Film festivals often rely on “precarious cultural work”.[1] Increasingly adopting the neoliberal logic of the creative economy, they entail particular forms of affective labour, combining “the pleasure and excitement experienced during the festival – alongside the lesser-known affective states of despair, disappointment, and anger that need to be managed as a consequence of films being rejected from the festival”. [2] Although recent scholarship has emphasised the precarious material reality of cultural workers, festival organisers often describe their activity as a “labour of love”. “Labour of love” – a somewhat naïve and romanticised shorthand for the less glamourous and resolutely not sponsorship friendly term “precarious” – insists on cultural work as producing not value or economic stability but intangible affects and relationships – friendships.

While the expression “labour of love” certainly participates in rebranding festival organisers’ precarious, unpaid or underpaid, cultural work as engendering positive affects, it also points to the central role played by collaborations and friendships in artistic endeavours. As I argue elsewhere, this emphasis on affects and friendship provides a productive framework for understanding festival studies itself: academic discourses on festivals often refract our own circuits and networks. [3] In the context of this article, however, I am interested in how friendships sustained at and through festivals participate in shaping cinematic cultures.[4] Reflecting upon her contributions to both film studies and the festival phenomenon, B. Ruby Rich resituates the role played by chosen networks of friends in establishing Women’s cinema:

Knowledge can be acquired and exhibited in a variety of ways. To read and then to write: that’s the standard intellectual route. In the years of my own formation, though, there were many other options. Journals and journeys, conferences and conversations, partying and politicking, going to movies and going to bed.[5]

Scholars traditionally describe festival circuits and networks in terms of their “relation to living and non-living actors”.[6] Emblematically, Dina Iordanova describes festival circuits as a “treadmill in motion only for as long as there is the living person to service it, only as long as there is someone to keep it in motion”.[7] In this framework, participants are first and foremost defined by their professional occupation: they are understood as “stakeholders” or “cultural intermediaries” whose competing performances regulate the event and who have “particular interests in seeing the network proliferate”.[8] While this framework posits that collaboration between stakeholders is crucial in organising festivals, it does not fully account for friendships sustained beyond the duration of the event.

In contrast, Rich’s autoethnographic history of Women’s cinema starts not from the festivals she successively curated, organised, or simply attended, but rather from her own encounters with festival-goers turned friends and collaborators. In so doing, Rich echoes Michel Foucault’s definition of friendship as a productive, radical, and “slantwise” network of relationality, one born out of her participation in various festivals and conferences but that exceeds traditional definitions of the circuit. As a network of relationality, friendships “short-circuit [institutions] and introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit”. It produces a potential for collaborations beyond one’s participation in an event, “[tracing] diagonal lines (…) [that] allow [relational] virtualities to come to light”.[9]

In this paper, I hope to illustrate what could be gained in taking seriously friendship as a network of relationality. Shifting the emphasis from traditional definitions of festival circuits to the interpersonal networks created and sustained at festivals, I analyse the role played by friendships in fostering artistic collaborations in 1980s-1990s Toronto as expressed through Canadian director John Greyson’s oeuvre. Indeed, Greyson’s work as a film and videomaker, political activist, curator, and festival board member generously refers back to friendships born out of his involvement on the festival/academic circuit.[10] As Susan Lord argues,

While Greyson never divests authorship and its social responsibilities, “John Greyson” is also central to the formation of collectivism since the 1980s. Much of the work is [sic] produced with his name is done within collective processes wherein filiations, collaborations between friends, and artist communities develop a praxis and an imaginary.[11]

In tracing Greyson’s collaborations through (and involvement in) various North American festivals and cinematic organisations, this paper argues that theorising friendships as radical networks of relationality enables us to advance festival studies on two fronts: (1) a reconceptualisation of the relationship between festival stakeholders through their artistic and institutional collaborations and (2) an analysis of interpersonal relationships as “crossing over” festival circuits and producing cinematic cultures.

Greyson’s “gay squib”: Friendships, collaborations, and the emergence of a gay and lesbian film culture

Greyson’s first tapes coincide with the emergence of a gay and lesbian cinematic culture marked by both video activism and an ethos of collaboration between artists, activists, and scholars. As Larry Horne and John Ramirez’s review of an academic conference held within the 1983 UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival makes clear, Greyson’s politics and aesthetics cannot be separated from

the specificities of the video apparatus  – [he] attempted to situate the emergence and input of gay and lesbian artists in video where the codes of production are not yet rigidly conventionalized. Promoting the undertaking of a history of alternative practices, Greyson’s history of video attempted a clarification of the social and cultural contexts for the medium’s development, its relation and intersection with other artistic forms, and its possible place in the social struggle for increased sexual liberation.[12]

In the early 1970s, a few critics and scholars organised gay and lesbian film festivals, largely dedicated to unearthing the gay subtext of European and Hollywood films and influenced by traditional modes of cinephilia.[13] The situation changed rapidly in the early 1980s: the Alternative Cinema conference held at Bard College and the protests against the films Cruising and Windows served as catalysts for the development of a community-based gay and lesbian cinematic culture, highly influenced by the politics and aesthetics of the video format.

In June 1979, “[f]our hundred film and video activists [as well as critics and scholars] met at Bard College in New York State (…), the most important national gathering of progressive media workers since the 1930s.” The conference, organised with the support of Jump Cut, aimed at bridging the gap between film scholars, artists, and activists. It featured workshops as well as an extensive screening programme, akin to a festival. While the conference emphasised the role played by video as a minority-led praxis of resistance, participants soon “recognized that their needs were not being adequately addressed by the structure and organization of the Conference, whose Organizing Committee was dominated by white, male straights from New York.” [14]

In order to defuse the controversy, the organisers included special sessions dedicated to minorities, albeit relegating some gay and lesbian programming to late night sessions.[15] In that context, the Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus (which included film and videomakers, critics, and scholars, among whom Thomas Waugh, Jan Oxenberg, and B. Ruby Rich) established a list of demands directed at the organising committee. The group called for an exchange of information between gay and lesbian media workers and scholars, as well as for the creation of “[a]lternative distribution centers which must seek out, distribute, and encourage the production of media made by lesbians and gay men.”[16]

A month later, a coalition of gay filmmakers, critics, scholars, and activists crystallised around two films distributed by United Artists: William Friedkin’s Cruising and Gordon Willis’s Windows. Importantly, United Artists’s parent company Transamerica had, through two of its subsidiaries, financed the campaign of homophobic politician John Briggs.[17] Furthermore, Friedkin had already been criticised by the gay liberation movement for his film The Boys in the Band.[18] In the spring of 1979, a script of Cruising was leaked to Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell, who urged readers to actively protest the film. In New York alone, more than 8,000 people marched against the film.

Taken together, the Alternative Cinema Conference and the protests against Cruising are emblematic of a new political movement symbolised by an alliance between critics, scholars, festival organisers, and film and videomakers. Gay and lesbian artists and activists were increasingly interested in the video format, which was understood as a community-based political medium enabling new modes of self-representation. Unsurprisingly, video festivals, defined in opposition to the elitism of the celluloid, emerged in the decade.[19] These debates are refracted in Greyson’s first tapes, which articulate a discourse on video as a collaborative critique of traditional modes of representation.[20]

A few months later, Greyson joined two organisations that were particularly active in mobilising against Cruising: both the Association for Independent Video and Film [AIVF] and the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers [NALGF] sought to enact the recommendations made by the Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus and to create alternative circuits of distribution for video. The NALGF, headed by Richard Schmiechen, Oxenberg, and Greyson, “include[d] producers, directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, video artists, film exhibitors, film organization administrators, critics, and film and video students.”[21] Its mandate revolved around two axes: to lobby against homophobic media and the erasure of LGBT people from Hollywood productions, and to develop independent circuits of distribution for gay and lesbian films and videos.[22]

Members were quite divided on how to achieve these goals. In several meetings, they discussed whether the NALGF should act as a “service organization with a distribution base [akin to Women Make Movies], [a] professional lobbying association for lesbian and gays working both as independents and in the industry, [a] trade association representing and supporting independent gay and lesbian media [modelled after the AIVF]”, or a loose informal network dedicated to connecting filmmakers with emerging LGBT festivals.[23] The NALGF often positioned itself as an interface between filmmakers and festivals. In the early 1980s, the organisation operated as a relay between Peter Lowy’s and Michael Lumpkin’s gay film festivals (in New York and San Francisco, respectively). It not only curated programmes for both events, but also organised a cross-pollination of sorts. These programmes were usually followed by a panel with filmmakers, festival organisers, and critics. [24] The NALGF also provided assistance in organising several ephemeral LGBT festivals, such as Southampton College’s Eggo or New York University’s Abuse, and relayed calls for submission, notably for Waugh’s 1982 Montreal-based festival Sans Popcorn.[25]

The NALGF further benefited from its connections with the AIVF. Capitalising on his role as a coordinator for both the NALGF and the AIVF, Greyson organised in March 1982 the festival/roundtable “Independent Closets: Gay & Lesbian Filmmakers Open Doors,” which featured both film/videomakers and scholars-critics (among which Mark Berger, Oxenberg, Vito Russo, and Waugh).[26] Greyson’s involvement in the NALGF led him to participate in other foundational conferences/festivals. In particular, Greyson presented his videos and gave a talk at the 1983 UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival. This event juxtaposed screenings with panels intermixing scholars (Dennis Altman, Richard Dyer, Martha Fleming, Bill Nichols, Ramirez, Waugh and Andrea Weiss), critics (Russo and Robin Wood), filmmakers (Barbara Hammer, Paul Leaf and Oxenberg), and activists – many of whom Greyson later collaborated with.[27]

