coming out

Leading Ladies

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:58:00 +0000

Directed by Erika Randall Beahm, Daniel Beahm

It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story. It is simultaneously a dance musical, coming-of-age story, and coming-out narrative. The power of the film comes from its ability to maintain the generic conventions of the story while completely rejecting the hetero-normativity that is typically the narrative thrust of the genre. What’s perhaps even more amazing is that Leading Ladies succeeds at thwarting convention within a conventional structure while simultaneously being a whole lot of damn fun. Lesser films would sink under such weight.

Helmed by first-time directors Erika Randall Beahm and Daniel Beahm, this joyous film tells the story of the Campari women. The matriarch of the family is ballroom-dancing stage mom Sheri, played by Latin and Ballroom Champion Melanie LaPatin. Sheri has two daughters: like-minded drama queen and dancing champion Tasi (Shannon Lea Smith), and Toni (Laurel Vail), Tasi’s practice partner and the wallflower of the family. The film centers on Toni’s relationships, particularly with the emotionally volatile Tasi, and an unexpected romantic attachment to Mona (Nicole Dionne), a bubbly and outgoing woman Toni meets at a dance club. While LaPatin’s acting is a bit stiff, Smith’s neurotic and self-obsessed Tasi is played to high-pitched perfection. Vail might be the real star of this film, however, as she says more with her eyes than many actors can express with a word. She artfully plays the Ugly Duckling, the quiet witness to familial squabbles and the glue that keeps the Camparis together.

Leading Ladies has an ebb-and-flow, alternating between slow and quietly stirring scenes and vibrant, fast-paced dance numbers (most notably a hysterical and boisterous number set in a grocery store). The heart of this film beats loudly and quickly, and it leaves the viewer invigorated and deeply moved. To learn more about her hopes for the film, its generative process, and the ideological concerns that lead to its creation, I recently spoke with co-director Erika Randall Beahm.

Beahm co-wrote the film with Jennifer Bechtel, a friend and LGBT youth advocate in Champaign, Illinois, and Bechtel was struggling to find mainstream films that spoke to the young gay community. As Bechtel and Beahm perceived it, most gay and lesbian cinema tends towards violence or explicitness, while mainstream cinema features gay characters as “the sidekick.” Beahm and Bechtel thus sought to create a “family-centered gay and lesbian film for the mainstream market.” Their hope is that Leading Ladies provides gay youth with a positive portrayal of gay romantic love and thus “open a dialogue within themselves” and perhaps between gay youth and their families.

The film eschews aggressive and explicit representations of gay love for a romantic and “joyful falling in love which... straight kids get to experience in movies all the time.” Indeed, Leading Ladies treats its same-sex couple as any movie musicals’ heterosexual pairing: they meet, they dance, they fall in love. The romance is beautifully articulated through an artful juxtaposition of two dance sequences. Toni and Mona’s meeting is shot like a typical dance movie sequence—bright lights, loud music, and overhead shots looking down on the dancers. This film could be Dirty Dancing, if it weren’t for the same-sex couples dancing on stage and in the audience. Indeed, this is the goal of the film: to illustrate that dance (and by extension, romance and love) is the same for same-sex couples as it is for heterosexual partners. Toni leads Mona through a raucous, enthusiastic dance, and as convention dictates, the two find love while dancing. In a beautiful inversion of this sequence, we next find Toni in Mona’s lush apartment, where the more romantically experienced Mona takes the lead in the dance of romance. The lovers’ embrace is gorgeously shot in sensual blush tones and shadow.

For choreographer and dancer Beahm and youth musical programmer Bechtel, dance served as an obvious choice of backdrop for the love story. Beahm choreographed the film’s dances with Melanie LaPatin and Benji Schwimmer, the former So You Think You Can Dance! winner who also plays Toni’s best friend in the film. For Beahm, dance has an inherently transformative power: “There’s this kind of kinesthesia with dance that gets people to literally be moved on a physical level, and I believe also on an emotional and intellectual level.” The love scene between Mona and Toni, for example, is highly choreographed to match the non-diegetic music; Beahm suggests that this emphasis on “energy shifts… and the musicality” of the scene helps the spectator “lose sight of this being a gendered duet, and it just becomes two people moving together, falling in love.”

By emphasizing the movement and musicality of the scene, then, Beahm hopes to ease the fear of spectators who are uncomfortable with same-sex coupling and perhaps open a space for internal dialogue within the spectator: “For people who might have a hard time seeing two women... make out, it becomes this kind of transference of two bodies going through these really emotional and tender but also choreographed spaces, and so gender becomes less important.” By shifting the spectator’s focus from gender distinction to the movement of the body the film illustrates how little gender matters and how love—like dance—is a universal language. Thus the film utilizes dance to open up a space for shifting “people out of the fear they may feel if they’re watching from an outside perspective.”

