"Yes, Thomas, it seems to be the case. Although I will say that I've been blessed to have several generous..." Read More
– Trevor Hoppe
"It appears you are a victim of prudish anti-gay Christian-Republican groups that are exploiting Google's complaint system to suppress positive..." Read More
– Thomas Kraemer
"We came to a simple-minded habit of binary thinking, here in 'the Western technological world', by many paths. Insightful discussions..." Read More
FILED
UNDER: "From the other side of the border"
TAGS:
By Nolberto González
i'm still working on the translation of what happenes in the word youth conference.. this is only a sample about the several agressions against the Youth Coalition for Education and Sexual Heatlth...
hope to translate my note soon.
by the way the note we made says:
In church did they teach you is good to urinate in public places?
The latest and greatest "The View From the Bottom" is now live! Jackson and I filmed this new piece while on gaycation on the Connecticut Coast. How very East Coast yuppie of us! In this episode, we dish on boyfriends who don't like to give head, dating another bottom, rectal microbicides, having HPV warts removed, and more! Enjoy!
As you may have noticed recently, I have removed Google advertising from my site. This was not of my own accord -- Google disabled ads to my site, calling it "pornography" and thus a violation of their terms of agreement. There was no possibility for appeal. Once the decision was made, it was final, I was told after asking for an explanation.
This of course destroys my only revenue stream for this blog. Google ads didn't bring in huge sums of money, but they did bring in just enough to cover my hosting bill. I now face having to pay my that bill out of my own pocket, which as a graduate student is a tall order.
I'm writing this entry today to seek your assistance. Since I began blogging in 2005, I've managed to keep this site afloat through funds of my own and ad revenue on the side. But since then the site has grown tremendously to over 10,000 monthly readers, and alongside that my hosting bill has quadrupled in just the past two years. Google ad revenue grew alongside that bill, but now that I cannot rely on that funding source I must look to you for help.
I want to continue this crazy idea of a project -- but I just can't afford the hosting bills on my own. I think this blog is a resource for folks out there who are interested in sex, gay men's health and HIV/AIDS. That's why I keep working on it. There are surprisingly few resources out there like it. Here you can find "The View From the Bottom," interviews with scholars in the field, and a heaping pile of gay analysis of the issues of the day. Trevorade doesn't just serve up "curated news" in the style of most blogs out there -- we generate original content that you can't find anywhere else.
And that is why I'm presently looking to you, our readers, to help us continue that mission of providing frank, incisive gay analysis on issues that matter to you. Donations of any size are welcome and wanted, from $5 to $50. I know that there are folks out there who want to see this blog continue for years to come, and it is to those readers that I am now asking for help. Everyone who donates has my gratitude, and if you include your shipping address when you do I'll be sending along a real, live thank you note. In the mail! (I know, so 20th century.) Thanks for reading. And thanks for helping.
There are scant few thinkers out there publishing critically productive work in the field of HIV prevention and public health more broadly. I have long been a fan and avid consumer of Australian Kane Race's scholarship. His analyses of HIV prevention, drug policies, and public health more broadly are beautifully incisive and incredibly helpful for anyone invested in thinking critically about these complicated issues. He is a master of explicating the taken-for-granted, and making you see what before was obscured. In his latest book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he continues to advance his concept of "counterpublic health" -- a concept built on the work of feminist and queer scholars invested in understanding oppositional public spheres. I had the pleasure of interviewing Kane recently for this blog, and I'm thrilled to share his thoughts here. We talk about public health, HIV prevention, and his challenging concept that aims to shake up our conventional understandings of these complex phenomenon.
Question: In both published essays and your recent book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, you've advanced a concept you term "counterpublic health" - a concept that of course borrows from Michael Warner and other scholars' work on the concept of "counterpublics." Can you talk a bit about that original "counterpublics" concept, and how you came up with the idea to adapt it to your critical work on health?
A counterpublic has a critical or oppositional relation to the public. It's a term that queer and feminist scholars are using to refer to collective contexts of discussion, debate and performance in which we forge oppositional interpretations of our identities, interests and desires. The term is useful because it references the venues, media and forms of circulation which help constitute a sense of collective political agency. It also points to the exclusions and ideological dimensions of the public sphere proper - and hence the necessity of developing alternative spaces in which critical understandings and strategies can emerge.
"To refer to these fields of public health as counterpublic health is, first of all, to register the disastrous impact of these mainstream ideological investments on the health and life chances of the groups thus stigmatized - queers, sex workers, drug users. It is to critique moralized notions of 'the public,' and think about how they affect our work."
For me the term is immediately useful for thinking about those areas of public health where mainstream investment in a moral ideology compromises the ability to respond effectively to public health needs. HIV prevention is an obvious example. Drug education and policy is another. In both of these fields we have a situation where political investment in a particular idea of public membership (e.g. family values, a drug-free nation, etc.) thwarts rational responses to public health. Ideological investment in these figures consistently obstructs efforts to conduct education (for example queer-friendly, sex-positive HIV prevention education) and institute services (such as needle and syringe exchange provision) which are known to be effective in improving the life chances of affected groups. To refer to these fields of public health as counterpublic health is, first of all, to register the disastrous impact of these mainstream ideological investments on the health and life chances of the groups thus stigmatized - queers, sex workers, drug users. It is to critique moralized notions of "the public", and think about how they affect our work.