The most important conference / festival happened a few years later, in reaction to the sex wars and the AIDS crisis. In 1986, a group of film and videomakers, students, and scholars at Boston’s Collective for Living Cinema decided to constitute a queer reading / screening group. In an effort to further intertwine self-representation and theory, the group tasked Bill Horrigan and Martha Gever with organising a series of screenings, which evolved into the 1989 conference and festival “How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video”, held by the Bad Object-Choices collective at the Anthology Film Archives and sponsored by the journal October. The event featured an eclectic mix of artists/activists (Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Richard Fung, Isaac Julien, Tom Kalin, Stuart Marshall, and Ray Navarro) and scholars/critics (Altman, José Arroyo, Douglas Crimp, Theresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, Gever, Cora Kaplan, Kobena Mercer, Judith Mayne, Rich, and Waugh). [28]

In the aftermath of the How Do I Look? conference/festival, Greyson started working with Pratibha Parmar and Gever on the field-defining anthology Queer Looks, published four years later (1993). It features many of the same filmmakers (Bordowitz, Carlomusto, Crimp, Nick Deocampo, John DiStefano, Fung, Hammer, Navarro, Parmar, Catherine Saalfield, and Jerry Tartaglia), and scholars/critics (Alison Butler, Chin, Gever, Mercer, Rich, Waugh and Patricia White).[29] The book’s introduction simultaneously recalls Greyson’s earlier attempts to foster a gay and lesbian distribution circuit and summarises the importance of collaboration and friendship in establishing a gay and lesbian cinematic culture:

We wanted to make public some of the exchanges occurring between an ever-shifting network of artists, organizers, and activists that spanned several continents. We wanted to witness some of the coalitions and collaborations, efforts at a new type of politic, a new sort of image. We wanted to put down on paper some of the ideas being debated by this larger “we”, this ever-expanding “we”, this collective, communal “we” of lesbian and gay critics, artists and audiences. (…) We were bored dissatisfied with queer critics who endlessly analyzed Hollywood but ignored the independent sector. (…) Distribution for independent queer features is both red-hot at the box office and nonexistent.  Distribution for queer video art has both mushroomed and ceased to exist.[30]

As these examples make clear, festivals and activist groups constituted spaces where scholars, critics, filmmakers, and festival organisers could meet and collaborate, thereby defining an emerging gay and lesbian cinematic culture. Friendships created through the festival/academic circuit were instrumental in establishing both gay and lesbian cinema and Greyson’s career as an activist, videomaker, and book author. Many of the people involved in the NALGF, the UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival, or the How do I Look conference/festival became collaborators, featured in both the Queer Look anthology and Greyson’s videos. From Waugh’s contribution as a “full frontal nudity expert”[31] to Fleming’s double role as actor and scholar, Greyson’s collaborators often occupied several institutional positions at once.

The “Toronto scene”: friendships and video/film circuits in Canada.

Video, a format far less elitist than celluloid films, played a key role in the development of this ethos of collaboration. In this historical context, videos were often marked by the idea of community. In this section, I shift my emphasis from Greyson’s collaborative efforts to define a gay and lesbian cinematic culture to friendships sustained through Toronto’s video collectives, positioned at the intersection of various festival circuits. Through the development of cooperatives, artist-run centres and festivals, videomakers in Toronto were constantly screening or curating each other’s work.[32] Video can be productively thought of as a cultural scene, defined by William Straw as:

designat[ing] particular clusters of social and cultural activity without specifying the nature of the boundaries which circumscribe them. Scenes may be distinguished according to their location (as in Montreal’s St. Laurent scene), the genre of cultural production which gives them coherence (a musical style, for example, as in references to the electroclash scene) or the loosely defined social activity around which they take shape (…) Scene invites us to map the territory of the city in new ways while, at the same time, designating certain kinds of activity whose relationship to territory is not easily asserted.[33]

In Toronto, this video scene emerged partly as a response to State censorship. In the 1980s, the Ontario Censor Board [OCB] actively forced art galleries, theatres, and festivals to cancel screenings of sexually-explicit films and videos. In 1979 for instance, the Arts Gallery of Ontario – one of the most prestigious museum in Toronto – had to call off its screening of Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950), deemed too (homo)sexual.[34] The Toronto Festival of Festivals (renamed TIFF) faced a similar situation with its 1982 programme “Video/Video,” which included tapes from Colin Campbell, Lisa Steele, and Kim Tomczak.[35] Greyson summarises the situation:

[T]he OCB insisted that any public screening must submit to prior censorship and that any venues, distributors, makers, or projectionists proceeding without prior approval would be subject to charges – including every art gallery, public library, community centre, high school, bar, bar mitzvah, you name it. (…) Most arts and community groups thought they were exempt or, at least, that the OCB was kidding. Wrong. The Canadian Images Film Festival was fined. (…) A Space Gallery was raided. Despite intensive organizing and numerous (drawn-out) legal challenges, a decisive chill caused the collective balls of the arts community to retract. Groups and individuals were understandably unwilling to become the next sacrificial lamb. Screenings were cancelled for fear of charges.[36]

Video artists were particularly active in contesting the Ontario Censor Board.[37] They often organised illegal screenings, thus openly defying censorship legislation. In 1981 for instance, the magazine Fuse put together a 12 hour-long screening of documentaries which had not been approved by the OCB.[38] Protests against censorship often took the form of inter-organisation collaborations. The 1985 festival “Six Days of Resistance”, which Greyson helped organising, is here a fascinating example: presented by A Space, the Women’s Cultural Building, the Artists Union and Trinity Square Video, it screened over forty films and videos without prior approval from the OCB.[39] This particular event is at the core of Greyson’s contribution to the anthology Queer Looks. Analysing the relationships between sex panic and State censorship in Toronto, Greyson recalls some of the tactics mobilised by video activists: in order to avoid having the prints seized by the authorities, “organizers would ask any cops present (undercover or not) to identify themselves, and they would then ask them to leave. (…) By law, cops must comply with this request. Since they couldn’t see the tapes or films, they couldn’t therefore lay charges”.[40]

This struggle against censorship partly accounts for the ethos of collaboration at the core of Toronto’s video scene, structured along a loose network of inter-related collective organisations which shared a commitment to “access and activism, participation and dialogue”, often regrouping “documentarists” and “video artists” in the same space (among others: LIFT, Charles Street Video, Trinity Square Video, and Vtape).[41] These artist-run centres, cooperative distributors, and art galleries were conveniently located around Queen Street, thereby facilitating inter-disciplinary cooperation: one could edit, distribute, and screen videos in the same building.[42] Greyson actively participated in these organisations. He notably took part in the 1984 and 1986 New Works Shows (organised by Trinity Square Video and Vtape)[43] and in YYZ’s 1986 Habits.[44] These artist-run centres and video co-ops fostered artistic collaborations and helped materialising Greyson’s call for alternative networks. As Lord argues,

[The] role of video co-ops and artist-run spaces in the shaping of Toronto’s art scene is profoundly important for our understanding of how Greyson’s work of the 1980s takes shape. His credits read like a meeting of Charles Street Video (which he joined upon moving to Toronto in the early 1980s), Trinity Square Video (where he worked with Michael Balser in the AIDS PSAs) (…) or a meeting at Vtape (on which he sat as a member of the board).[45]

Importantly, this cultural scene intersected with various festival circuits. In the 1990s, “over one hundred small and medium sized documentary, queer, experimental, student and community-based media festivals” were organised in the city.[46] In Toronto, festivals dedicated to South Asian queer films (Desh Pardesh) coexisted alongside events devoted to alternative pornography (Pleasure Dome).[47] These organisations did not compete with one another. Rather, they largely shared information and expertise.[48] Toronto’s video scene thus reflected “a crucial permutation on the formulation of a metropolitan cosmopolitanism”[49] that juxtaposed festival circuits and promoted collaborative organising.

Several gay and lesbian film and/or video festivals were organised in the city.[50] Some happened only once, such as the 1986 “Inverted Image” organised by the newspaper Xtra!.[51] Others were multi-disciplinary: for instance, Sky Gilbert’s “Queer Culture Festival” (starting in 1990) featured videos alongside theatre plays and dance.[52] Inside/OUT, Toronto’s most famous LGBT film and video festival, was created in 1991 in an effort to develop a queer circuit defined in opposition to commercial films. According to Joceline Andersen,

The filmmakers who began the group saw it as a platform to showcase queer experimental and transgressive work that with short formats and DIY production values could not find a venue in the art house circuit or the burgeoning film festival phenomenon of the largely narrative New Queer Cinema.[53]

These gay and lesbian organisations were actively fighting against censorship. Canadian custom agents and Canada Post enforced censorship legislation rather zealously. Shipments from and to the Glad Day Bookshop and the Women’s bookstore were prevented in 1991 and 1992, and many film prints were destroyed at the border. This censorship also took the form of a withdrawal of public funding. Grants to A Space, Arts Sake, and Trinity Square Video were cancelled in 1982.[54] In 1992, the Christian association CURE successfully lobbied against funding allotted by the government of Ontario and the City of Toronto to gay cultural events: the Metro council “voted to rescind a $4000 grant to the Inside/OUT lesbian and gay film and video festival”. The theatre company Buddies in Bad Time was similarly accused of “exercising bad judgement by allowing the Queer Culture Festival of Toronto to rent their space to hold two seminars on bondage and ‘female ejaculation’”.[55] Due to a strong mobilisation of the press and artistic communities, funding was eventually re-established.[56]