Though the idea of dance as a catalyst to ideological and personal transformation may seem unusual, Beahm is quick to point out that dance has often added a “queer element” to the movie musical. In West Side Story, for example, the spectator sees groups of men “snapping and skipping” and yet the dance isn’t “sexualized, it’s charged and it’s activated.” Dancing is particularly subversive in moments of unison dancing, she suggests, when members of both sexes dance the same movements, suggesting a unity of the sexes and the democratization of the body. Leading Ladies takes this democratization one step further, rejecting the hetero-normative ballroom dance structure of male lead and female follow and replacing it with same-sex couplings. In doing so, Beahm simultaneously feeds off of the democratizing nature of dance while rejecting the rules of a dance form that reinforces gendered performance.

It is the inherent queerness in dance that Beahm finds so appealing and in tune with her views on feminism. For her, dance and feminism are “compatible” because they are both “hard to pin down” terms; their “slipperiness” as terms allows them to create spaces for dialogue and questioning. She likes her feminism to work “from the inside out,” enjoying the notion of becoming part of a system, and breaking it down from within. This is why her personal mantra is the cheeky suggestion to “wear pearls to the country club and then talk dirty.” Ultimately, Leading Ladies represents a filmic expression of this mantra—by placing non-conventional characters within a conventional generic structure, the film wears its pearls but then lets out a glorious, enthusiastic expletive as it sits down to dinner. Swearing has never been so much fun.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, July 15th 2010

Fucking Different: Tel Aviv

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

Directed by Kristian Petersen

Filmproducktion

Fucking Different: Tel Aviv is the third installation of this international collaboration of visual storytelling, starting first in Berlin and New York City in a sense similar to Paris Je T'aime_and _New York, I Love You. Now, while I have not seen the previous two iterations, please allow me the privilege in speculating that Fucking Different: Tel Aviv may certainly be one of the bests in the romantic short film collection genre. The fifteen directors' short films together illustrate a beautiful panorama of diversity in myriad forms within a thriving and vibrant Middle Eastern and Mediterranean metropolis. They shed light on a host of issues such as the Right-Left divide in Israel, dealing with coming out, first love, ideas of masculinity and femininity and Judaism and homosexuality.

Tel Aviv has been called the “mini-Los Angeles” of the Middle East, but L.A. is a place that many say “no one comes from, rather they go to,” but the people in Fucking Different: Tel Aviv are fully present in the times that all residents of Tel Aviv are shaped by. In the first short story entitled “Political Sex”, two new lovers, Yossi and Tzuf must decide whether to be pragmatic or passionate when the discussion turns to politics. In this short piece we see that the gay community is no less driven by a right-left partisan divide. What ensues after said discussion is some visually enthralling sex. This is another reason why this documentary is appealing. These shorts do not conceal or shirk away from what, in reality is everyday life, rather they reveal the ordinary struggles of people who refuse to be ordinary.

Another poignant moment is found in the short containing the story of Emmanuel and Brigitte. We are introduced to a man applying makeup and discussing how Brigitte came to be and how she represents his identity as much as Emmanuel. The waters get even deeper as the story progresses. We learn that Emmanuel performs the oboe for the Tel Aviv Philharmonic and that had he not had that same courage to first perform as Brigitte at a local club, he may not have ever had the courage to reach for his dream and apply to the very competitive Berlin Philharmonic.

“Gay men after being called a 'sissy' or 'faggot' when they are young become fearful of their own femininity...” "Emmanuel/Brigitte" connects seamlessly with the knowing histories of every gay man who was called such names, myself included, when he uttered such a painful truth. The story of some gay adult men is the story of not just helping friends and family become comfortable with something that may be “foreign" or "different” to them, but also becoming comfortable within your own skin and learning to celebrate it, just as Emmanuel and Brigitte do.

Fucking Different: Tel Aviv mixes epicurean delights with sapphic ecstasy and has some of the most scintillating lovemaking between beautiful people while keying you into the notion that there are also some gays who don't fit the stereotype. They would be just fine with a night watching an entire season of Absolutely Fabulous rather than having sex. Make it Battlestar Galactica or Fringe and I'd probably give the same answer. Maybe it is my love of the diversity of a metropolis or simply my lust for Jewish men, but after screening this collection of short films I was ready to book the next flight to Tel Aviv.