The concept of counterpublics is also useful because it pushes us to think about the collective contexts and modalities through which alternative strategies develop. So much health work and health education today advocates individual solutions to public health problems. But if we think about the early response to HIV/AIDS, it is quite clear that much of its success depended upon creating a shared horizon of concern about the threat, as well as specific contexts of collective self-activity. Nancy Fraser talks about the journals, bookstores, conferences, conventions, festivals, lectures, educational programs, and events which make up what she calls a feminist counterpublic. I began to picture the multiple public contexts that people have activated and engaged in order to undertake HIV education and prevention - the media, working groups, drag shows, conferences, blogs, sex venues, erotic performances, public forums, dance parties, research centres, internet sites, phone-lines, bars and service organizations. These spaces of collective activity have been crucial for the undertaking of HIV prevention. They've enabled us to transform our bodies, practices, and pleasures without denying or eliminating them. In order to develop reflexive contexts around stigmatized practices like gay sex and illicit drug use, it has been necessary to create public or semi-public forums for the acknowledgment, discussion and remodeling of these practices. In his work on counterpublics, Michael Warner also draws attention to the discourse pragmatics of different spheres of public address and performance, and this opens up an important set of questions for people engaged in HIV education and prevention. Questions like, how does this particular format/venue/event engage bodies, and what possibilities does this open up for collective reflexivity about certain risks and/or practices?
Question: How is this concept of "counterpublic health" useful in your own work, and how do you hope others will take it up?
I think it helps define a broad field of public health practice and understand the conditions in which certain public health initiatives operate. This field is characterized by a tension between public morality and what I like to call practical ethics of public health. One of the first lessons of health promotion, for example, is that education works best when it is couched in terms of the values, vernacular and practices of the group in question. But when it comes to HIV prevention or drug harm reduction, this necessarily involves an acknowledgement of practices that are difficult to acknowledge (without scandal at least) in the conventional public sphere - practices like gay sex or substance use. Paradoxically, public morality makes those initiatives which are most likely to connect with the relevant groups in effective ways most at risk of political intervention.
"The concept could be used to describe any public health work that discovers that it is necessary, as part of its project, to challenge hegemonic ideas of average personhood and create new collective contexts for the airing of otherwise stigmatized practices."
The scenario is familiar. An educational campaign or service which is explicit about drug use or gay sex gets picked up by a tabloid newspaper. Moral outrage ensues and the story dominates talkback radio for a couple of hours. The minister's office panics and condemns the organization that produced the resource. It's a constant possibility. And it is very damaging because it compromises the ability of health promotion practitioners to engage people at the level of their concrete embodied practices.
Counterpublic theory is useful here because it understands this dynamic as a product, in part, of the mass media's mode of address: the presumption of the reader as a member of an imaginary national family unit that is white, heterosexual and drug-free. This is the ideal with which we are encouraged to identify our deepest interests at the hands of this form of address. But it's a fiction, in the sense that it is based on untested presumptions about the average reader or listener or voter. So while many readers may not actually organize their lives in this way, this image of the public takes on a forceful reality which counterpublic health practitioners must contend with all the time. Counterpublic theory provides a useful handle on these dynamics and encourages us to think about the constraints and possibilities inherent in different scenes of circulation and modes of address - and develop new ones. The concept could be used to describe any public health work that discovers that it is necessary, as part of its project, to challenge hegemonic ideas of average personhood and create new collective contexts for the airing of otherwise stigmatized practices.
Question: I met you back in 2006 for the first time at the "Against Health" conference here at Michigan. Should we be against health? Does the concept of "counterpublic health" help answer that question?
One of the things that conference did well was highlight the use and abuse of the term health. Health is tricky like that: it's just as likely to evoke moral criteria as practical criteria around wellbeing. But "morality" does not always amount to healthiness, and frequently moralism has distinctly unhealthy effects. I think it's unfortunate that, because the term is so frequently abused, many of us find ourselves in a situation where we start believing that we are, indeed, "against health". To be sure, health is only one concern among many, and it is not always the most pressing one. But I agree with the conference organisers that our efforts to live longer, happier, more pleasurable lives would be greatly enhanced by bringing some critical force to bear on the ways in which the term 'health' is exploited to pursue other agendas. Counterpublic health may be a useful concept here, because it describes the situation of doing public health work in a context where hegemonic ideals of sexuality, personhood and citizenship are loaded against you. I don't think we are or should be against health, but frequently queers are constituted in precisely that way.
Question: There is a long history of both collaboration and tension between public health practitioners and HIV activists. They've been the best of friends and the worst of enemies at times. I wonder how you see that relationship evolving today, both in Australia where you work and more globally?
I think that today most HIV activists work within the frameworks and institutions of public health, and they do some very good and very important work there. Certainly this is the case in Australia. But I wonder how well the discourses and paradigms of public health are able register the importance of critical sex education, which has been a crucial component of the community response to HIV/AIDS. I think we need more than the professional frameworks of public health are able to offer if we are to sustain effective forms of HIV prevention. We need to promote literacy and reflexivity around sexual practice, and this is not necessarily something that public health specialists are particularly well trained to do, or that is easy to register within the professional frameworks of the field. Sexual practice is infinitely more complex than is recognized in public discourse, and the risks it gives rise to are often disguised or distorted by our desire to identify with normative forms. There's a critical literacy around sex, health and stigma that has developed within communities responding to HIV/AIDS that is worth sharing with people who are new to gay life. I don't know how you argue for a critical focus on heteronormativity as part of HIV education within official institutions of public health, but I think that's an important dimension of our work.