Gay and lesbian cultural events were often connected with festivals organised in the video circuit. Local videomakers both navigated between and participated in the building of different venues: if the Toronto scene was organised around several structures, they were largely incestuous. Images, a festival started in 1988 by the Northern Vision collective, actively curated programmes dedicated to minorities:

It had also been our desire to be egalitarian in our selection regarding gender, region and race. We wanted to represent those voices which through formal concerns or socio-political agendas are often ignored by national showcases. (…) The Northern Visions selection body attempted to represent various concerns of Blacks, Asians, Native Peoples, gay and lesbian activists and feminists. These concerns have traditionally been ignored by mainstream festivals, yet they truly contribute to what is produced and what we know about Canadian culture.[57]

These incestuous organisations enabled particular forms of friendship and collaboration among filmmakers. Following the models of artist-run centres, they were organised by videomakers themselves. Their organising teams were largely overlapping. Board members of one festivals were often screened in another. In Figure 1, I trace Greyson’s artistic collaborations through his involvement in both Images and Inside/Out.[58] More than half of the festivals’ team members have participated in Greyson’s projects, in one way or another. Greyson’s involvement in these events as curator, board member (Inside/OUT 1994-1996, 1998-1999), jury (Images 1994), lecturer (Inside/OUT 1993), or filmmaker (Inside/OUT: 1991, 1994, 1996, 2000, Images 1990, 1992, 1994) indicate the extent to which festivals served not only as spaces of exhibition, but also as places where one could meet old and new friends. These friendships and collaborations were not limited to Image and Inside/OUT. For instance YYZ’s 1986 Habits show incorporated Greyson’s Moscow Does not Believe in Queers (1986) alongside with Kibbins’ Henry Kissinger Won the Nobel Peace Prize (1986), a tape on which Greyson was a technician.

As this historical example makes clear, festival organising in 1980-1990s Toronto both reflected existing and fostered new artistic collaborations. Cultural work produces friendships that can potentially crossover festival circuits. Greyson’s videos both feature friends and collaborators met on the festival circuit and address some of the issues debated within the Toronto video scene. His oeuvre corresponds to a “project animated by friendship through which an extensive and affective political geography grows (…) a spatial network of solidarity [which] form[s] translocal productions”.[59]

Networks of friendship, circuits, and stakeholders

Filmmaker and AIDS activist Mike Hoolboom describes Greyson’s position within the Toronto scene:

[Greyson] is never “at the beginning”; his ambitions rest neither with the first word nor with hopes for the last. Instead, he finds himself always in the midst of a social web of produced and producing identities (…) It is little surprise that as an artist whose entry point admits him to a conversation already underway, Greyson receives and adapts established modes of address.[60]

In resituating Greyson’s work as a videomaker, curator, festival organiser, and public intellectual, this paper argued that friendship, defined as a network of relationality, provides a theoretical framework for conceptualising both cinematic cultures and crossovers between festival circuits. Greyson’s network of friends and collaborators refracts the evolution of both gay and lesbian cinema and the Toronto video scene. While, in Mike Hoolboom’s words, Greyson is never at the beginning of this history, his words often preface major anthologies on censorship, AIDS, and gay and lesbian cinema – generously introducing friends, reflecting (upon) the collective nature of video/activism.^[61]

Greyson’s career also illustrates what could be gained in taking seriously these networks of friendship: as such, his collaborations transcend professional occupations. Greyson and his friends often occupied several institutional locations at once, constantly shifting between videomaking, organising, curating, and writing. This is not surprising: in this historical context, “the existence of the pure critic/scholar who has not tried curating or film/video making is as rare as the curator who has not directed a film or written film criticism (though both animals do exist, of course).”[62] As a slantwise network of relationality, friendships point to the productive interplays between various forms of participation in festival organising.

This is particularly important, as scholars often analyse festivals in terms of the competing performances of various stakeholders. Actors participating in festivals are traditionally understood through their professional occupation, an hermeneutic model which presupposes that one is either a festival-goer, or a critic, or an organiser, or a policy-maker, or a scholar. While such analyses enable us to describe the cultural economy of festival organising, the reality is – as always – messy: one might be a critic and/or a festival organiser and/or a policy-maker and/or a scholar. One might even move from one of these professional occupations to any other(s). As networks of relationality, collaborations and friendships crossover analytically separated institutional locations, thereby complementing traditional analyses of festival circuits and stakeholders. Instead of separating curators from filmmakers, scholars, and festival organisers, friendships as networks reveal what could be gained in taking seriously the interplay between various forms of institutional location. As a “labour of love”, festival organising entails a form of collaboration that can potentially be productive, a mode of relationality that largely crossovers existing circuits and participates in the shaping of cinematic cultures.

Figure 1.: Greyson’s (main) collaborators and their role in Inside/OUT & Images (until 2000).

 

Name	Participation in:	(main) collaborations with Greyson
Achtman, Michael	Inside/OUT: screening committee (1997)	– Un©ut (1997, screened that year)
Campbell, Colin	Inside/OUT: advisory board* (1994-1995), board of directors (1996)*. Images: board of directors (1991), advisory board (1994-1996)	– The Jungle Boy (1985) – You Taste American (1986) – Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (1986) – A Moffie Called Simon (1986) – The ADS epidemic (1987) – Urinal (1988)
Cass, Robin	Inside/OUT: jury (1998), advisory board (1999-2000)*	– Zero Patience (1993) – Lilies (1996)
Day, Dennis	Inside/OUT: trailer (1997)*	– Trailer, Inside/OUT (1997) – Un©ut (1997, screened that year)
Diamond, Sara	Images: guest programmer (1989), advisory board (1994-1999)	– Herr (1998)
D’oliveira, Damon	Inside/OUT: Jury (1999)	– Zero Patience (1993) – Un©ut (1997) – The Laws of Enclosures (1999) – Proteus (2003)
Douglas, Debbie	Inside/OUT: advisory board (1994-1995)*, board of director (1996*, 1998)	– Zero Patience (1993) – AIDS Cable Access Project (1980s)
Durand, Doug	Images: Board of Directors (1993-1994)	– The Visitation (1979)
Findlay, David	Images: Director (1995)	– Kipling Meets the Cowboys (1985) – A Moffie Called Simon (1986) – Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (New York and Toronto) (1989)
Flanders, Elle	Inside/OUT: director (1997), Images: board of directors (1998-1999)	– Covered (2009) – Toronto declaration (protests against TIFF as part of the BDS campaign)
Foster, Steve	Images: Jury (1997)	– Captifs d’Amour (2010) – The Ballad of Roy and Silo (2010)
Fung, Richard	Inside/OUT: advisory board (1994-1995)*, Inside/OUT: coordinator (1997), Inside/OUT: programming (1998, 2000), Images: board of directors (1988-89, 1991), programmer (1992)	– Kipling Meets the Cowboys (1985) – Zero Patience (1993) – Rex v. Singh (2009) – Fig Trees (2009) Greyson also collaborated on several of Fung’s films (for instance, as a camera operator on the 1986 Chinese Characters).
Kazimi, Ali	Images: board of directors (1991-1994), programmer (1992)	– Rex v. Singh (2009) – Fig Trees (2009)
Lee, Anita	Images: Board of directors (1996-1997)	– Proteus (2003)
McIntosh, David	Images: Jury (1992)	– A Moffie called Simon (1986) – Urinal (1988)
Moores, Marg	Images: Board of directors (1989, 1991-1996)	– The First Draft (1980)
Paterson, Andrew	Images: Jury (1989)	– Zero Patience (1993) – Fuse (magazine)
Raffé, Alexandra	Inside/OUT: Advisory Board (1994-1995; 1998-2000)*	– Zero Patience (1993)
Rashid, Ian Iqbal	Inside/OUT: organising team (1994-1995)*	– Bolo Bolo! (1990)
Roche, David	Inside/OUT: member of the founding collective (1990)	– You taste American (1986) – The Pink Pimpernel (1989 – Screened in 1991 at Inside/OUT) – Zero Patience (1993)
Steele, Lisa [Vtape: Founder]	Inside/OUT: advisory board (1994-1995)*, Images: Board of Directors (1988), Guest programmer (1992), staff (1999)	– Kipling meets the cowboys (1985) – Collaborator on Centerfold / Fuse – Vtape: Greyson’s distributor
Tomczak, Kim [Vtape: Founder]	Images: Board of Directors / founder / programmer (1988-1994)	– Vtape: Greyson’s distributor – Have collaborated on several exhibitions. Among others: Paris’ 11th Biennale (1980), Powerplant’s 1987 Toronto : A play of History. – Appears with Greyson on several tapes, such as Hoolboom’s 2006 Fascination.
Travassos, Almerinda	Images: Jury (1991)	– Urinal (1988) – The Making of Monsters (1991)
Waugh, Tom	Images: Guest programmer (1989)	– Full Frontal Nudity Expert (among others) – Cameo in several of Greyson’s films and videos, extensive interview in Un©ut (1997)
Yael, b.h.	Images: Board of Directors (1989, 1991-1995), programmer (1992)	– Toronto Declaration

* : Greyson participated, that year, in the organisation of this festival.

 

Notes

[1] Skadi Loist, “Precarious Cultural Work: About the Organization of (Queer) Film Festivals,” Screen 52, no. 2 (2011): 268–73.