Written by: Brandon Copeland, December 29th 2009

Another Life Altogether

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Elaine Beale

Spiegel & Grau

Elaine Beale crafts the engrossing coming-of-age and coming out story of Jesse Bennet in Another Life Altogether. Jesse lives on the northeast coast of England, one of the world’s fastest eroding coastlines. The constant threat of the breakdown of the cliffs is mirrored by Jesse’s mother’s constant threat of mental collapse. The book begins with her mother in Delapole, the local mental hospital, though Jesse tells her classmates that her mother is on a cruise; her hope is to impress a girl she has a crush on in her class. But when her mother is discharged, in an attempt to escape judgment and get a fresh start, her father moves them into a dilapidated house in a small village.

Jesse is desperate to begin her own new life at the new school somewhere higher in the pecking order. She gets her wish as she develops a friendship with Tracey, a girl with a mean streak and an older sister, Amanda, that Jesse falls for. With her unrequited love for Amanda, and a mother who spends most of her days and nights in bed, Jesse spends much of her time writing letters to Amanda that she never sends. The letters allow her an escape and provide an outlet for her feelings in a world where she feels no one understands her or cares about her.

The layers of life develop throughout the book as Jesse battles to reconcile what she thinks her life should be and what it actually is. She wrestles alone trying to understand her sexuality and steals a book from the local mobile library on homosexuality that still doesn’t help her reconcile her feelings towards Amanda to the fact that nearly everyone around her judges homosexuality as perverse and wrong. Her father ignores the stress and trauma of the family life, preferring to yell at the television, hoping that his wife will snap out of it, and assuming Jesse can carry on by herself. Jesse’s mother struggles with what seems to be bipolar disorder; manic at times and nearly catatonic at others, she is trapped by her own brain.

The idea that mental illness is something that can be shaken off like a blanket permeates the book; the mother wants to be better but can’t. Another theme throughout is the almost impossible cruelty that kids can inflict upon each other; regardless of the time period (the book is set in the 1970s), those who are different are relentlessly picked on.

At the book’s climax, I kept desperately hoping that Jesse would do the right thing. (Don't worry. I won’t spoil it for you!) And at the end of the book, while Jesse has changed and grown throughout, we see that her life still has to carry on. There is no happily-ever-after, but there is a waking up: an acknowledgment that appearances and popularity often mean nothing and that ignoring things won’t make them go away.

Another Life Altogether is an extraordinary true-to-life book, and Beale tells a number of important and poignant stories all at once with great skill.

Written by: Kristin Conard, December 3rd 2009

Boy Crazy: Coming Out Erotica

admin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:13:00 +0000

Edited by Richard Labonté

Cleis Press

Boy Crazy is a series of firsts: first coming out of the closet experiences, first feelings of sexual awakening, first realizations of “otherness,” first times falling in love... the list goes on and on. In a series of otherwise unrelated stories, multiple authors tell the tales of coming out and first encounters, all from the perspective of boys, of young homosexuals' way of perceiving the world. It’s not complicated, as Richard Labonté writes in his introduction, “Those are the stories of those boys, and the boys who are crazy about them.”

There are seventeen different stories in Boy Crazy, told by seventeen different voices. The title can be a bit misleading, as it can be assumed that all of the stories are of sexual nature, but that is not the case. Some of the tales are about the innocent discovery of love, the moment in which the boy realizes he loves other boys—and they love him. Other tales are about the excitement brought on by the first sexual encounters, at times told in fun detail. Regardless, the stories deal with reciprocated feelings and for the most part are entertaining to read.

A very interesting element to Boy Crazy is how each author brings a different portrayal to life. Depending on the tone and mood, the story can be comical, or provocative or at times even a bit darker in mood or outlook. The writing styles vary greatly, in one story we are in the world of a young boy and his pearl clutching grandmother and in the next story a college freshman sits around a coffee shop checking his laptop and texting his roommate that he won’t be home. The multiplicity of authors brings a fun perspective, but it does not mean that there won’t be similarities.

For the most part, the stories either revolve around or have elements based on the idea of a young unpopular boy who lusts after his sister’s boyfriend and eventually has his first sexual encounter with him. At times it can be repetitive, varying only in location. After all this is a compilation of stories about the same subject. However, there are other stories, such as “Sundelin,” in which a new type of awakening is discovered and it has nothing to do with a sibling, or with anything in general, but only leaves the reader wanting more (like the main character).

Boy Crazy is a fun book to read. At times it’s provocative, and it can be sweet. It can be a light read, but also has enough good writing to be taken seriously.

Written by: Jessica Sánchez, October 27th 2009