"How do we equip people to think flexibly and creatively and astutely about their sexual practice and intimate lives? What forms of pedagogy can be developed to this effect?"
In some ways, the concept of counterpublic health is my response to this situation. It is designed to conjure a critical "outside" to given institutions of public health while recognizing that most of our HIV activist talent is now fully immersed within these institutions. I want the concept to signal the practice of connecting with subcultural knowledge and queer critique, and to convey the importance of keeping that connection alive. How do we equip people to think flexibly and creatively and astutely about their sexual practice and intimate lives? What forms of pedagogy can be developed to this effect? I think these are crucial questions.
Question: In one of your forthcoming articles, you talk about the "risk of HIV prevention." Can you talk a bit about what you mean by that?
I use that phrase in my paper "Engaging in a Culture of Barebacking: Gay Men and the Risk of HIV Prevention", which first came out in 2007 and is being reprinted this year in HIV Treatment and Prevention Technologies in International Perspective, edited by Mark Davis and Corinne Squire. The article is concerned with the way risk is measured in the prevention sciences, and the effects of the mismatch between gay men's HIV prevention practices "on the ground" and what's identified as risk within the science. Barebacking is the case in point. I was amazed to discover that most of the initial articulations of barebacking in the US media from 1995 were made by HIV positive men, speaking about unprotected sex with other HIV positive men. There's no risk of newly infecting an HIV-negative individual with HIV in these circumstances. And in fact this strategy is even promoted today in some US contexts as serosorting. But these men were denounced as deliberate risk-takers at the time because they were talking about breaching the condom code. In the moral panic that ensued, the concerns around HIV prevention that were actually informing the practice got lost. I'm interested in the extent to which mainstream behavioural science was complicit in this process.
"In failing to attend to the cultural categories and practices according to which gay men are organising their sex lives, behavioural science misses innovative HIV prevention practices and mislabels them as risk."
The risk of HIV prevention which the title refers to is the risk that, in failing to attend to the cultural categories and practices according to which gay men are organising their sex lives, behavioural science misses innovative HIV prevention practices and mislabels them as risk. This promotes an image of gay men as intentional risk takers, irrespective of the precautions and conditions that actually animate their sexual practice. I think this is what has happened in the case of barebacking, and the effect has been to produce unprotected sex without condoms as a thrilling transgression of public health norms. When in fact it needn't be, and in some contexts it is actually quite safe.
More broadly, I think there is a related risk that current practices of HIV prevention, including social scientific practices, can't quite grasp the relationality of liminal practices like sex and drugs, and end up reifying the idea of the rational choice-making individual as the subject of these practices. Sometimes we overemphasize the intentionality of sexual actors, when it seems to me that part of the appeal of sex and drug practices, at least on some occasions, is a certain losing sight of the self. I think there's something important about the focus on relationality and liminality in these approaches that needs further elaboration. We need to develop better ways of accounting for sex and risk which take this dimension of erotic experience into account, without pathologizing it. I'm hoping that grappling with this problem may produce some new and better ways of doing practice-focused sexuality research. But this is an ongoing project.
Question: What do you think needs to change about the way public health approaches HIV prevention?
Well, that's a difficult question to answer, because public health approaches HIV prevention differently in different contexts. But I think this would be one area. We need knowledge practices that are better attuned to the cultural categories according to which people are organising their sex lives and which are better able to account for the relationality and variability of sexual practice. Sexual practices, drug practices and prevention practices change - in the context of new technologies, new environments, and new circumstances. I think HIV prevention needs to keep in touch with these changes if it wants to remain relevant and responsive to those groups that are most at risk. There is a lot of emphasis in the international field today on determining the predictability of interventions. I think this emphasis is misguided, given what we know about historical and cultural change. Instead we need research methods and pedagogies that promote both individual and public responsiveness to the unpredictable situations that inevitably emerge.
"I think sex education needs to be a central part of HIV prevention education, and it needs to go beyond biological descriptions of anatomy and risk to provide opportunities for reflection on the dynamics of specific sexual contexts and relations if it wants to equip people to protect themselves and each other effectively."
I've talked about the need for critical sex education as a feature of HIV prevention programs. There is a great deal of resistance to this internationally. Indeed, one of the drivers of official enthusiasm for very expensive trials of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis around the world at the moment seems to be the promise PREP holds out of avoiding difficult public discussions around sexual practice, drug use, and gendered relations. I think sex education needs to be a central part of HIV prevention education, and it needs to go beyond biological descriptions of anatomy and risk to provide opportunities for reflection on the dynamics of specific sexual contexts and relations if it wants to equip people to protect themselves and each other effectively. The same could be said for drug education. We need a less moralizing approach to drug education and service delivery that de-pathologizes people's desire for pleasure and proceeds pragmatically from that point.
