FILMxFIVE: 5 Films for Pride History
by Aster Gilbert, GenreQueer Programmer
In recent years Pride has become known as a celebration of queer visibility. But its history is one of revolution and riot. As massive social unrest erupts across the country to resist racist oppression, it is more important than ever to remember the political roots of Pride and the rebellions that secured our rights today. The rich and vibrant history of queer cinema is a testament to this. Both somber and celebratory, queer cinema is often our most accessible entry point into the complex—and often erased—history of queer people.
While not always reflected in queer films, the Pride movement was born out of queer resistance to police harassment. Lead by Black and Latinx trans sex workers like Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) and Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002), present-day LGBT rights owes its existence to the work of these women. Johnson and Rivera understood that queer liberation was enmeshed with racial and economic justice.
In the last week of May, 2020, we lost a towering figure of gay activism: Larry Kramer (1935-2020). Kramer was a celebrated playwright, author of The Normal Heart (1981), and a leading voice in AIDS activism. Back in January, Kramer gave an interview where he was asked, “Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?” he responded:
“Gay history. Most historians taken seriously are always straight. They wouldn’t know a gay person if they took him to lunch. A good example is Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton, which doesn’t include the fact that he was both gay and in love with George Washington.”
With Kramer’s words as my guide, I’ve gathered 5 incredible queer films that represent and investigate our history. Pride is a celebration of where we’ve been and a reminder of the work left to do.
The Watermelon Woman
(dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1996)
AVAILABLE STARTING FRIDAY, 6/12 VIA SOFA CINEMA!
Cheryl Dunye’s feature debut was a watershed moment in Black lesbian cinema. Endlessly inventive, Dunye plays a semi-fictitious version of herself named Cheryl, an aspiring documentary filmmaker working at a video store. Cheryl finds inspiration for her film project in the subject of “the Watermelon Woman”: the sole credit of a Black actress in a 1940s Hollywood melodrama titled Plantation Memories. By begging for and borrowing equipment when she can, Cheryl tracks down the surviving colleagues and lovers of the mysterious Watermelon Woman and her string of Black and white lesbian lovers. A hybrid of fiction and documentary anchored in Dunye’s signature sense of humor, The Watermelon Woman frequently plays like a mocumentary. The film is self-reflective of its fictitious elements, with Dunye stating that because she couldn’t find her history as a Black lesbian, she decided to make it up. Much of the film’s historical subjects are products of Dunye’s creative imagination. But what makes the film so incredible is how it uses fiction to explore the realities of excavating Black and gay histories within institutions that don’t value them. The white lesbian archives sequence is a hilarious yet tragically real staging of these obstacles to uncovering history. The Watermelon Woman will be available to rent through Sofa Cinema at The Oriental Theatre website as part of our Pride Month selections starting June 12, with 50% of the proceeds going to support Milwaukee Film.
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria
(dir. Susan Stryker, Victor Silverman, 2005)
Available to stream via Kanopy and other streaming services
Three years before the Stonewall Riots was a nearly forgotten rebellion at Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco in 1966. Compton’s was an all-night cafeteria where trans women sex workers would congregate after long nights of working, but the owners began calling the police, as “female impersonation” was a law used to discriminate against cross-dressers and trans people. After repeated incidents, the trans women, mostly Black, Latinx, and Asian, had had enough and fought back against police discrimination. Screaming Queens is a documentary about recovering this history and finding the participants to write this crucial political moment back into mainstream consciousness. Directed by and featuring a pioneer of Transgender Studies, historian Susan Stryker kicks off the story by finding a small blurb in a Vanguard newsletter from the 1960s, tucked away in an archive. By centering the voices of those who participated, Screaming Queens is an essential work of queer history. Stryker reminds us through both the Riots at Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall that modern queer rights were fought for by poor transwomen of color, many of them sex workers forced to live on the margins of society. Too often, this history is sanitized or rewritten to appear respectable to the very authorities that oppress queer folks. Screaming Queens makes a great double feature with The Watermelon Woman, as both films interrogate the obstacles of recovering the histories of minoritized communities through archives and living memory. And if you want more of the story, Stryker’s book, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (2017) is essential reading! Screaming Queens is available to stream on Kanopy and to rent through other streaming services.
