Gay film festival to play at Teater Utan Kayu

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): We all know Hugh Grant as the charming lady- killer who Andie MacDowell falls for in Four Weddings and a Funeral and who Julia Roberts is enchanted by in the upcoming Notting Hill. We also know Kate Winslet as the sexpot who makes men around the world wish they were Leonardo DiCaprio tied next to her on the hull of the Titanic.

Now picture them as gays.

At one time in their careers they were. They played gay characters, that is. Grant a university student who is head-over- heels for another male student in the 1987 film Maurice. Winslet a schoolgirl infatuated with one of her schoolmates in the 1994 movie Heavenly Creatures. And guess what, they are as charming and sexy as when playing straight roles.

Maurice and Heavenly Creatures are two of the nine feature films about gays which will be shown at Teater Utan Kayu (TUK) in East Jakarta from July 21 to July 25. An American documentary about gays in the cinema called The Celluloid Closet will close the festival. The movie will followed by a discussion.

None of these movies have shown in commercial theaters in Indonesia. Nor has there ever been a gay film festival here. The Studio 21 system has showed a number of gay-themed movies here, including Philadelphia, The Wedding Banquet, The Birdcage and most recently The Object of My Affection. But these are few and far between and do not make an impression about gay culture.

"Gay films seldom come to our cinemas," Al, a gay university student from Jakarta who did not want his real name to be used, said. "And most moviegoers rely on the theaters. It's just real movie buffs with access to laser discs and VCDs who can get a variety of gay movies."

Indonesia may not be the only country with this problem. Even in the United States, the issue of the availability of gay films still exists, although to a lesser extent.

"Hollywood still runs scared from people who feel that the very mention of homosexuality, the very display of it in some form on the screen, legitimizes the subject," said Armistead Maupin, the author of the gay-themed novel Tales From The City, in an interview included in The Celluloid Closet. "Well, of course, it does. It shows that homosexuals are human beings."

Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss wrote in a 1994 article about gay movies: "Many people in the U.S. don't fear the gay culture, they simply and unapologetically hate it. The idea of same-sex gives them the creeps. They want homosexuals ... out of American life."

This, in a way, has resulted in a limited number of movies which feature gays. And the gays in many of these movies are not exactly role models. Both Corliss' article and The Celluloid Closet mention Cruising, a movie starring Al Pacino, and Sharon Stone's vehicle to stardom Basic Instinct as very bad examples of gay cinema. Both movies depict homosexuals as psychotic and murderous.

"I would define a gay film as a film with a gay sensibility," said Jakarta-based book publisher John McGlynn. "Not necessarily in the sense that gays have to be portrayed in a positive light, but that it is true to life and they're not used as a ploy for laughs like that stupid film As Good As It Gets, in which the portrayal of gays goes backward by 20 years."

"There would be movies that would make us laugh a lot more and cry a lot more if they would actually acknowledge the true diversity of humanity," said Maupin.

The eclectic selection of TUK's gay film program seems to be moving in that direction. It presents films from France, Canada, Cuba, Hong Kong, the U.S. and the United Kingdom, as well as offering a variety of genres -- drama, comedy and thriller. Most importantly, the gay characters in these movies appear as human beings in important roles instead of ridiculous freaks playing secondary-parts.

In Maurice, Grant and James Wilby play young, sympathetic gays who buck the odds to proclaim their love for each other. In The Incredibly True Adventure of 2 Girls in Love, two female adolescents -- one black, one white -- brave both the sexual and racial boundaries of prejudice. And Heavenly Creatures, a true account of a notorious 1954 New Zealand murder, depicts two schoolgirls so crazy about one another, they would cross the edge rather than be separated.

In these movies, gay people triumph and the ignorant straight community, for once, becomes an object of ridicule.

In the Oscar-nominated film Strawberry and Chocolate from Cuba, gay writer Diego laughs when his innocent, straight friend David mentions his theory of how Diego could have been "helped" when he was a child: "Your parents should have brought you to a doctor or something, and had you cured."

In the landmark 1970 film The Boys in the Band, a straight man named Alan stumbles upon a group of seven partying gay men, and says to an ostensibly "normal" guy: "You're gay? But you said you were married."

"My only hope for this film program," McGlynn said, "is that it will present alternative films for the larger film community, especially films about gays."

"Now is the right moment to have it, not too long after the Gay Pride parade in Surabaya on June 25," said the similarly enthusiastic Al.

"I hope with these films, the people from our gay and lesbian community will grow in self-confidence and that they can see that there are lots of people like them throughout the world. And they can see films in which gays do not get condemned or mocked, but play lead roles with acknowledged places in the community. They're just regular people who happen to have a different (sexual) orientation."