I also believe that public health needs to resist current trends towards criminalizing HIV transmission. Sex is a relational practice. It takes place between two or more people. In criminalizing HIV transmission and non-disclosure of status, the criminal law produces a sense of HIV-positive individuals as exclusively responsible for HIV infection, and this in turn promotes a false sense of security and protection for HIV-negative individuals. So while one may well find willful or reckless transmission ethically troubling, there is a technical and practical question here about whether criminalization is an effective way to promote public health (not to mention a shared response to HIV). There is already a wealth of knowledge in the field about the negative public health effects of punitive strategies. Punitive strategies constitute individuals as stigmatized subjects; make them less likely to access services; promote evasiveness and disavowal; and reduce people's capacity to care for themselves. They also promote a climate of distrust, suspicion, hostility and fear - the very opposite of an enabling environment for public health. I believe public health needs to continue to insist on HIV prevention as part of its ambit, and not a matter for the criminal code.
Question: Many scholars today have trouble with the notion of social change, in part because both the foundation for advocating for that change and the notions of "progress" and "justice" have been so thoroughly challenged and at the very least made slippery. And yet, of course, many of us got involved in academia with some hope of our scholarship actually making some kind of impact on the world around us. How do you approach this problem?
Hmm. I think social change is already happening - sometimes very rapidly, sometimes quite slowly, always with complex implications - and the challenge is to work out how it is happening, and intervene in ways that you think will be productive. We have a habit in the HIV field of separating the concept of "science" from "intervention", but as someone who has been involved in the HIV field in various ways for almost 15 years now, I am utterly convinced that knowledge practices matter: they are performative - which is to say they are intimately involved in the production of certain realities over others. I've seen this happen. Science is intervention, whether we like it or not. So for me your question is a qualitative question. That is to say, if scholarship is already having an impact on the world around us, then what sort of impact is it having and how could things be improved?
"To me, to articulate and teach critical theories of sexuality is to develop one counterpublic space among others."
And for me this raises methodological questions. I'm attracted to fields like cultural studies because they provide models of embodied scholarship and a context for reflecting on practices of embodied scholarship which I find more promising, politically and ethically, than research methods which require you to cloak your subjectivity at the door as a condition of entry. I find it bizarre for example that we have so many people working in the HIV field (and also the drugs field) who are participants in affected communities but who are blocked if not actively discouraged by the professional or scientific frames within which they work from reflecting, as part of their work, on their experience in any structured or sustained or critically informed way. We need to be producing spaces and contexts for this to happen! In the mainstream field, it now seems as though "research" and "community" are conceived as entirely distinct domains, the first completely disembodied, the second increasingly tokenistic. We should refuse this binary. We need participants of affected communities to be engaged in critical reflection and research about the conditions and details of their experience, and for the knowledge they produce through this process to be taken seriously as part of policy debate. For the past couple of years I have been putting most of my energies into developing a large undergraduate course in sexualities here at the University of Sydney. There is nothing more exciting than seeing a student begin to pick up the tools of queer studies and cultural theory and start to use them to understand their world and their experience of it. I think the new generation of sexuality researchers will be critically astute, engaged with social policy, and produce work that is both conceptually innovative and empirically informed, and grounded in their experience of the world. Certainly, these are attributes I hope to foster in my teaching.
To me, to articulate and teach critical theories of sexuality is to develop one counterpublic space among others. And many need to be developed. Like other cultural researchers, I try to work at various interfaces and engage with multiple publics - some academic, some pedagogical, some policy-related, some popular, some subcultural - where the aim is to participate in debate and develop new ways of understanding, and therefore acting upon, experience. It's true that academic work has a quite specific field of circulation, but it connects to many others. One would hope that by identifying and giving weight to certain under-articulated or hidden forms of experience, new spaces for thought and practice - and new possibilities of responsiveness - open up.
My luck at Frameline just never seems to end this year. I've laughed. I've cried. And now with the addition of The Adults in the Room, I've had to think. Hard. This is hands down the most creative, challenging, and fascinating film I've seen this year at Frameline -- and perhaps ever. I know, I know -- that's a bit of a strong statement, but it reflects my love for this film. It is nothing short of incredible.
To say that this film deals with controversial subject matter is an understatement. Sex between people classified as minors and those classified as adults is perhaps one of the most heavily policed sexual boundaries. Maybe only incest is regarded with more disdain. Young people are not supposed to be sexual, and when they are with their peers it causes anxiety. When they have sex with people older than them, it causes outright panic.
This film cannot be easily classified. It is part documentary, part feature. Part fiction, part true story. It takes everything you expect about a film and throws it out the window. As such, telling you about it here is something of a challenge. But here goes.
When director Andy Blubaugh was 15, he had an intimate relationship with the father of his classmate. In The Adults in the Room, we get to see Andy grappling with the memory of this relationship. We see him meeting with friends to discuss making the film, his conflicted emotions about the relationship, and his angst over how to represent his lover without painting him as either totally innocent or guilty, so to speak. We see him auditioning actors to play both his younger self and his older lover, and the real discomfort that these actors experience when they realize they're expected to make out on screen. We see him discussing the "character" Andy's motivations with friends and teachers. We even get to see Andy in the classroom, teaching students about film-making (which reads as documentary, but is actually reenacted for the film by volunteers).
Alongside these self-reflexive and incredibly insightful vignettes into the filmmaking process and into Andy's brain, we get pieces of the finished narrative product. The actor cast as the younger Andy was in fact 16, and does in fact make out with his costar. He's pretty incredible and does a great job of conveying conflicted youth on screen. As the director noted during the Q&A, there is a difference between a 20 year-old playing a teenager and an actual 16 year-old on screen. Teenage angst is just about impossible to recreate without seeming farcical or overplayed.