[2] Liz Czach, “Affective Labor and the Work of Film Festival Programming,” in Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, ed. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist (Routledge, 2016), 196.

[3] Antoine Damiens, “Festivals, Uncut: Queer/Ing Festival Studies, Curating Queerness” (PhD diss., Concordia University, 2018).

[4] In this article, I use the term “cinematic cultures” instead of “film cultures” to include both celluloid and video formats.

[5] B. Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke University Press, 1998), 3.

[6] Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 101.

[7] Dina Iordanova, “The Film Festival Circuit,” in Film Festival Yearbook I : The Festival Circuit, ed. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (St Andrews Film Studies, 2009), 33.

[8] Ragan Rhyne, “Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders,” in Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, ed. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (St Andrews Film Studies, 2009), 9.

[9] Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (The New Press, 1982), 135–40. [Emphasis: mine]

[10] From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, academic conferences on gay and lesbian issues often included a screening programme akin to a festival. Conversely, LGBT festivals of the period often featured several academic talks. In using the same term to designate both academic and cinematic circuits, I underscore the productive interplay between festival organising and academic knowledge production which participated in shaping the gay and lesbian cinematic cultures of the 1980s. See: Damiens, “Festivals, Uncut.”

[11] Susan Lord, “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University Press-, 2013), 137.

[12] Larry Horne and John Ramirez, “Conference Report: The UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 29 (1984).

[13] Antoine Damiens, “The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals and Queer Cinema’s Legs,” Studies in European Cinema 15, no. 1 (2018).

[14] Jump Cut, “Alternative Cinema Conference: Documents from Caucuses and Workshops,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 22 (1980): 34–37.

[15] Peter Biskind et al., “Alternative Cinema Conference Times Seven: Jump Cut Editors’ Individual Perspectives,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 29 (1979): 37–40.

[16] Jump Cut, “Alternative Cinema Conference: Documents from Caucuses and Workshops” It is worth noting that members of the Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus consulted with other minority groups, in effect enacting a politics of solidarity typical of the 1980s.

[17] beverley Philadelphia and wendy stevens, “Why Protest Windows?,” Off Our Backs 10, no. 4 (1980): 9, 13, 20.

[18] The film was perceived as promoting negative depictions of necessarily sad gay men. Furthermore, Friedkin had publicly discussed his preliminary research on Fire Island in a 1975 lecture at the New School, recalling with disdain being confused at the touristic attractions the gay vacation spot offers – namely “200 to 300 guys in daisy-chain [sic], balling each other in the ass [in the Meat Rack].” See: Edward Guthmann, “The Cruising Controversy: William Friedkin vs. the Gay Community,” Cineaste 10, no. 3 (1980): 2–4.

[19] Future research will address the politics of video festivals, a topic which has surprisingly been ignored by festival scholars.

[20] In particular in The First Draft (1980), a tape which “looks at the limitation of constructing alternative media within a dominant culture” through a video aesthetics. See: Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie, and Thomas Waugh, The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 503.

[21] National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, “Dear Friends…,” Winter 1981, Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

[22] Steve Forgione, “Organizing on the Left: Some Thoughts on the Lesbian/Gay Struggle,” New Political Science 1, no. 4 (1980): 74–75.

[23] National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, “Meeting Minutes, June 28th,” n/d, Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

[24] Stefan Pevnik, “Gay Filmmakers Confront Media Homophobia in the US,” The Advocate, November 26, 1981.

[25] “Eggo Film Festival 1983 – Southampton College, Fine Arts,” 1983, Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

[26] Foundation for Independent Film and Video, “Agenda,” The Independent 5, no. 1 (March 1982): 24 Also known as “prognosis for gay and lesbian independent film”; see: Thomas Waugh, “Notes on Greyzone,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University MQUP, 2013), 37.

[27] UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival, “UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival,” 1983, Folder Film Festivals — Outfest, The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

[28] Bad Object-Choices, How Do I Look? : Queer Film and Video (Bay Press, 1991), 11. In itself, the fact that How Do I Look? is remembered as a conference (and not a festival) exemplifies quite well the erasure of festivals organised in the margins of the contemporary queer circuit. I analyse this issue in: Damiens, “Festivals, Uncut”.

[29] Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, Queer Looks (Routledge, 1993).

[30] Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, “On a Queer Day You Can See Forever,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar (Routledge, 1993), xiv–xv.

[31] Waugh, “Notes on Greyzone.”

[32] Nancy Patterson, “Curating Video,” Cinema Canada, March 1987, 14–15.

[33] Will Straw, “Cultural Scenes,” Loisir et société/Society and Leisure 27, no. 2 (2004): 412.

[34] Brenda Cossman, Censorship and the Arts: Law, Controversy, Debate, Facts (Ontario Association of Art Galleries, 1995), 102.

[35] Jay Scott, “Ending on a Negative Note: Censor Board Accused of ‘Attempting to Destroy Festival,’” The Globe and Mail, September 20, 1982, 11; “Fest of Fests May Get New Deal from Censors,” Cinema Canada 145 (1987): 63.

[36] John Greyson, “Don’t Cry for Me, Project P,” in Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, ed. Lorraine Johnson and John Greyson (Toronto Photographers Workshop and The Riverbank Press, 1997), 2–3 [Emphasis in the original].

[37] Ger Zielinski, “Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals” (PhD diss., McGill, 2008), 16.

[38] Cossman, Censorship and the Arts, 23–23.

[39] “Calendar of Events in Toronto from Monday April 22 to Thursday May 31,” The Body Politic, no. 114 (May 1985): 25.

[40] John Greyson, “Security Blankets: Sex, Video, and the Police,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar (Routledge, 1993), 383–94.

[41] Dot Tuer, “Mirroring Identities: Two Decades of Video Art in English-Canada,” in Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, ed. Janine Marchessault (YYZ Books, 1995), 123.

[42] Philip Monk, “Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years,” C Magazine 59 (1998).

[43] Geoffrey Shea, “The 1986 New Work Show,” Cinema Canada, November 1986, 33–35; Patterson, “Curating Video.”

[44] Phil Van Steenburgh, “‘Habits’ by YYZ, Toronto: Invitation to a Screening.,” Cinema Canada, August 1986, 26–27.

[45] Lord, “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson,” 137.

[46] Dipti Gupta and Janine Marchessault, “Film Festivals as Urban Encounter and Cultural Traffic,” in Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities, ed. Johanne Sloan (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2007), 251.

[47] Tom Warner, Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2002), 326.

[48] Zielinski, “Furtive, Steady Glances,” 116.

[49] Brenda Longfellow, “Surfing the Toronto New Wave: Policy, Paradigm Shifts and Post-Nationalism,” in Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, ed. André Loiselle and Tom McSorley (Canadian Film Institute/Institut canadien du film, 2006), 194.

[50] According to Ger Zielinski, the first festival might have happened as early as 1980. Zielinski, “Furtive, Steady Glances,” 144n114.

[51] “Gay Fest in T.O.,” Cinema Canada News Update 1 (November 10, 1986): 3.

[52] Kevin Dowler, “In the Bedrooms of the Nation: State Scrutiny and the Funding of Dirty Art,” in Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures, ed. Sally McKay and Andrew J. Paterson (YYZ Books, 2001), 34.

[53] Joceline Andersen, “From the Ground up: Transforming the inside out LGBT Film and Video Festival of Toronto,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 40.

[54] Cossman, Censorship and the Arts, 31.

[55] Mary Louise Adams, “Gay Clout Turns inside Out,” Herizons 7, no. 4 (1997): 14; David Roche, “Queer Film Fest Is Homeless. Euclid Collapse Forces the Inside Out Collective Elsewhere,” Xtra!, November 1993; Dowler, “In the Bedrooms of the Nation: State Scrutiny and the Funding of Dirty Art,” 34.

[56] Similar attempts to withdraw funding from gay and lesbian cultural organisations were made in 1997. See: Andrew Paterson, “Private Parts in Public Places,” Fuse 12, no. 4 (1989): 43–44.

[57] Northern Vision Collective, “Images 88,” 1988, 3.

[58] I limited myself to the organisational team. A similar argument could be made through an analysis of festivals’ acknowledgement sections and film selections. For instance, Inside/OUT’s 1993 catalogue reads like a credit from a tape by Greyson and/or a who’s who of his collaborators — referencing among others Kay Armatage, Desh Pardesh, Doug Durand, Ellen Flanders, Richard Fung, Fuse magazine, Ian Rashid, Gita Saxena, Euclid Theatre, Full Frame, Vtape and YYZ.

[59] Lord, “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson,” 136.

[60] Mike Hoolboom, “Audio Visual Judo,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 209–10.

[61] For instance, Greyson wrote the introduction to Thomas Waugh’s anthology The Fruit Machine: John Greyson, “Foreword,” in The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, by Thomas Waugh (Duke University Press, 2000), ix–xii. His academic writings further preface several books on censorship and/or AIDS, such as: Greyson, “Don’t Cry for Me, Project P”. Conversely, B. Ruby Rich wrote the foreword to an anthology on Greyson: B. Ruby Rich, “Foreword,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), xv–xvi. Significantly, this chapter is immediately followed by Waugh’s own contribution, which theorises his friendship with Greyson: Waugh, “Notes on Greyzone.”

[62] Thomas Waugh and Chris Straayer, “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 599.

