Same-sex parenting has gone so mainstream of late — what with Modern Family and The Kids Are All Right and any number of stories in the New York Times Style section — that it's kind of a surprise to find few if any such storylines in the 78 films being presented in the 22nd Tampa International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. (Read CL's reviews of selected movies in the festival here.)
It may be that the vagaries of parenthood are old news for LGBT filmmakers. TIGLFF's new program director, KJ Mohr, is herself a mother-to-be, but for her the really intriguing subject matter these days, the territory that for audiences both gay and straight remains relatively uncharted, is the world of what Mohr calls "gender fluidity." Some of the most powerful and illuminating films in this year's festival challenge notions of masculinity and femininity in ways both philosophical and visceral. "It's all very complicated," says Mohr. "And also exciting."
The opening-night film, Gun Hill Road, is a case in point. The scenario sounds familiar, redundant even: macho Latino dad angered by his son's effeminacy. But writer/director Rashaad Ernesto Green has such a sure sense of place and the performances are so rich and specific that it subverts stereotype, particularly in transgender actor Harmony Santana's portrayal of Michael, at first tentative and finally resolute in his desire to live as a woman.
Another extraordinary film, Romeos, looks at the experiences of Lukas, a college-age German woman transitioning to male. Neither movie shies away from the clinical, sometimes painful details of gender reassignment — hypodermics, hormones, hair — and neither soft-pedals the bias the protagonists face in society at large. In that regard, both films are highly suspenseful — you keep waiting for something to go really, really wrong — but neither winds up where you think it will.
The films, in their own ways, are also educational. For instance, in Romeos, Lukas' best friend Ine, a lesbian, asks why Lukas is going to the trouble of changing gender if she's attracted to men? It's a question that betrays an uninformed attitude about the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, but there's a good chance some members of the audience are wondering the same thing. Thanks to Ine's question, says Mohr, they're able to say to themselves, "Good, she asked it."
But more than anything else, these are just good stories, says Mohr. Finding that balance — movies that entertain and enlighten — is one of the joys (and challenges) of programming film festivals. Mohr, 38, discovered her calling when she was a teenager in Ripon, Wisconsin, and her father, a liberal Protestant minister, introduced her to foreign film. She went on to program a women's film festival in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992, and has since curated for prestigious venues everywhere from Chicago to Bangkok to Brazil. She's currently Director of Film and Video Programs at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, where she met former TIGLFF programmer Margaret Murray. When Murray decided to step down, she recommended KJ, and the transition has been smooth. "I think we are probably exactly the same," Mohr says of herself and Murray. "We have the same sensibilities."
Mohr is rightfully proud of the wide range of documentaries TIGLFF is presenting this year, many of which will be shown in a venue new to the festival, the Tampa Museum of Art. (Other offerings will be shown, per usual, at Tampa Theatre and Muvico Baywalk in St. Pete.) The 19 feature-length docs include Gen Silent, about '40s and '50s generation LGBT people who grew up unable to be open about their sexuality and now face old age without family or institutional support; Hollywood to Dollywood, about gay twin brothers on an odyssey to meet Dolly Parton; Kink Crusaders, about the International Mr. Leather competition; and Orchids: My Intersex Adventure, about a filmmaker's discovery that she was born with 46 XY (male) chromosomes. Watching Orchids for the first time, Mohr says she realized "I didn't know any of this. We didn't even know how to form the questions."
Wish Me Away, a documentary about Chely Wright, the first country singer to come out as gay, was another revelation for Mohr, who had never heard of Wright before seeing the film. "It's been pretty easy for me to be queer, and easy to think it's been that easy for everyone. This movie shows how it's not that easy at all."
Mohr has a long history of showcasing the work of women directors, but there are considerably fewer women than men represented in TIGLFF's film roster. Tied into that is the fact that men attend the fest in greater numbers than women do, and that's partly reflected in the programming. "We are looking at our audience which, for better or worse, is predominantly gay men." The truism — "Women stay home, men go out more" — has some truth to it, she says. She doesn't have a ready explanation, except that "I think maybe gay men have more stamina."
So, of course, the docs have to be balanced by the surefire crowd-pleasers. Fortunately, in addition to the obligatory cutey-pie boy movies, some of the festival's best films seem likely to be among its biggest hits. Circumstance, for instance, is one of Mohr's favorites and the winner of the Audience Award at Sundance. It's "beautiful, heartbreaking and sexy," she says, about the tensions in an upper-class Iranian family between a cosmopolitan young lesbian and her brother, who has turned to fundamentalism. 3 (Three), about a heterosexual (sort of) couple and the man who has affairs with both of them, was directed by Tom Tykwer of Run Lola Run fame. And festival mainstay Casper Andreas is back with Going Down in La-La Land, a far superior film to his Violet Tendencies, the strained comedy which opened last year's fest.
What distinguishes gay filmfests finally from other such cinematic smorgasbords, says Mohr, is the sense of community they engender. "You'd think that would have changed with Logo and Netflix," she says, but a festival "is really different than sitting in your living room alone." It's a family reunion of sorts, with ample opportunities to mingle and/or cruise, including this year's new food and street fest, the Taste of TIGLFF on Sat., Oct. 15, and that night's two famous (or infamous) men's and women's parties, Surge and Sugar. And this year, the festival is reviving its big black-tie fundraiser, a Great Gatsby-themed gala at the Don Vicente de Ybor hotel on Oct. 8.
It's fitting that the festival closes Oct. 16 with Leave It On The Floor, the splashy musical about L.A.'s drag ball subculture. Though it's not without flaws, it's yet another fascinating look into the shifting landscape of gender and it ends with one big fabulous party. And even if there's nary a Modern Family in sight, Leave It On The Floor, like TIGLFF itself, is a testimony to the enduring power of the families we choose.