What I especially love about these feature segments is that, because of the inclusion of the documentary-esque portions, the reconstructed artificiality of this story becomes apparent. Often times we take more seriously stories that are based on true stories, but of course what we remember is not actually what happened. It is our reconstructed, reformulated memory of those events. Because we get to see real-life Andy typing and editing the script for the scenes in the feature segments, it becomes impossible for the viewer to consume the story as if it were actually "reality." This of course should not be a way of discrediting the representation of that reality. Indeed, reconstructed memories are how we make sense of our lives and create our identities. They form the foundation of the decisions we make today -- of who we are as people.
I can't also applaud more loudly Andy's carefulness in dealing with this subject matter. He never claims to have the answer, to exculpate his lover or intergenerational relationships generally. He has his experience, and he sticks to it. This is a difficult decision when dealing with an experience that is caught up in such a web of sticky political issues. Representing that experience without making dramatic claims about its political rights and wrongs is no easy task. Put another way, he sticks to what he knows best. What that allows as a viewer is to leave the film asking the political questions, which is exactly what I did. Because he did not give us easy answers, my friends and I were still talking about that film two hours later.
I could keep writing about all the things I loved about the film, but I'd wind up taking away the pleasure that you will undoubtedly have in watching it yourself. I desperately hope this film gets distributed. You need to see it. And I can't wait to see it again! You can follow the film's progress on their website.
"UNDERTOW"
Director: Javier Fuentes-León
Trevor's Rating: 4.5 / 5 Stars
Shot on the stunningly beautiful Cabo Blanco coast of Peru, Contracorriente ("Undertow") is a quirky and tumultuous love story between a stranger and a small town local who struggle to keep their relationship a secret. You think you've heard it all before, but there's a bit of a twist: The stranger dies while swimming along the coast and his ghost is now haunting his lover. The acting is solid, with wonderful performances by both male leads. But it is the steady direction by Fuentes-León that truly shines here, made all the more impressive by the fact that this is his feature directorial debut. We were lucky enough to have him at this screening, and he is incredibly charming
I really wanted to love this film, and I think it is pretty incredible. But it just never really hit me in the gut, where you would expect such an intense and dramatic love story to hit. I guess I should have identified with the stranger in town, who wants his married-with-child lover to run away with him. He is certainly the more readily identifiable as gay of the two. But I felt little interest in him nor his closeted lover. Perhaps it is the two men's masculinity that makes me feel distant. Their's is the kind of even-keeled, easy-going masculine way of being that has always intimidated me.
Nevertheless, I can certainly recognize the beauty of this film. It's definitely worth checking out.
"SEX IN AN EPIDEMIC"
Director: Jean Carlomusto
Trevor's Rating: 2.5 / 5 Stars
This documentary is a strange mix of things -- an attempt to throw everything about AIDS from the start to the present into one confused film. Archival footage is rarely identified, creating confusion over whether the interview you're watching was conducted by the filmmaker or was just rescued from the annals of history. It became clear watching interviews of people I knew were dead that the filmmaker had done little of her own work. In fact, she basically stole the entire concept of the film Sex Positive, chopped it down to 20 minutes, and inserted it into the film without credit -- the kind of thing that if done on a written work would be called plagiarism.
Indeed, this is one of those films that is well intentioned but poorly executed. There is plenty of interested archival footage, but it is sloppily stitched together without a strong narrative structure. Unlike We Were Here, this film lacks the kind of clear focus and narrow scope that made that film so powerful. It pretends to be telling a national HIV story, but it's really about New York City. What happened there did not happen in San Francisco, and those differences go unspoken in the film but were clear. ACT UP happened in New York for a reason, but we don't hear about that because the film has no concept of its geographic specificity.
This film will be a resource for those looking for archival footage, and a random array of interesting but vaguely related facts. Here's a trailer:
I'm left with more questions than answers after seeing Guez's stunning Off World, which is probably the director's goal. Lucky (played by the intense Marc Abaya) returns to the Philippines after being raised for the bulk of his life by a Canadian family. His mother gave him up for adoption when he was a toddler. He returns to Smokey Mountain, a slum outside of Manila that is depicted in all its horrifying decay. It is something of an enormous landfill, except that thousands of people happen to live there. The smoke in the air that gives it its name is the product of the decaying trash releasing methane gas and other toxic chemicals.
Lucky is of course trying to find himself, his identity, and he is aided in this quest by an NGO employee, Julia. She facilitates a reunion with his brother, who he initially rejects because of his genderqueer presentation. What follows is a strange and disturbing journey through life in the slum and the emotional confusion that comes with meeting a family you never knew. It is a story that is familiar, in a setting that is grotesquely strange.
What is unclear is the relation between director Mateo Guez and the main character. There is a strange moment at the end where the narrator (the main character) points out a child riding on the back of a garbage truck. He says that he paid for him to go to school next year, and he'll be coming back to make sure he went. This is a strange moment. Is this the director speaking? The actor? The character? It's unclear. It seems to be saying: "Don't worry. I didn't go here, make a film, and abandon it." But without a better understanding of who is speaking, it's impossible to interpret this sequence.
