this historically sexual behavior, to define such forms of bisexuality?

     These are important issues in what has seemed to boil down to the central issue that is discussed in this film, whether same-sex behavior is a production of our genes, something of nature, or of our psychological development, an issue of nurture.

   The film begins with a brief discussion with neurologist Simon LeVay, who at the time this documentary was made (1995), had developed the thesis that within the hypothalamus of the brain he found homosexuals to have smaller gatherings of cell clusters than heterosexual men.

     And for many gay men and women of the day—and one might add many still today—the idea that their sexuality was defined at birth is an important issue in establishing that their behavior is not controllable or changeable, which might encourage others to realize that their behavior is not “inverted” or “perverted” or different much like one’s gender or the color of one’s skin. Certainly, at the time before the abandonment of laws against homosexuality and at a time when gays were still unable to marry, this seemed like a step forward for recognition of their equality just as women and blacks had fought for their rights. In other words, for many it became a political matter.

   And as June Reinisch, from the Kinsey Institute, argues, we still don’t know what causes heterosexual behavior. If we were to knew that, then it would far easier to demonstrate what is behind homosexual actions.

      Indeed, the film goes on to interestingly explore the cycles of scientific research since the Age of Reason which might almost be said to alternate between the nature/nurture debate. The film focuses, for example of the early 20th century studies of German Magnus Hirschfeld, who was definitely on the side of nature, arguing similarly to LeVay’s current belief in a “third sex”— actually Hirschfeld argued for a array of sexes, which the movie does not explore—and attempted to study these sexualities as “difference,” arguing that since sexuality as inborn it made no sense to apply special penalties to what was described as deviant behavior. But, of course, his studies where interrupted and destroyed by another force, Nazism, which also saw homosexuality as something inborn, but defined that “otherness,” as they did also for Jews, as a natural aberration, as a perversion of human nature that needed to be destroyed, filling their murderous concentration camps with Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies. How the Nazis used the notion of inborn homosexuality and racial differentiation should give us pause for any celebration we might have over studies such as the one briefly outlined in 1995 by LeVay. Scientific concepts can be used in various way.

      Certainly, the post-World War II reaction against Hirschfeld’s notions further prove that point. An entire new generation of psychotherapists grew up after the way, many of the theorists having escaped from Germany to the US, developing an entirely opposite view of homosexual behavior that was based on how we developed as children and young adults. Using some of the concepts of Freud’s theories about absent father and domineering mothers, psychologists now argued not only that homosexuality was a disease, but was a curable one, if one really wanted to change and was willing to pay a psychiatrist to help him or her make that change. Accordingly, homosexuality continued to be listed by the medical establishment as an unnatural disease.

      It was startling to hear Duberman describe how all the young gay well-educated men with whom he was connected believed to a man that they had some sort of characterological disorder, were basically unhappy with their “condition” and sought out psychiatrists. He relates how at one point as part of the therapy he was forced to abandon his lover, given the view that homosexual “acting out” (the way sex was described) was to relieve the anxiety. The only to get to the root of that anxiety was to give up “the acting out,” when tension would develop and the patient would be forced to face it and resolve the problem.

     The film goes on to mention even more horrific forms of educative methods such as shock therapy and neurological operations. All of these forms, in the long run, have been shown to be ineffective, and that any changes in the patient who often attained only in an attempt to please the physiologist or with significant psychological damage, resulting in depression or worse. There is no evidence that such treatments can change one’s sexual orientation, argues one commentator.

      Duberman goes on the mention that there were a very few psychoanalysts who disagreed with these theories of homosexuality, but no research was done and they were considered primarily as mavericks.

      Growing up near end of this era in 1950s and early 1960s, I myself begin to explore psychological reasons for my own still-hidden sexual urges, creating what were clearly fictional explanations about my father and mother to explain my desires. There seemed to be no other way in which one could explore one’s feelings since we had no history of other explanations at that time.

      As the picture expresses it, however, “then something happened to shatter the complacency of American society.” Alfred Kinsey’s reports suddenly showed us, regarding male sexuality, that a very large percentage of self-defined heterosexual males had had, at least one time in their lives, sex with other men, and that a large portion of those individuals who described as being homosexual had had sex with a woman. Moreover, there were high percentages of both heterosexual and homosexual individuals who had had same experiences far more often. In short, Kinsey returned us, in his real-life studies as opposed to those theoretically-based, that there are a large range of sexual experiences of all sorts in which individuals fell. There were, in fact, relatively few individuals who were simply one or the other, just as we now are discovering about gender. What had been wrong about our thinking is that we had not accounted for the very diversity of human experience when it comes to sexuality.