 

Notes on the Contributor

Antoine Damiens holds a PhD in Film Studies from Concordia University (Montréal). His dissertation interrogates the historiographical and political project of festival studies through an analysis of minor, ephemeral, LGBT festivals. Antoine serves as the co-chair of SCMS’ Film & Media Festival Scholarly Interest Group and as Synoptique’s festival review editor. He has participated in organizing various festivals, among which Cannes’ Queer Palm.

 

Bibliography 

Adams, Mary Louise. “Gay Clout Turns inside Out.” Herizons 7, no. 4 (1997): 14.

Andersen, Joceline. “From the Ground up: Transforming the inside out LGBT Film and Video Festival of Toronto.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 38–57.

Bad Object-Choices. How Do I Look? : Queer Film and Video. Bay Press, 1991.

Biskind, Peter, Michelle Citron, Chuck Kleinhans, Julia Lesage, B. Ruby Rich, Peter Steven, and Thomas Waugh. “Alternative Cinema Conference Times Seven: Jump Cut Editors’ Individual Perspectives.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 29 (1979): 37–40.

“Calendar of Events in Toronto from Monday April 22 to Thursday May 31.” The Body Politic, no. 114 (May 1985): 25.

Cossman, Brenda. Censorship and the Arts: Law, Controversy, Debate, Facts. Ontario Association of Art Galleries, 1995.

Czach, Liz. “Affective Labor and the Work of Film Festival Programming.” In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 196–208. Routledge, 2016.

Damiens, Antoine. “Festivals, Uncut: Queer/Ing Festival Studies, Curating Queerness.” PhD diss., Concordia University, 2018.

———. “The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals and Queer Cinema’s Legs.” Studies in European Cinema, 15, no.1 (2018).

de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam University Press, 2007.

Dowler, Kevin. “In the Bedrooms of the Nation: State Scrutiny and the Funding of Dirty Art.” In Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures, edited by Sally McKay and Andrew J. Paterson, 29–49. YYZ Books, 2001.

“Eggo Film Festival 1983 – Southampton College, Fine Arts,” 1983. Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

“Fest of Fests May Get New Deal from Censors.” Cinema Canada 145 (1987): 63.

Forgione, Steve. “Organizing on the Left: Some Thoughts on the Lesbian/Gay Struggle.” New Political Science 1, no. 4 (1980): 74–75.

Foucault, Michel. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley, 135–40. The New Press, 1982.

Foundation for Independent Film and Video. “Agenda.” The Independent 5, no. 1 (March 1982): 24.

“Gay Fest in T.O.” Cinema Canada News Update 1 (1986): 3.

Gever, Martha, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson. “On a Queer Day You Can See Forever.” In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parma., xiii–xv. Routledge, 1993.

———. Queer Looks. Routledge, 1993.

Greyson, John. “Don’t Cry for Me, Project P.” In Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, edited by Lorraine Johnson and John Greyson., 1–5. Toronto Photographers Workshop and The Riverbank Press, 1997.

———. “Foreword.” In The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, by Thomas Waugh, ix–xii. Duke University Press, 2000.

———. “Security Blankets: Sex, Video, and the Police.” In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar, 383–94. Routledge, 1993.

Gupta, Dipti, and Janine Marchessault. “Film Festivals as Urban Encounter and Cultural Traffic.” In Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities, edited by Johanne Sloan., 239–54. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

Guthmann, Edward. “The Cruising Controversy: William Friedkin vs. the Gay Community.” Cineaste 10, no. 3 (1980): 2–8.

Hoolboom, Mark. “Audio Visual Judo.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, 209–15. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Horne, Larry, and John Ramirez. “Conference Report: The UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 29 (1984).

Iordanova, Dina. “The Film Festival Circuit.” In Film Festival Yearbook I : The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 23–39. St Andrews Film Studies, 2009.

Jump Cut. “Alternative Cinema Conference: Documents from Caucuses and Workshops.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 22 (1980): 34–37.

Loist, Skadi. “Precarious Cultural Work: About the Organization of (Queer) Film Festivals.” Screen 52, no. 2 (2011): 268–73.

Longfellow, Brenda. “Surfing the Toronto New Wave: Policy, Paradigm Shifts and Post-Nationalism.” In Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, edited by André Loiselle and Tom McSorley., 167–202. Canadian Film Institute/Institut canadien du film, 2006.

Longfellow, Brenda, Scott MacKenzie, and Thomas Waugh. The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Lord, Susan. “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh., 135–47. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Monk, Philip. “Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years.” C Magazine 59 (1998).

National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. “Dear Friends…,” Winter 1981. Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

———. “Meeting Minutes, June 28th,” n/d. Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

Northern Vision Collective. “Images 88,” 1988.

Paterson, Andrew. “Private Parts in Public Places.” Fuse 12, no. 4 (1989): 43–44.

Patterson, Nancy. “Curating Video.” Cinema Canada, March 1987, 14–15.

Pevnik, Stefan. “Gay Filmmakers Confront Media Homophobia in the US.” The Advocate, November 26, 1981.

Philadelphia, beverley, and wendy stevens. “Why Protest Windows?” Off Our Backs 10, no. 4 (1980): 9, 13, 20.

Rhyne, Ragan. “Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders.” In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 9–22. St Andrews Film Studies, 2009.

Rich, B. Ruby. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Duke University Press, 1998.

———. “Foreword.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh., xv–xvi. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Roche, David. “Queer Film Fest Is Homeless. Euclid Collapse Forces the Inside Out Collective Elsewhere.” Xtra!, November 1993.

Scott, Jay. “Ending on a Negative Note: Censor Board Accused of ‘Attempting to Destroy Festival.’” The Globe and Mail, September 20, 1982, 11.

Shea, Geoffrey. “The 1986 New Work Show.” Cinema Canada, November 1986, 33–35.

Tuer, Dot. “Mirroring Identities: Two Decades of Video Art in English-Canada.” In Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, edited by Janine Marchessault, 107–25. YYZ Books, 1995.

UCLA Gay & Lesbian media Festival. “UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival,” 1983. Folder Film Festivals — Outfest, The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

Van Steenburgh, Phil. “‘Habits’ by YYZ, Toronto: Invitation to a Screening.” Cinema Canada, August 1986, 26–27.

Warner, Tom. Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Waugh, Thomas. “Notes on Greyzone.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, 19–42. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Waugh, Thomas, and Chris Straayer. “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 599–625.

Zielinski, Ger. “Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals.” PhD diss., McGill, 2008. 

Filmography

Dennis Day and John Greyson. Trailer – Inside/OUT (1997, Tonronto, ON: Inside/OUT), 35mn.

William Friedkin. Cruising (1980, Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists), Film.

Richard Fung. Chinese Characters (1986, Chicago, IL: Video Data Bank), Video.

Richard Fung, John Greyson, and Ali Kazimi. Rex v. Singh (2009, Vancouver, BC: Out on Screen), DV.

John Greyson. The Visitation (1979, undistributed), Video.

———. The First Draft (1980, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. The Jungle Boy (1985, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. Kippling Meets the Cowboys (1985, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. You taste American (1986, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (1986, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. A Moffie Called Simon (1986, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. The ADS epidemic (1987, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. Urinal (1988), San Francisco, CA: Frameline Distribution), Video transferred to 16mn.

———. Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (New York and Toronto) (1989), Video.

———. The Pink Pimpernel (1989, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. The Making of Monsters (1991), 16mn.

———. Zero Patience (1993, Toronto, ON: Cineplex Odeon Distribution), Super-16 mn, released 35mn.

———. Lillies (1996, Toronto, ON: Alliance Atlantis), 35mn.

———. Un©ut (1997, Toronto, ON: Vtape), D-Beta transferred to 16mn.

———. Herr (1998), DV.

———. The Laws of Enclosures (2000, Toronto, ON: Momentum Pictures), 35mn.

———. Proteus (2003, Culver City, CA: Strand Releasing), D-Beta transferred to 35mn.

———. Covered (2009), DV.

———. Fig Trees (2009), DV.

———. Captifs d’Amour (2010), 16mn/DV.

———. The Ballad of Roy and Silo (2010), DV.

Mike Hoolboom. Fascination (2006, Chicago, IL: Video Data Bank), DV.

Ian Iqbal Rashid and Gita Saxena. Bolo Bolo!: Talking About Silence, AIDS and Gay Sexuality (1990, San Francisco, CA : National Asian American Telecommunications Association), Video.

Gordon Willis. Windows (1980, Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists), Film.

The Gay and Lesbian Films Season, now known as the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (HKLGFF), was founded in January 1989 by Edward Lam, a well-known Hong Kong film director and gay activist. It was the first time that Hong Kong held a LGBT-themed film event, and it was also the first time for such an event to take place in Asia. Before the new millennium, the Hong Kong Art Centre (HKAC)[1] organised the HKLGFF and Lam was the festival director who programmed the film festival. Lacking the experience of organising similar events, Lam made great efforts to adjust the programming style and enrich the forms of activities for the purpose of increasing the attendees as well as receiving the support from the local queer communities. The early HKLGFF has contributed to the prosperity of Hong Kong queer culture.[2] However, the failure of the box office impeded the development of the HKLGFF.[3] Due to the financial pressure and the disappointment from the Hong Kong queer communities, Lam decided to leave the HKLGFF in 1999.[4] Also, the HKAC suspended the festival in the same year. In 2000, Raymond Yeung, a film director, and Wouter Barendrecht, the founder of Fortissimo Films[5], brought the HKLGFF back to the public. Under the operation by Yeung and Barendrecht, and the HKLGFF gradually got rid of the previous style formed by the HKAC and Lam, and commenced the commercial transformation. Through the tough process for years, the HKLGFF has succeeded in transforming to the independent and commercial queer film festival recently.