Adding confusion is that the film is not subtitled. Most of the dialogue is English, but there are extended sequences in Tagalog. We can generally intuit what people are saying, but nevertheless are made to feel as outsiders -- which is certainly the point. It is Lucky's perspective, who also does not speak the language. This is a very useful device in the film, and a decision worth applauding.
But this decision may have had too much of the effect it intended -- despite its stunning beauty and horror, I never really connected with the film. The poverty on display is indeed horrific and terrible depressing. But while the story is interesting and compelling at times -- notably in a drug-induced binge that takes Lucky through the slums -- it just seemed to fall flat. Perhaps it was never developed. Perhaps the acting wasn't compelling. Perhaps its because the primary love story is heterosexual. Or perhaps as a viewer the material is so unfamiliar that it cannot feel anything but alien. It's a beautiful film -- I cannot deny that. I just felt like there was something missing.
I've had extremely good luck with movies this year. Donato's Brotherhood was no exception. Rare is the film that takes on the subjectivity of the hated so intently, exploring what is taboo and almost entirely unspeakable without apology. More specifically, this is a love story between two neo-Nazi radicals.
If you had to flinch a bit when reading that, you're not out of the norm. Characters such as these -- along with racists, homophobes, etc -- rarely are allowed sympathetic airtime on film. We prefer to see them get their due or repent and become rehabilitated. And in some ways, this film does wind up rehabilitating its characters, but not in the typical sense.
The story is quite wonderfully set-up and executed. Lars (exquisitely played by Thure Lindhardt who you may remember as the self-flagellating cult member in Angels & Demons) is forced out of the Danish army because his subordinates suspect he is gay. He is angry, dejected, and desperately seeking some kind of sociality. He unexpectedly finds himself at a recruitment meeting for a local neo-Nazi group held informally at a friend's apartment. Their issue of the day is of course immigration, and in particular those from the Middle East. A local refugee center is their target.
Lars doesn't sign up enthusiastically, but is rather courted by the group's local leader who sees in him a bright young spirit who could bring a discipline and intelligence to the group. A violent initiation leads him ever more into the hands of his comrades as he runs away from home and moves in with a prominent member, Jimmy, who is suspicious of the new recruit and the attention the leader gives him.
What follows is something in a study of deeply repressed homosexual desire and the violence of masculinity. It is quite wonderfully depicted here. It is indeed the love that dare not speak its name. Many times in the movie, I would find audience members laughing at parts that I found utterly sad. Like the moment Lars wakes up to find himself in bed with Jimmy. There is a terror in his eyes -- and panic. The audience laughs, but this is not a funny moment. He is of course scared of himself and what he has done, but also of what Jimmy might do to him if he wakes up.
I would also applaud the way in which the idiosyncrasies of neo-Nazi culture are explored here. Jimmy drinks organic beer because we have to be good to the environment -- protecting that which is natural is one the their central tenets. Set alongside the group's binge drinking and destructive practices, the irony is indeed exposed. Violence against gays is important, but terrorizing immigrants is the top priority. All of these ways expose their worldview and its contradictions.
Some of my friends felt like the film was bordering on "Nazi porn." I disagree. I think that's the easy and obvious way to write this film off. But if we want to work to dismantle hate ideologies, we desperately need to understand that its practitioners are actually human and find the humanity in them. That is in many circumstances an absolutely terrifying project -- but I think it's critical.
"THE LAST SUMMER OF LA BOYITA"
Director: Julia Solomonoff
Trevor's Rating: 4 / 5 Stars
Something incredible is happening in Argentina. At the 2008 Frameline Festival, I saw for the first time what has become one my favorite movies of all time -- XXY -- which deals beautifully with the issue of intersexuality and the medicalization of sex and genitals. Now we have another incredible entry treading similar territory, The Last Summer of La Boyita. While there are some important differences, it's quite incredible that one country has made what are perhaps the two most compelling feature films on this topic.
The story is a classic summer tale: a doctor takes his daughter Jorgelina to the countryside where she forms a flirtatious friendship with a boy named Mario. They ride horses together. She swims in the pool while he whittles wood into rough sculptures. She protects him from the aggressive older boys who make fun of him. Mario is gearing up to race so that he "can prove he is a man," as Jorgelina's father says. Adolescence awkwardness and anxiety are wonderfully captured here.
Jorgelina becomes increasingly curious as to why Mario refuses to come swimming with her. She's pretty savvy, and after noticing blood on his pants she searches for answers about boys' menstruation. When she finds no answers, she turns to her father.
Unfortunately because of its subject matter and setting, the automatic comparison is XXY, which is a masterpiece of a film. The Last Summer doesn't quite measure up: The acting and casting isn't as incredible, the story is slightly less exciting, the presentation less provocative. But it is a wonderful film, despite its occasional shortcomings. The breathtaking country setting make for stunning cinematography. And there are some very funny and incredibly endearing moments. It's a real gem of a film.
Check out the trailer -- and keep an eye out for it!
"DZI CROQUETTES"
Director: Raphael Alvarez and Tatiana Issa
Trevor's Rating: 4.5 / 5 Stars
What a charming film! Many of you will be familiar with The Cockettes, San Francisco's infamous drag troupe that ruled in the 1960s and 70s. Less of you will be familiar with Brazil's amazing counterpart, "Dzi Croquettes" (a title they came up with while eating the French fried food). The director Tatiana Issa's father worked as part of the group's technical staff, and she grew up with the troupe around them. There is clearly a lot of love packed into this gem of a movie, with each of the 13 cast members getting due attention and care.