      Kinsey’s revelations as well as the increasing political rise of the young through the 1960s eventually brought about the far more engaged and committed homosexual and transgender communities which finally forced the police to stop the raids of gay and lesbian bars through Stonewall, and begin the long, very long voyage the LGBTQ+ community has made since then.

     The narrator suggests that scientists once more began to explore a biological explanation, focusing on how our genes affect us not only with regard to gender but to sex as well. But as Reinisch again reminds us the either/or paradigm disregards the fact that environment and nature are completely intertwined, that growing up in a certain environment affects the biology of any growing being. She argues that it is 100% environment and 100% nature simultaneously. Richard Green (The Sissy Syndrome) points to other facts; for example, that children are simply not all the same, some being more aggressive and assertive than others, while some are more aesthetic and passive. If you have a boy who’s more passive and interesting in doll-playing than aggressive, that boy’s relationship with his mother and father will be different than another’s as well as connections to his siblings and peer group. It may then become a kind of socialization tract that as a boy gets on that helps to define his behavior and also influences his later sexual orientation.

      Richard Pittard points to another fascinating experiment. Ken Zucker took pictures of effeminately behaving boys, who Pittard argues, we know will in a larger proportion turn out to be gay men. He mixed in with these pictures of others, typical masculine-behaving boys, and showed them to judges, asking them to pick which ones were the “cutest, prettiest, or handsomest.” The selectors chose almost exclusively the effeminate-behaving boys. What this suggests is not at all clear. Are there other genetic factors that make gay boys into prettier or more handsome men? We have all heard women say, why are all the most beautiful men gay? Of course, much of this depends upon what societally we learn to perceive as beauty and, obviously, upon who these selectors were and how they were chosen. In short, when one enters into the world of homosexuality, one enters a maze of confusing contradictions.

     Reinisch takes us back to reality, moreover, by reminding us that homosexuals come in all types, that there is no one defining characterization that can be applied to the range of men or women who define that sexual definition.

     Paula A. Treichler argues against the notion that any definition of feminine or masculine, male or female, sex or gender has anything to tell us about sexual orientation. Any attempt to define homosexuality, insists another commentator, is not in order to understand it but to either incriminate it or excuse it. Accordingly, the whole medical attempt to define sexuality is basically dangerous in that we have to ask what the different forces are going to do with our understanding.

         This film, produced in a time when the rewards of the political efforts were not yet known, accordingly becomes an important summation of the various pushes and pulls of the scientific community regarding these important matters up until the mid-1990s. But finally, this film argues that the scientific community will not provide those answers, that it is the political struggle that truly matters whether or not there is tolerance and understanding of the many differences we have learned human beings express.

         What this work and others like it continue to make clear to me is precisely why it is so difficult in several films, coded and otherwise, to point clearly to an individual and explain why I perceive him or her to be of LGBTQ interest. As Kinsey intimated, human beings themselves are normal only in their very queerness. What we describe as normal is simply a manner of behavior that the society has agreed to aspire to as opposed it its real everyday actions.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Agnieszka Holland | Total Eclipse / 1995

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Mitch McCabe | Playing the Part / 1995

charmed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mitch McCabe (director) Playing the Part / 1995 [documentary]

 

In this early lesbian autobiographical-documentary, director Mitch McCabe performs as her own self as she proceeds to move back and forth between her university dorm in Harvard and her family home in the wealthy community of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

     As the director, she quickly summarizes her family history before beginning what might have been a somewhat frightening odyssey between the two worlds had McCabe not been able to perceive her own experience as a anything other than a comedy gone wrong.

     Mitch is currently dating someone, which would be good news to share with her family, but as McCabe puts it, “she’s a she, and I don’t know how I’m going to tell my parents.”

     The situation is made more complex by the fact that both women are seniors, and Cat, her girlfriend, is from England without a visa to stay on beyond June, so their future is itself uncertain. So too, it appears are Mitch’s feelings about her sexuality and everything connected to it, as she heads home for Thanksgiving, determined to tell her parents.

      There we meet her affable businessman father, with whom she has a fairly good relationship, and her mother, an interior decorator who has carefully designed every room in their comfortable home, has notions of how her daughter should dress and behave, and has a determined perspective about what she expects of Mitch’s future life. Obviously, the two do not get on.

      Yet there is love there, or perhaps in Mitch’s case, a sense of order and privilege in being the daughter of such an organized and controlling woman. If nothing else she falls under the charm of her mother’s presence, as if her mother represented a kind of tropical breeze under whose spell one cannot free oneself, falling into a sort of fevered trance.