Regarding the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF, Pang Ka Wai points out that the commercially transformed HKLGFF is male oriented, which means that the festival is operated based on the logic of the middle-class gay consumption, and argues that this commercially oriented logic weakens the political function of the HKLGFF.[6] The criticism of the HKLGFF will be analysed in detail. Nevertheless, the aim of this article is to critically rethink the commercialised phenomenon of queer film festivals and address the positive aspects that the commercialisation can lead to queer film festival by using the HKLGFF, particularly the period from 2000 till now as the example. I argue that the commercial transformation of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival can be a tool for pursuing queer political goals and realising social value through increasing the visibility of both HKLGFF and the local queer communities as well as diversifying the audience in the long run. In order to review the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF, this article firstly explores why and how the HKLGFF has gone through the commercial transformation, and then it illustrates what significance of the commercial transformation is to the film festival.

Before expanding the research topic in depth, the term commercialisation, or commercial transformation, needs clarification here.  Rebecca Finkel proposes three aspects from which commercialisation acts on arts festivals,

“It is suggested that arts festivals are affected by commercialisation processes in three different key ways: (1) when they are organised principally for financial gain and when revenue generation becomes the principal aim, (2) when they are sponsored by a for-profit enterprise and (3) when they become vehicles for executing economic agendas.”[7]

Simply speaking, her claim demonstrates that funding of the commercialised arts festivals mainly involves box office and commercial sponsorships, and the festivals regard making profits as a significant agenda. Hence, combining the key words addressed by Finkel, in the context of queer film festivals, the commercialisation of queer film festivals means that the funding of the queer film festivals is primarily made up by the box office and/or the commercial sponsorships, while the festivals perform the commercial agenda as one of the priorities for the financial sustainability. While the commercial transformation of queer film festivals can be interpreted in two ways. One is the process of altering funding pattern to the commercialised one, and another one is that the festivals execute the self-adjustment from various aspects, including programming, events, screening venues, and promotion, in order to accommodate the commercialised funding. Specifically, this article will investigate the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF from three aspects, including programming, screening venues and funding pattern, while these three aspects are closely connected and interactive.

According to Skadi Loist, the majority of queer film festivals are registered as the non-profit organisations. Although “commercialisation of non-profits occurs when these organisations decide to produce goods and services with the explicit intent of making a profit”.[8] The commercialised process does not change the essence of the non-profit entity to the business company. Tuula Mittila defines the commercialisation of non-profit organisations as “a strategic process of developing an organisation’s mission into products and services, marketing and management of stakeholder relations and relationships, both internal and external.”[9] It means that commercialisation is a method that facilities organisations to accomplish the mission, the character of non-profit organisation remains the same. Hence, as long as profits are utilised to cover the routine operation expenditure and to invest on achieving social values as well, the commercialisation will not cause the alteration of being the non-profit entities in essence.

 

Before the Transformation: The HKLGFF in the HKAC Period

The analysis starts from exploring the background before the appearance of the HKLGFF, which builds up the whole picture for the analysis. The background information of establishing the HKLGFF reveals the situation of holding gay films screenings in the 1980s. Edward Lam himself had planned and organised different types of events related to lesbian and gay film screening before the establishment of the HKLGFF. In 1982, he founded Zuni Icosahedron, a Hong Kong-based international experimental theatre company adopting art and culture as a means of political intervention. From 1985 to 1987, Zuni Icosahedron constantly screened the queer films of Western directors, such as Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The audience of the gay films screenings were mainly local and foreign gay men who were interested in art and cultural events. Moreover, this type of audience also shares some characteristics of the main audience of the HKLGFF, which will be deeply analysed later in the third section of this article. All these gay cultural practices were the prelude of the HKLGFF. While, regarding the story of the HKLGFF’s establishment, during a trip to Britain in 1987, Edward Lam was inspired by the local queer culture, and felt that the LGBT community in Hong Kong had no similar means or space to express itself. Lam then came up with the idea and the project plan of establishing a local queer film festival, which he proposed to the Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC), which is a non-profit arts organization, which aims to promote contemporary performing arts, visual arts, film and video arts and provide arts education, the following year. Two members of the film department of the HKAC at that time, Ain-ling Wong and Yau Ching, who were hugely interested in gender and sexual minorities, supported Lam’s idea and decided to facilitate the holding of the HKLGFF.

As noted above, Hong Kong Art Centre took the responsibility of hosting the HKLGFF from 1989 to 2001 (a period I will refer to as the HKAC period). Although the HKAC claims itself as a non-government organisation, the HKAC has had an extremely close relationship with the Hong Kong government since the preparatory stage of HKAC. The Hong Kong government is one of the main sponsors of the HKAC; the government also appoints main governors of the HKAC and pays their salaries. The HKAC is a partially governmental organisation, as the Hong Kong government does not interfere with the actual operation of the HKAC. Therefore, the HKLGFF is a partially government-funded festival. The HKAC fully supported the festival through providing funding and event venues. Except for several special events, almost all the screenings events took place in HKAC venues, including Lim Por Yen Film Theatre (now known as Agnès b. Cinema), McAulay Studio and Shouson Theatre. In addition, the HKAC took charge of the publicity as well as the administration of HKLGFF. The HKAC utilised its own resources as well as the experience of organising similar events to promote the HKLGFF.

Both the HKAC and Edward Lam had rich experiences of organising themed film screening events. However, the actual operation of the HKLGFF during the HKAC period was not smooth. Here are the three characteristics. Firstly, the HKLGFF was not constantly and annually organised. Two years after the first HKLGFF, the festival began to be held annually, but there were also discontinuations in 1996 and 1999, and in 1997, the festival was held twice. Thus, the intermittent operation indicates the difficulty and disorder of the HKLGFF organisation at the time. Secondly, the scale of the HKLGFF varied in every year in terms of the length of festival and the number of films selected. The first HKLGFF stretched across three months, but the fifth HKLGFF in 1995 lasted for 18 days. In addition, the HKLGFF held in 1992 selected only 22 films; while, the fourth HKLGFF, held in 1994, screened more than 100 films. Thirdly, the name of the festival changed repeatedly during the Lam period. First, it was called The Gay and Lesbian Films Season, then became The Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1992, but changed to the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival the next year. It was renamed again in 1998 as the Hong Kong Queer Film/Video Festival. The name change reflected the identity politics of programming and the theme of that year. Generally speaking, the HKLGFF was in effect held as an individual new event each time in the HKAC period.

The funding of the HKLGFF was not abundant. Travis Kong points out the “tight funding constraint” cannot meet the requirement of bounteously organising the festival.[10] Hence, the HKLGFF started to seek commercial sponsorship in the mid-stage of the HKAC period (from 1995). The prominent Hong Kong gay disco Propaganda[11] started to support the HKLGFF from 1995, and its sponsorship lasted more than two decades, until Propaganda was closed in 2016. Furthermore, several commercialised companies began to support the HKLGFF since 1998. In particular, the fashion brand Agnès b. built a close relationship with the HKLGFF. As a result, the sponsorships of HKLGFF have changed from the LGBT-related non-profit organisations to the commercial companies of different types, which included non-LGBT commercial ones. increasing commercial sponsorship indicates that it was harder for the HKAC to provide sustained funding to the HKLGFF. Meanwhile, this also marked the prelude to the commercial transformation of HKLGFF.

As to the reason why HKLGFF had to change its operational mode, one of the prime reasons was that the HKAC found it hard to support the festival as before, as the HKAC was suffering from financial hardship. According to Fung ManYee, the economic crisis in 1997 seriously affected the source of finance, which almost reduced by half the rental income of the HKAC in the following three years.[12] The income mainly comes from the rental of office and venues, while the financial crisis caused a severe house price drop. In addition, Hong Kong residents had less income for discretionary spending on arts and cultural activities during the economic crisis. The ticket sales and the tuition fees were significant revenue sources of the HKAC as well. The HKAC thus had insufficient funding to organise large-scale activities; the HKAC itself had difficulty maintaining its own internal operations.

 

Two Main Stakeholders: Fortissimo Films and Ekdo Film Ltd.

In March 2000, Raymond Yeung and Wouter Barendrecht renewed the film festival and officially changed the name of the festival to the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival with the help of several Hong Kong filmmakers and film critics, such as Shu Kei. The HKAC did not entirely cut its relationship with the HKLGFF from the beginning of the transformation. It still hosted the festival in 2000 and then turned the relationship from one of fully hosting the HKLGFF to merely providing venues. In 2001, Wouter Barendrech and Raymond Yeung founded the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Society (HKLGFFS), a non-profit organisation that aims to promote equal opportunities and eliminate discrimination against sexual minority groups in Hong Kong through screening cinematic works and fostering a regular and stable audience base.[13] Since 2002, the HKLGFFS has been the official organiser of the HKLGFF. 2002 was the last year for HKAC to provide venues.

Since the break-up with the HKAC, the HKLGFF has relied on box office. With regard to state grants for film-related events in Hong Kong, the situation is tough, which means that the festivals in Hong Kong are hard to get the amount of public funding. The HKAC has not hosted or supported large-scale events such as film festivals since almost before the new millennium; neither is the Hong Kong government a significant financial source for local film festivals. Throughout the last decade, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC)[14] has not granted funds to large-scale events like film festivals[15], so the HKLGFF cannot rely on funding from the HKAC or the government. The HKLGFF has to become an independently run queer film festival. Nevertheless, the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF has progressed slowly, especially at the early stage of the transformation. According to Pang, the HKLGFF was struggling with a severe commercial failure at the early 2000s; Yeung and Barendrecht underwrote a large part of the operating costs.[16] Only the two directors or the HKLGFFS cannot sustain the HKLGFF, it is necessary to cooperate with other stakeholders.