This is both a feature and a flaw of the film, and it's inherent in documentary making. So many stories to tell. So little time to tell it in. But I cannot fault the film for it, for the stories are so incredible that I cannot imagine having to cut any of them. The troupe had a long and fiery road to fame, with plenty of fights and trists and romances along the way. Their performance style is simply uncanny -- a kind of pastiche of numerous genres that come together to create something fabulously unfamiliar, exciting, and totally queer. It's not like the drag you see on Ru Paul's LOGO show. It's performance art.
What is particularly incredible is that they came into fruition at a tumultuous time for Brazil: an oppressive dictatorship whose grip on the nation was ever-tightening. The film specifically sites the impact of AI-5 (Ato Institucional Número Cinco), which shut down Congress and suspended many civil rights. The government had no way of understanding the Croquettes -- their performances were not explicitly against the regime, and thus they managed to slip under the radar and convince the government that they were harmless. Given the censorship that was going on at the time in Brazil, this is truly amazing.
Liza Minelli -- of all people! -- was instrumental in bring the group international acclaim. She helped them secure precious media coverage after she had seen them in Brazil. She's always a wonder to watch on screen, and it was really very generous of her to make time to be interviewed for this piece. Even Josephine Baker herself had a hand in bringing the Croquettes fame: Before she died, she told the theatre owner that they should take over her spot at the show. Just a few days later, she died on stage. The theatre owner kept her wish, and their run at Paris was hugely successful.
I'm dying to get my hands on a video of once of their performances. They're truly incredible. In this trailer below for the film, you'll get a taste. Get your hands on this wonderful film if you can! Enjoy!
If you haven't heard me blog about Juanita More's Pride Party, you clearly must be new to this blog. It's the best party in the world. And if you're in SF and looking for a good time, you gotta be there! See my coverage from 2008's party for a taste. Go to Juanita's website for more info.
"WE WERE HERE: VOICES FROM THE AIDS YEARS IN SAN FRANCSICO"
Director: David Weissman and Bill Weber
Trevor's Rating: 5 / 5 Stars
I can recall sobbing uncontrollably exactly three times in my adult life. Last night was one of those times. I ventured out to the Castro theatre for the "sneak peek" screening of "We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco." I knew I was in for a tear-fest, but I had no idea just how incredibly moving and utterly devastating the film would be. Before the screening, both the filmmakers admitted not wanting to make this film -- how can you possible represent the horror of those years without doing some injustice, without leaving some story untold? The idea is daunting.
No documentary to my knowledge exists that chronicles these years so intently, most likely because these stories are so incredible painful to tell -- and just as painful to listen to and absorb. I can only imagine that this film's road to the screen is paved in rivers of tears. As someone who did not experience those years, these representations are my only access to the memory of an era that shaped my gay world. It's why I have the kind of sex I do. It's why I have so few gay mentors from that generation. It's why bathhouses closed and disco died. And it's probably why gay marriage is the 21st century gay raison d'être.
As such, I listen to these stories intently whenever I can, mostly in the form of movies -- Longtime Companion, It's My Party, Angels in America, Sadness, and the like. With the exception of William Yang's incredible Sadness, these representations are rarely retrospective. They are told from the battleground itself rather than the hill overlooking the cemetery years later. This kind of war analogy is invoked several times in the film: as one interviewee explains, AIDS was what World War II was to many Americans. But of course as a comparison it is somewhat limited in its utility. War involves a coordinated opponent that you can see or at least pinpoint on a map. AIDS turned gay men's own bodies against them, crippling the young and muscular as quickly as it did the old and infirm. And during the first years of the epidemic, they had absolutely no idea how it was transmitted or who might already be infected.
Five individuals -- four gay men and one woman -- narrate the film, each with a unique experience that adds a new facet to the incredibly rich and devastatingly moving story. A flower vendor remembers giving away flowers to neighbors who wanted to bury their friends with dignity but had no money to give. An artist chokes back tears as he relives his lover dying as he frantically drove him to the hospital -- and in a heartbreaking turn, losing a second lover to the disease a few years later. A volunteer at the AIDS ward in San Francisco's General Hospital remembers finding a way to be a part of a gay community in comforting those who were dying. Their stories are heart wrenching.
The film was screened to a sold out crowd at the Castro Theater. Many in the room had lived through those awful years -- some in San Francisco, others elsewhere. Sitting in that room full of so many sobbing, hurt, and mournful gay men was one of the most challenging experiences of my life. At one point early in the film, a series of self-portraits by the photographer John Davis flashed across the screen. The series, titled "FIERCE," shows the artist emaciated, his body decimated by his illness. His naked, pale figure is contorted, stretched into alarming positions. An IV line is implanted in his chest. The crowd was silent except for the wailing howl of one man towards the back who could no longer hold back his tears. Even now as I write this, I cannot help but bury my face in my hands and cry. I will never forget the sound of that man's anguish. It will haunt me for the rest of my life. (And I'm not the only one to have this experience at the premier, it seems.)
