I met the mayor of Shreveport, La. recently. He weighs 400 pounds, is about as black as it gets, and is straight. His name is Cedric. I met him at the Lesbigay Film Festival. That's not its real name, of course, although his real name is Cedric. Its real name is something far more exotic and abbreviation-able (SLBGTFF, or letters along those lines), but it's a lesbigay film festival, all right, and I was one of its opening-night attractions. In Shreveport. Louisiana. Where people once wore hoods and strung 400-pound black men up, and probably just left the bodies of other undesirables to be be disposed of by crocs in any of the many neighboring lakes.
Times have changed. There's a big casino, where my pal Whoopi Goldberg headlined the week before the lesbigay festival. And an industrial-strength queen like me was on the front page of the local newspaper promoting the lesbigay festival, the town's third annual. (The way had been paved for me by Leslie Jordan, that one-man song of the South, and John Waters, venturing below Baltimore.)
Shreveport is not what we -- the imperial we who live on one of the coasts -- think it is, and it took a gay and lesbian film festival for me to realize this. Why else would someone like me be in Shreveport, or its sister metropolis, Bossier City, directly across the Red River?
Well, we might be there to make a movie. After Katrina closed New Orleans as a production site, the industry moved north to that corner of Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana, known as ArkLaTex. There are two state-of-the-art studios in Shreveport, and they are never fallow. A ton of movies have been made there. (My personal favorite is Shark Night 3D, in which giant, mutant sharks jump the freeway and infest the lakes. You've heard of jumping the shark, but this is a whole new deal.) So we might be there to make a living and enjoy the tax breaks.
But most of those movies are mainstream, or Lifetime, and rarely do they have a gay agenda. The movies at the festival are all gay, all the time. They are screened at the newly restored, 200-seat art house smack downtown, and the festival lasts a week. The mayor, who is one of those all-embracing personalities who has forged a coalition across every conceivable line of division, has never missed an opening night.
The festival is sort of a big deal. It is heavily underwritten by local businesses, many of which sport gay owners or executives in key positions. It is well-attended, by a cross-section of the population that would astound studio marketers, who believe only the biggest tentpole franchises -- think transformers, pirates and hobbits -- draw outside a single niche. And it is not alone. There are festivals just like it all across the country, and I have shown up at dozens of them.
I've learned a lot at these clambakes (one of them actually had a clambake, which would have alarmed any Orthodox Jews who don't eat shellfish, but fundamentalists don't tend to hit film festivals). I've learned that most of gay America is coupled up, or looking to be. No wonder gay marriage has such traction. So many of us are already in it, so of course we want the legal benefits.
I've learned that there is a tremendous amount of gay allies out there. They just have to be shown where their good sentiments can be directed. A film festival is a perfect venue. It's about art and expression as well as visibility and identity. It achieves political ends without being political in itself. And, unlike most political events, it's a good night out -- especially if the programmers have some guts.
Most gay cinema is horrific. Anybody with a cellphone can make a movie nowadays. And they tend to be treacly, amateur, coming-of-age stories that may be true but don't really grab you by the shorthairs, if you have any left after that manscaping you did on a drunken dare. So careful culling is in order when putting one of these shindigs together.
I've also learned that the gay business community in most cities is eager to find something to support that isn't overtly political or connected to a disease or a social condition. A festival can bring together a community that didn't know it was a community. And that community can be directed, as a bloc, to other causes within the community.
And I've learned that the It Gets Better campaign means something after all. As much as I love Dan Savage's columns and books and TV appearances in which he slices and dices the opposition with aplomb, I have never been a fan of It Gets Better. It seemed to be telling kids not to worry, that the bullying they're getting now is tolerable because things will get better once they're out of the system and into the real world. I couldn't imagine any other minority that would give its kids such a message. Perhaps I was misreading, but after the 400th celebrity video telling kids to just hold on, I began to wonder. I expressed this to someone at the lesbigay festival in Fort Worth, a political operative who does a lot of work with local government, as well as with the boys in Austin. He said that he found It Gets Better invaluable because it has reached straight people who had no idea taht there was a problem. Seriously. This campaign was their first clue. And their reaction was immediate and deep. They began getting involved in anti-bullying programs in their local schools. They didn't want to see children victimized. Like many unenlightened straight people, it didn't occur to them that there are gay kids. As bizarre as this may sound to any of us who struggled through a homosexual or questioning childhood, it never crossed their field of vision. They assumed it all happened later, that we were all going through a phase. The idea that so many gay adults are coming forward to mentor the next generation stunned them into recognition. And for that, we should all be profoundly grateful to Dan Savage.
See what you can learn just by attending a lesbigay film festival? Not to mention that there is Grindr in so many towns where you didn't think there could possibly be. And that there is no vampire bar in Shreveport.
North Louisiana Gay & Lesbian Film Festival presented by P.A.C.E. ...
PACE 2011 North Louisiana Gay & Lesbian Film
North LA Gay and Lesbian Film Festival opens this weekend ...
And to the NOLA poster, he said 'when' Katrina hit, it closed you down, not that you still were. Y'all are back, we're happy about it, so don't get your Mardi Gras beads in a knot.
Unlike Lifetime movies. They usually just make me laugh.
Way to go Shreveport!
One of the biggest beefs we in the gay community have --- our straight counterparts, even the supportive ones, often don't include us in their conversations and thoughts.
You have no reason to remember this, but back in 1960-never-you-mind, you and I both appeared in Ohio State University's Stadium Theater's production of the musical "Carnival!" You were one of the bigshot leads, playing the grand emcee of the traveling carnival and I was a lowly 16-year-old chorus boy who doubled as a clown and roustabout. You, of course, went on to have your fabulous and well-earned career, while I grew up into a closeted husband and eventual father of seven kids.
Back then, I was taught my attraction to other boys was some kind of deviation; that was the message you got growing up in Columbus. It took me till age 40 to come out. Fortunately, a couple of my sons did not have to wait so long, thanks to evolving public awareness that gay people exist.