With the assistance of Barendrecht, the Fortissimo became one of the official sponsors of the HKLGFF, and this thoroughly changed its mode of operation. With the help of Fortissimo, the HKLGFF was able to “obtain internationally renowned films”[17] and in addition, acquire certain films with no rental cost.[18] To be more specific, the HKLGFF has screened more Asian gay films since Fortissimo joined the festival, because Fortissimo focuses on the Asian Market and it creates connections between Asian films and worldwide audiences. The Fortissimo also contributed to the operation of the HKLGFF in other regards. For example, as Denise Tang states, Barendrecht’s own social network secured support from local businesses, especially to promote “festival parties at [the] gay bar Propaganda with little cost.”[19] The opening and closing parties were held in the Propaganda and the bar also sponsored the events by providing the venues and parts of the drinks. As Raghan Rhyne observes, “Barendrecht’s own commercial success translated into a solid foundation of private funding for [the] HKLGFF.”[20] However, the relationship between the HKLGFF and Fortissimo is far more complex. As already noted, Yeung and Barendrecht founded the HKLGFFS in 2001, but the operations of the HKLGFF strongly relied on Fortissimo Films during the transition period. According to Tang, “Not only does the festival [use] Fortissimo Films’ address as the festival address, the festival’s bank account is also managed by the company’s administrative staff.”[21] An important lesion we can learn from the process is the significance of certain stakeholders. In the stakeholder configuration, not all the stakeholders plan an equally important role. Some are more influential during certain historical junctures.

Faced with the situation of the HKAC fading out of the operation of the HKLGFF, one of the top priorities of the HKLGFF was to find suitable screening venues. Broadway Cinematheque, a local multi-screen specialty venue in Kowloon’s Yau Ma Tei district, came to the rescue. In addition, more and more cinemas, situated in high-end shopping malls, gradually became main screening venues. The high-end shopping malls in Hong Kong normally are the multi-functional commercial space that provides western luxury brands of clothing and cosmetics, cinemas and chain restaurants. In 2003, Palace IFC started to screen some of the festival films, and by 2004 it had become one of the main screening venues, showing almost the same number of festival films as Broadway Cinematheque. Likewise, AMC Festival Walk has supported the HKLGFF since 2005. Situated in a large, high-end shopping mall, AMC Festival Walk drew audiences quite similar to those of Palace IFC as well. In 2006 and 2007, the number of films shown in these three cinemas was almost equal. Moreover, the festival has added two more screening venues, Broadway The One (the brand-new upscale cinema in The One in Kowloon District) and AMC Pacific Place (one of Hong Kong’s leading stadium-seating cinema in Pacific Place in Hong Kong Island) since 2008. In fact, these five cinemas, Broadway Cinematheque, IFC Palace, AMC Festival Walk, AMC Palace, and Broadway The One, all belong to the same Hong Kong film company, Edko Films Ltd. Founded in 1950, Edko Films Ltd. is one of the main Hong Kong based? film companies, which dedicates itself to film production, film distribution and cinema running.

As commercial transformation and the actual operation cannot only rely on Fortissimo Films and Edko Films Ltd., there are various kinds of commercial sponsorships collaborating with the HKLGFF, including non-LGBT international commercial companies and LGBT media outlets. For one thing, the non-LGBT sponsorships are provided entirely by international companies. The types of the companies vary, from fashion brands to hotels and restaurants. Dim Sum, which is one of the most successful local gay lifestyle magazines in Hong Kong, and Fridae, which is the leading gay online media in Asia, collaborate with the festival as its online media platforms. Particularly, due to Joe Lam, who is the current Festival Director and also the founder of Dim Sum, Dim Sum has become the official media sponsor of the HKLGFF since early in the new millennium.

 

The Debate: Queer vs Commercialisation

Skadi Loist and Ger Zielinski address the grass-roots characteristics of early queer film festivals by pointing out that the activist media practice and social movements, particularly women’s and gay liberation movements, significantly contributed to the appearance of queer film festivals, and the festivals were usually funded by grassroots queer activists.[22] The relationship between queer film festivals and queer activism indicates that the priority of queer film festivals is to pursue the political agenda of gay rights and community empowerment. However, many queer film festivals also have commercial considerations: they select the films that can attract a larger audience, and with more commercial value. To be specific, queer film festivals prefer to screen romantic gay films played by handsome and fit white males, and as a result, lesbian and transgender representations are screened far less frequently. According to her research on the commodification of lesbians, Danae Clark points out that the marketing of lesbian images is less accepted by mainstream audiences when compared to gay images.[23] In fact, the practice of screening more gay films than other types of queer films exists in numerous queer film festivals all over the world. Rosemary Hennessey argues that ‘the increasing circulation of gay and lesbian images in consumer culture has the effect of consolidating an imaginary, class-specific gay subjectivity for both straight and gay audiences.’[24] The representation that focuses on middle-class gay men can only appeal to a part of the audience who are interested in a specific type of queer film. This also means that the festivals fail to attract other types of audience from the local queer communities.

Capital is the key factor of this issue, which limits the representations as well as the types of audience. Alan Sears addresses this:

In this context of commodification, a person becomes visible as ‘queer’ only through the deployment of particular market goods and services. Others are invisible, either because they are literally left outside the door (for example, because they cannot afford the cover charge) or because they cannot look ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ if they are old, fat, skinny, transgendered, racialised, stigmatised as disabled or ill or obviously poor.[25]

Through the logic of commercialisation, only certain queer communities can receive benefits, while the interests of others are more or less sacrificed. Members of the local queer communities can be visibly queer only when they can afford the tickets and attend queer film festivals. Simply, capital makes queer visible, meaning that the commercially orientated queer film festivals marginalise diverse types of local queer communities, as opposed to embracing them.

Due to the participation of Fortissimo Films, the HKLGFF programming has been transformed since 2000. Lam once stated that only naked masculine bodies can sell tickets,[26] whilst Renee Penney points out that romantic comedy is a ‘popular audience draw’ for queer film festivals.[27] Gary Mak, the festival co-organiser, claimed that Yeung and Barendrecht ‘tried to bring in more accessible work than Edward’s style’,[28] meaning that they preferred to select films with comparative commercial value, including romantic gay films, comedy, gay films with graphic sex, and films with big stars. Several Hong Kong film scholars have criticised the programming of the HKLGFF mainly from two aspects. Firstly, Day Wong criticises the HKLGFF for its western programming style, pointing out that HKLGFF has shown quite a number of western queer films without Chinese subtitles.[29] The target audience of the films without Chinese subtitles is therefore restricted to people who have some knowledge of English, or to the foreigners working and living in Hong Kong. She criticised HKLGFF for being too reliant on the western-queer culture, and for having ‘failed to capture the Chinese experience of same-sex desire and relationships.’[30] Furthermore, HKLGFF has also been criticised in terms of its gay-orientated programming. Pang notes that the number of lesbian films has always been much lower than gay films since 2000.[31] This, she concludes, has been the case especially since 2000, where the number of gay films selected has been several times that of lesbian films.[32] The western-orientated programming is closely related to gay-orientated programming, and through the interviews of several female festival directors of the HKLGFF, such as Denise Tang and Yau Ching, Pang admits that lesbian films fail to generate a similar amount in the box office as gay films do.[33] Likewise, Joe Lam also indicates, ‘…we try to program lesbian films. The market is so small though and there aren’t very many good lesbian films every year…of course the gay films are going to be [more] popular than lesbian films.’[34] Therefore, in order for the film festival to remain sustainable, the majority of the films selected by the HKLGFF possess commercial value, which means that the programming fails entirely to consider the interests of the queer communities in Hong Kong. The representations of lesbian and transgender individuals are neglected by the HKLGFF, and the topics and genres of the films chosen by the programming committee are relatively monotonous, as many of the HKLGFF programmes are lacking in experimental films or documentaries with serious topics, such as HIV-AIDS.

The western- and gay-orientated programming can shape and draw in a certain type of audience of the HKLGFF. According to Pang, local middle-class gay men who are around 30 and of white orientation are the targeted audience that the festival has sought since the commercial transformation.[35] Similarly, as Denise Tang highlights, the core identity of the HKLGFF ‘has often [been] perceived as a primarily upper middle-class gay male event.’[36] It is necessary to clarify what type of the main audience actually is, and especially the term ‘middle class’. According to Lui Tai Lok, a person who earns a salary from 20, 000 HK dollars to 50, 000 HK dollars (approximately £2,000 to £5,000) can be defined as the middle class, although only from the economic perspective.[37] Meanwhile, lifestyle and educational background are also significant.[38] More specifically, the main and targeted audience of the HKLGFF are 30-year-old, well-educated gay men who earn at least 20,000 HK dollars per month and who are familiar with western culture and lifestyle. I will elaborate further on two aspects of the festival and the targeted audience. Firstly, the screening venues indicate the main type of audience of the HKLGFF. Tang states that the cooperation of the commercial cinemas in the financial district of Hong Kong ‘symbolises corporate wealth and global consumerist ideologies’, and the screening venues have inevitably ‘predetermined the target audience’ for the HKLGFF.[39] As previously mentioned, the HKLGFF organises screenings in commercial cinemas in high-end shopping malls, and the ticket prices are around 100 to 150 HK dollars, which is double and sometimes even triple the price of the tickets in HKAC’s screening venues. The price is not relative for the working-class audience. Additionally, the publicity is intentionally aimed at the middle-class gay audience. Dim Sum was published monthly and available free of charge at most gay venues in the city; however, it moved from print to online in January 2016. Due to its business success and popularity among Hong Kong’s middle-class gay community, Dim Sum contributes greatly to the promotion of the HKLGFF. The cooperation with Dim Sum is a reflection of the fact that the target audience of the HKLGFF are middle-class gay people interested in art and culture. Additionally, they are the potential customers of commercial sponsorships, and the commercial operation is therefore likely to marginalise lesbian, transgender, non-middle-class audiences.