Davis' self-portraits are both grotesque and stunningly beautiful at the same time. After the film, the director noted that these photos documented the duality of the epidemic so beautifully that they helped him to conceive of the film. On the one hand, you have thousands of men dying -- leaving behind friends, lovers, tricks, clients, parents, children, and admirers. On the other, you have an outpouring of support from both gay men and those outside the community, helping to take care of those who were dying and to fight for the support HIV-positive people needed to survive. AIDS could have destroyed gay community. But it didn't. Gay men's resilience in the face of death itself is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
The moment the film ended and the credits began to roll, the floodgate of my emotions let loose. I bent over in my chair, put my head in my hands, and gasped for air in between sobs. The crowd rose to its feet for a standing ovation, but I could not get out of my chair. I stayed in my seat, bawling. Crying for all those men I never knew, who I wish desperately were here today. For all their sass, for all their sex, and for all their creativity that was snuffed out far before it's time. But they're not here. And that is one of the hardest parts about being a post-AIDS gay man for me. Missing what I did not know. Longing for what I cannot have.
The film is, at times, rather painful to watch. Hubert is a real teenage brat, and Dolan plays him beautifully. A real son-of-a-bitch ingrate. But he's damn handsome and there's something incredibly charming about him -- petulant, but charming. I was worried the film was going to wind up a celebration of bratty teenagedom at the expense of his struggling mother, but to my delight the film successfully balances Hubert's rants with sympathetic (if at times unflinching) portrayals of his mother. Neither of them are really very likable at the end -- their flaws and failures are so savagely exposed to the viewer that you can't help but cringe. That is the beauty of this film -- it's monstrous realness.
I do have a few quibbles -- mostly with the fact that every man in this movie looks a Greek statue who was just recently awoken from a 2000 year slumber. It's not that their bodies are ripped -- on the contrary, cinema outside the states has not idolized muscular men in the same way that American films have. Rather, these men's bodies often resemble more the kind you might find in 1970s gay porn: Hairy but not bearish, thin but not emaciated, toned but not muscular. But their faces are so beautiful that you can imagine feeling uncomfortable in their presence -- it's the kind of beauty that would never be caught dead associating with us peons. Hubert and the other young men who appear are not just physically stunning, but have simultaneously managed to put together an effortless fashion that is meant to look easy but is upon closer inspection incredibly meticulously sculpted. Dolan's curly locks fall over his face just so, suggesting both control and chaos.
This is the one point that makes me feel an outsider to Hubert's experiences. The life of the beautiful. I'm reminded of my very handsome best gay friend telling me when we were 19 that there was a secret look that very sexy guys would give each other to signal their interest in each-other -- and that I would never know that look. A secret society of sorts, replete with their own customs and predilections. Somehow I feel that Hubert's experiences are like that secretive look that I will never know. The problems of the beautiful.
But really this is the only bad thing I can say about this film. It's wonderful -- if at times grotesquely brutal. I hope Dolan continues to make films, although I'm told he has a fear of flying that kept him from attending Frameline. Get over it Dolan -- you need to make more movies, and this is a business that requires traveling.
Rare is the occasion for a transwoman character and a lesbian character to be seen romantically involved on screen. And for that, this movie brings us a new kind of story that is exciting and refreshing. The actor playing Madona is sadly not a transsexual -- as director Marcelo Laffitte reveals in an interview about the film's premier at Tribeca. But Cotrim does a great job bringing the quirky, eccentric Madona to life -- and does an especially good job when Madona goes in drag as a man to meet Elvis' parents. A male actor playing a transwoman playing a straight man. Incredible.
This film is something like a romantic comedy with a dash of drama thrown in, and should be regarded as such. It doesn't take itself too seriously, which is the film's best asset. The characters don't ponderously struggle with identity politics or over how they're going to have sex -- they just do it. This is what a lot of people -- trans, queer, and gay alike -- want out of LGBT cinema. Sure, we want to think critically about our lives and our politics, but sometimes we just want to munch on popcorn and see films that relate to our lives but that don't require too much thinking.
As I said, very charming. If the film makes a stop in your city, be sure to see it. No news on distribution yet, I think. Let's keep our fingers crossed!
So first the French gay rags TETU and PREF, and now the very respectable The Times! My mission to take over Europe is in full swing! I was of course honored to be interviewed for this piece on HIV across the pond. The author is interested in the idea of gay generational gaps in approaching / experiencing HIV, and I tried to add a bit of complexity to the standard-issue story. Indeed, rather than make young gay men the target of our ire, I try to turn it around to say that fear-based HIV prevention and abstinence-only education are part of the story here. Check it out!
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Pam's House Blend
She's a fabulous North Carolinian blogging about politics, LGBT and women's rights, the influence of the far Right, and race relations. What more can I say?
There are scant few thinkers out there publishing critically productive work in the field of HIV prevention and public health more broadly. I have long been a fan and avid consumer of Australian Kane Race's scholarship. His analyses of HIV prevention, drug policies, and public health more broadly are beautifully incisive and incredibly helpful for anyone invested in thinking critically about these complicated issues. He is a master of explicating the taken-for-granted, and making you see what before was obscured. In his latest book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he continues to advance his concept of "counterpublic health" -- a concept built on the work of feminist and queer scholars invested in understanding oppositional public spheres. I had the pleasure of interviewing Kane recently for this blog, and I'm thrilled to share his thoughts here. We talk about public health, HIV prevention, and his challenging concept that aims to shake up our conventional understandings of these complex phenomenon.