     The film takes us through three major encounters with the family, one at Thanksgiving, one in Cambridge when the parents go East for a visit, and the final meeting at Christmas holiday, each time McCabe becoming more determined to finally tell her parents the truth, which by the end of this film she failed to do.

       In between, she photographs herself as her stylish mother, endures a Christmas ritual party in which she is forced to dress up in Christmas finery and entertain the male guests, and basically reassesses the good life which she is now willing, but not quite able, to abandon should her parents adamantly react to the truth of her sexuality.

        McCabe’s work, in fact, might have been the first lesbian coming out movie, before even the later gay-boy movies such as Hettie Macdonald’s Beautiful Thing (1996), or the films I’ve most often mentioned with regard to “B” version of this genre, Simon Shore’s Get Real and David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen both of 1998.

        But, in the end, her film only reveals how she avoids the act and its significance not necessarily out of fear, but from a kind of lassitude, a feeling within the director’s soul that forces her instead to focus on the tensions she has in her own life between the charmed world of the American dream—which the family has long ago obtained and which has permitted her education at Harvard and even allowed her to freely explore new ideas and her own sexuality—and the queer cold world of after-college that is suddenly facing her without her having a clue of what it will bring. It is the child in the narrator, not the adult lesbian self, who is still in control of her being and one might even say of the rhythm of this movie, which permits its comic tonality. Surely things can’t be as serious as they threaten to be if she can’t exert the effort to actually speak the truth.

       Ultimately, of course, in “playing the part,” in pretending to be the same girl her parents knew from her childhood on, Mitch McCabe is a kind tragic figure, albeit one who isn’t unaware of that irony. She will most certainly lose her girlfriend, Cat, as she is sucked up into a future vortex that McCabe has not yet allowed herself to fully step into. Although she creates a chaos of her own room, hoping that her mother’s eventual anger will break her out of her trance, it doesn’t succeed as her mother growls but basically permits the status quo, perhaps sensing an unpleasant reality, McCabe returning to Boston yet again without the confrontation.

       By film’s end the narrator/director is planning her “coming out” for graduation, when her family will be arriving again in Cambridge, admitting that it has to happen then because, frankly, she’s getting tired of playing the role. But then, many play such roles throughout most of their lives. It takes courage to tell others who you really are, just as it takes courage to make such an honest film.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Svend Wam | Sebastian (När alla vet) (When Everyone Knows) / 1995

what it means to be gay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hansi Mandoki, Petter Vennerød and Svend Wam (screenplay, based on a novel by Per Knutsen), Svend Wam (director) Sebastian (När alla vet) (When Everyone Knows) / 1995

 

Sebastian (Hampus Björck), a 16-year-old student is going through the psychological and hormonal changes of every young man and woman of his age, suffering from inexplicable spurts of excess bodily animation and vivacity which leads to him and his male friends to grab hold of one another, hitting and wrestling whenever they meet as well as experiencing bouts of violence which he cannot control. But it’s worse than that; something else is clearly bothering him. Basically a nice boy, somedays Sebastian ponders robbing small businesses; at one point he steals a bicycle and drives it into the fjord, only to pull it out by rope and return it to the spot from which he has taken it; another time while Sebastian’s parents are out for the evening, he and his best friend Ulf (Nicolai Cleve Broch) trash his own house, participating in a mad waffle-making fracas and a bathroom tub water fight that spills over onto the floor, mirrors, cabinets, etc., all of which he makes no attempt to clean up.

     With friends he is often loving and caring, but the next minute he goes out of his way to evade them. A formerly talkative son, he now refuses to discuss anything with his parents (Ewa Fröling and Helge Jordal) and particularly becomes irritated when they bother to ask him about any problems he may be facing, whereupon he leaves the room or the house.

     In fact, his parents are open-minded and loving, his best friend Ulf (Nicolai Cleve Broch)— suffering from an alcoholic father and a hard-working mother—spends much of his life caring for his two young sisters, and when he mother is ill even substitutes for her janitorial duties; his other friends become animated and show their joy, moving forward to greet and kiss him, whenever the shows up for their nightly meetings on the street of the small Swedish town where they live. The handsome, long-haired, and lanky teenager Sebastien is doing well in school. So what, other than suffering through teenage confusion and angst, is his problem? That question, in fact, is the central concern of Svend Wam’s 1995 film.

