Ending Gaysploitation
In July, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Outfest, celebrated its twenty-six years of LGBT cinema. Outfest is one of the premiere film festivals that focuses on the LGBT community and the filmmakers who supply it with its programming. With Hollywood A-gays, agents, buyers, and the penniless filmmakers sipping goblets of sponsored liquor and targeted corporate advertising aimed at that urban myth of gay disposable income, films will be screened that are hardly anything to be proud of, much less celebrate.
Films like Boys in the Band, Longtime Companion, and the recently restored Parting Glances were a queer America’s response in dealing with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. We didn’t know what was killing us at first and then when we started going to more funerals than birthdays, the discourse permeated throughout the community to
Leave a Reply