Shakedown
(dir. Leilah Weinraub, 2018)
Available to stream via The Criterion Channel
Like the Vanguard newsletters of Screaming Queens, Shakedown begins its historical recovery through exploring flyer advertisements for underground Black lesbian strip clubs in Los Angeles. Structured like a mixtape, complete with an opening tracklist, director and cinematographer Leilah Weinraub’s film is a document of a queer time and place, cut together a decade after it was long gone. Shakedown is a documentary about the labor of creating space by and for Black lesbians in Los Angeles in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following the events of Shakedown Entertainment, Weinraub captures the people and atmosphere of Black lesbian nightlife with the intimacy of a home movie. Featuring candid interviews with event organizers, MC’s, strippers and their girlfriends, Shakedown is an essential history of the recent past. As a critical historical document, the film also illustrates the continued exclusivity of the queer bar scene. Just as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots were fueled by the banning of trans women from gay bars because they attracted police harassment, Shakedown documents the continued invasion of non-white queer spaces by police. Weinraub balances the realities of these oppressions with a celebration of the vibrant subculture that took shape in these underground events. The film is both an erotic spectacle and a groundbreaking stylistic achievement. Its uncategorizability is evident in its recent official premier on Pornhub before moving to The Criterion Channel, where it’s currently available to stream.
Viktor and Viktoria
(dir. Reinhold Schünzel, 1933)
Available for purchase via Kino Lorber
Weimar Germany (1918-1933) was a global epicenter for queerness. Berlin was not only the home base of the world-renown UFA film studios, but also played home to a flourishing culture of drag kings and queens, transsexuals, and out gays and lesbians. The films of the time reflected this, and Viktor and Viktoria remains a crowning achievement of queer German cinema. A raucous slapstick musical of gender confusion, this classic from 1933 is the basis for the 1982 hit remake Victor/Victoria starring Julie Andrews. Viktor and Viktoria follows a down-on-his-luck actor who moonlights as a female impersonator in seedy nightclubs. When he falls ill and loses his voice, he convinces his new friend, a down-on-her-luck actress, to fill in for him. Her performance is a runaway success, attracting a big shot agent who takes her show on the road to London. Everyone thinks she’s actually a man in drag, forcing her to maintain the ruse to keep the money flowing. This multi-layered performance of a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman results in a hysterical comedy of errors. It features a rambunctious gender play of drag king iconography, lesbian desire, and homoerotic encounters. Along with Leontine Sagan’s famous lesbian drama Mädchen in Uniform (1931), Viktor and Viktoria stands as a monument to the popular queer cultures of Weimar Germany that were swept away by the Nazi’s in the very same year that Viktor and Viktoria released to theaters. These films were immediately banned and queer and trans people were among the first victims of the fascist state. While everybody knows the famous photographs of Nazi’s burning books, too few are taught that those were books about trans people and queer sexuality, taken from Magnus Hirschfeld’s library, one of the first institutes dedicated to the study and activism of queer people. Hirschfeld founded the World League for Sexual Reform and advocated for the equal rights and acceptance of queer and gender non-conforming people. Apart from being one of the finest comedies of the 1930s, Viktor and Viktoria reminds us of our pioneering queer ancestors and the dangerous intolerance that Pride continues to resist. Viktor and Viktoria was just released in a new remastered home video edition from Kino Classics.
Take One
(Wakefield Poole, 1977)
Available for purchase on DVD
Wakefield Poole’s Take One is one of the wildest gay films ever made. An experimental documentary about gay men’s sexual fantasies that crosses over into adult film territory, it’s both a sizzling masterpiece and an artifact from that brief period of time when adult films played in theaters and were outselling Hollywood blockbusters. The history of gay male images has always straddled the line between avant-garde experimentation and sexually explicit material. The work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the films of Kenneth Anger both attest to this. But perhaps the greatest cinematic embodiment of this duality is the work of Wakefield Poole. A Broadway director turned 16mm experimental filmmaker, Poole’s work transformed gay cinema in the 1970s with a series of films that defy categorization. An interesting bit of trivia is that his 1971 film Boys in the Sand was the first gay adult film advertised in the mainstream newspaper, next to a James Bond film! Take One is a fascinating glimpse into the everyday life of San Francisco’s storied gay communities in the 1970s. Featuring a meta-narrative about its own production, Take One is one of the most unique American films of the 1970s. It’s also a fascinating reminder that queer sexuality is as much a part of Pride’s history as political rebellion. By making queer sex, in all of its diversity, visible, Pride has worked to de-stigmatize queer people from the deadly beliefs that they are mentally ill or degenerates. The place of open sexuality in Pride celebrations has become a topic of fierce debate in recent years, as some queers believe the visibility of kinks at Pride is inappropriate. For that I recommend this essential piece on the sexual histories of Pride by Chingy Nea. The films of Wakefield Poole are currently unavailable to stream, but have been recently released in excellent remastered DVDs from Vinegar Syndrome.
Aster Gilbert is Milwaukee Film's GenreQueer programmer.
Posted by: Tom Fuchs