      Obviously, anyone reading this essay in a book on Queer Cinema will immediately realize that my questions are somewhat rhetorical, that Sebastian’s central problem is that he suspects that he is gay and is highly attracted to Ulf, whose sexuality is not so apparent. But even then we have to ask why is Sebastian having such a difficulty coming out? Although it is always dangerous to generalize about an entire country, most people perceive that Sweden and other Scandinavian countries by the mid-1990s were some of the most open-minded of all places on earth about sexuality. And when he finally does admit the fact to his parents, his mother cries for a few moments while his father sits temporarily speechless, but soon after they both openly accept his homosexuality with open and loving arms, suggesting that they should all celebrate. One of his friends, also in love Ulf, Lisbeth (Rebecka Hemse) even suspects that he is gay. And when his friends finally all discover the fact—hence the film’s alternative title, När alla vet (When Everybody Knows)—they appear to be completely comfortable with the fact.

     Wam’s film was criticized upon its original release as escapist gay youth fare that refused to address deeper issues. I’m not exactly sure what those issues might entail. The film might certainly have introduced a homophobic being, one of his parents or his friends, and it might have further focused on the abuse of Ulf by both his father, who beats his wife and son upon his returns home, and focused on his often negligent mother. The fact that the brother and, in one instance, Sebastian himself, are asked to babysit two young girls raises issues that might have been further explored.

      But that is not obviously the world the writers or directors have created. In both Sebastian’s and Ulf’s cases this cinematic work presents youths who represent the incredible resilience of most young people. The problems that these boys face are ones that they have to handle internally, and every being does that in a slightly different way. It is quite evident that Ulf is simply more mature than Sebastian and has not only come to terms with his extra-familial responsibilities, but enjoys nurturing his two charming sisters in a situation that might otherwise have destroyed their childish joy. We find out late in the film, that he has already experimented with gay sex, discovering that it was not for him.

      This film is not, fortunately, yet another statement about the general angst and joys of coming out, but is a  more detailed character study in how one individual, despite all of the good intentions of those around him, has himself to “come through,” to deal with his own sexuality in a manner that, ironically, may be even more problematic than for a hateful homophobic to share a shower or a dorm room with a gay schoolmate. The mind sets up barriers and probabilities that the world sometimes has not established. We can see in Sebastian’s behavior some of the torturous questioning that many young, self-closeted youths suffer. The first and most frightful fear is simply that in suddenly recognizing that one may be attracted to and desire sex with others of one’s gender,

how one will behave, what will such a life look like? My companion was afraid that by being gay he would suddenly turn into a grotesquely effeminate being the way homosexuals in his day were often depicted by society and in the media. Does being gay mean that you want to be a woman? That you perform the role of a woman, or begin to perform feminine gestures and behavior?

       With his friend Ulf, Sebastian actually explores this territory, as the two inexplicably get an urge to apply make-up, lipstick, and eye-liner in exploration of the possible feminine aspects of their beings and, strangely, a kind of exploration that children perform with Indian war-paint and cowboy masks. It is also a bit like “dressing up,” preening for one another, becoming beautiful in the context of the heterosexual gaze. From there they graduate to drawing “tattoo” like-figures on each other’s stomachs and backs—allowing them also to explore one another’s bodies without literal sexual contact. But, of course, even painting or drawing upon actual flesh and muscle does become sexual, as they join in a kind of celebratory rock/war dance in connection with their new kinship.

     The chaos that bookends these psycho-sexual enactments, in part, is an attempt to rid themselves of the guilt of exploring that territory, countering their feelings of attraction to one another through gluttony, smearing jelly across their faces; and, later, wiping away the memory of trying to become artificially “beautiful” for one another in the most sexual act of all, by sharing a bathtub completely naked.

       The pushes and pulls of attraction and disgust they explore naturally results in Sebastian’s final kiss of Ulf on the lips And when it is not greeted as either something of a joke or received with pleasure, the self-hate and confusion Sebastian feels returns full force.

      And so to do the other questions that young gay boys face rush to the surface. How does one go about finding someone to love? Where are other people like him who also desire someone of his sex and might find him attractive?

      Finally, how does a homosexual make love? Heterosexual love, advertised daily through magazines, film, television, and even advertisements pretends to lay out the proper approaches of male and female sex and love. But where does a boy coming to terms with homosexuality find explanations of what two males (or for women what two females) do together to enjoy each other and express their pleasure, information that, without the help of today’s computers and pornography, might not be as readily available for someone living, as Sebastian describes his town, in Podunk.

      It is these issues and others like them floating through Sebastian’s unexpressed consciousness that is the focus of Wam’s probing film. It is truly sweet that once he has openly expressed his desires through his attempted kiss that everyone accepts him, demonstrates their love for him, and, in Ulf’s case, holds no hard feelings for being the object of his friend’s affections. It’s great that “everybody knows.” But the question when the film comes to his sunny ending is when and how will Sebastian know what and who he is really is as a gay individual—a territory that lies outside of the experiences of a 16-year-old boy living in a small Swedish town.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).