 

Increasing the Visibility and Diversifying the Audience

The screening venues of the HKAC were almost all in the Wan Chai area, a major hub of foreign cultural institutions in Hong Kong. Except for the HKAC, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre were also used for organising various kinds of art and cultural activities. Thus, in the HKAC period, the HKAC could be seen as a “closet”, which is a comparatively safe space for the HKLGFF. As the law decriminalising male homosexual conduct was passed in 1991, the queer communities in Hong Kong were still “in the closet” in the 1990s.[40] The main audience of the cinemas is intellectuals, which means that the audience is comparatively a minority group. The HKLGFF used the HKAC as a cover, which was branded as an art event, to offer the ambiguity to the queer communities, not definitely showing their intent as well as their sexual identity. This kind of public space also provides privacy to its audiences.

However, the commercial transformation has forced the HKLGFF to come out from the “closet” to go into the broader public space. Unlike the venues of the HKAC, both the Broadway Cinematheque and the commercial cinemas in the high-end shopping malls do not attract a specific kind of audience, instead, they reach wider audiences. Broadway Cinematheque is located in the Yau Ma Tei neighbourhood in Yau Tsim Mong district, with the consequent convenient transportation for audiences who live in Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Sham Shui Po. As Mak points out, that Broadway Cinematheque is “more for local”.[41] Also, due to the fact that rental prices in Yau Ma Tei are much lower than in the Central area, the ticket prices at Broadway Cinematheque are slightly cheaper than those of other mainstream cinemas. Other four cinemas, including IFC Palace, AMC Festival Walk, AMC Palace, and Broadway The One, are all situated in high-end shopping malls. Furthermore, most of those shopping malls are in the Central and Tsim Sha Tsui area, the commercial golden zone. It is symbolically significant when the HKLGFF came to the public. Joe Lam sees cooperating with a number of commercial mainstream cinemas as a gradual process of “coming out.”[42] In other words, the newfound cooperation with mainstream cinemas, especially those in high-end shopping malls, represents the fact that the HKLGFF has left the comfort zone created by the HKAC and entered the broad public, in that various kinds of audiences comes to mainstream cinemas, unlike the culture-and-art lovers of the HKLGFF at the HKAC period. However, the commercial cinemas can also limit some types of audience, in the other way. Indeed, the article should address the fact that the screenings of the HKLGFF in the high-end shopping malls can relatively restrict the audience who are non-urban and not affluent, which also means the people at the bottom of Hong Kong society. Nevertheless, following the logic of commercialisation, the festival should pay more attention to the audience (middle-class) who are possible to provide comparatively more commercial value for the festival, as they can afford both tickets and various kinds of commercial events (such as opening and closing parties) held by the festival.

The high exposure of the HKLGFF in commercial space is able to attract different types of audience, in other words, it provides the possibility to diversify audience.  Broadway Cinematheque is semi-art house commercial cinema; hence, it has already formed a batch of moviegoers who are easier to accept comparatively non-mainstream films. Joe Lam claims the HKLGFF can attract the “indie film lovers, [who] might be here to watch their favourite movie star.”[43] In addition, screening in high-end shopping malls can attract two types of audience. First, these locations attract a gay audience that is not a frequent movie-goer. For example, in terms of the audience of the Palace IFC, Mak states that “There is a gay crowd coming down from the gym to the cinema.”[44] He continues: they are “more affluent and more English speaking. They talk more about consumption, lifestyle, and parties, instead of sharing about the film.”[45] They are not regular festival-goers, but they have chosen to join the festival, when visiting queer film festival becomes a kind of trendy consumer lifestyle that reflects good cultural ‘tastes’ and middle class distinction. Second, the HKLGFF can also appeal to ordinary customers, as customer flow rate of malls is extremely high. Although the interests of the local queer communities cannot be comprehensively considered, the film festival, in fact, are diversifying the audience base. Moreover, Joe Lam states that queer films are no longer only for queer communities[46]. In other words, from the viewpoint of festival committee, the HKLGFF should no longer only serve the queer community.

The HKLGFF has started to enter into university campuses since 2015. Aiming at achieving the social values, the HKLGFF has organised a campus tour during the festival period. Cooperating with the Red Ribbon Centre and different student groups, the HKLGFF presents short films of diverse topics related to queer life and culture. As a free event to college students, this campus tour carries out the educational function without distinct commercial considerations, which is also the way how the HKLGFF actively gets touch with younger generation. Nevertheless, from the perspective of business, getting touch with college students is able to cultivate the festival audiences of the next generation, and to have good publicity for the festival in the campus as well.

On the one hand, from the commercial perspective, diversifying audience contributes to box office success. As Richard Ohmann argues, “markets are shaped, not discovered.”[47] These newly formed audience can also secure the attendance of the festival. On the other hand, from the aspect of social value, attracting these audience can shape the audience basis for efficiently realising queer political goals. No matter how each queer film festival claims its social responsibilities and the political goals, the aim of most queer film festivals is to increase positive and diversified queer representations to the broader public. actually, these political goals are more for the general public, not aiming to the queer communities. It is difficult for queer film festivals to convey the messages of eliminating discrimination as well as increasing social acceptance from the broader. In addition, according to Nanna Heidenriech, who was the curator for the Berlinale program Forum Expanded, “no festival passively responds to a pregiven audience;” instead, film festivals “shape audience.”[48] Although the engagement is not straightforwardly or efficiently effectual, queer film festivals can instil the idea of equal rights in the long run.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, after surviving a difficult period that lasted over a decade, the HKLGFF has become successful from the commercial standpoint in recent years. According to Gary Mak, “For the immediate figures, it is the box office [that counts]. So far, the festival has been doing well, especially in the last three to five years (interviewed by Stuart Richards in 2014), [when] we have been nearly sustainable just from the box office [takings] we earn.”[49] This claim shows the success of box office in the recent years, but also illustrates that the HKLGFF will maintain this type of operating model for the sustainability and the development of the festival. This article has highlighted the necessity of the commercialisation of small, local and independent queer film festivals, such as the HKLGFF. Nevertheless, both scholars and film festival curators have to think about the question of how this kind of queer film festivals can balance the commercial value and the social value with a limited budget.

The article has also illustrated that small local queer film festivals, such as the HKLGFF, are usually in cooperation with a few main stakeholders. The relationship between the festivals and the stakeholders is complex, while the impacts of the main stakeholders greatly influence the actual operation of the festivals. Furthermore, it is significant to consider the impacts of global networking of queer film festivals on the local queer film festivals when discussing the commercialised process and local specialities of the festivals.[50] This work open up the discussion of interpreting the commercialisation of local queer film festivals in the context of international and regional queer film festival circuit.

 

Notes

[1]          
A group of artists have come up with the idea of establishing a non-profit organisation to promote local art activity, and then wrote to the government to request a piece of land to build an art centre. Going through many hardships for years, with the help of Hong Kong Governor, HKAC was finally established with the new building in 1977.

[2]

Ta-wei Chi 紀大偉, “Fanyide Gongguan: Aizi, Tongzhi, Kuer,” 翻譯的公共: 愛滋, 同志, 酷兒 [Translation/Public: AIDS, ‘Tongzhi,’ and ‘Ku’er’] Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature臺灣文學學報 26 (2015): 91-92.

[3]

Xiaofei Zhen 甄晓菲, “Shishi Feifei Tongxinglian Yingzhan,” 是是非非同性恋影展 [Shishi Feifei: Queer Film Festival] 18 December 2007, Southern Weekly南方周末.

[4]

Ibid.

[5]

Funded in 1991 in Amsterdam, Fortissimo Films has been one of the world’s leading international film sales organisations, specialising in the production, presentation, promotion and distribution of award-winning and innovative feature films and documentaries by independent filmmakers from around the globe. For more information: http://www.fortissimofilms.com/about.

[6]

Pang Ka Wei 彭家維, ”Tamen de Gushi: Xianggang Tongzhiyingzhan Yanjiu”  她們的故事:香港同志迎戰研 究 [Herstories: The Research of Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival], (Master’s thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009), 111

[7]

Rebecca Finkel, “Re-imaging arts festivals through a corporate lens: a case study of business sponsorship at the Henley Festival,” Managing Leisure 15, no. 4 (2010): 238.

[8]

Howard P. Tuckman, “Competition, commercialisation, and the evolution of non-profit organisational structures” in Weisbrod, Burton A., ed. To profit or not to profit: The commercial transformation of the nonprofit sector, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26.

[9]

Tuula Mittilä, “Commercialisation of Non-Profit Organisations,” Lugano: The 19th Annual IMP Conference, 2003, 5.

[10]

Travis SK Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities: memba, tongzhi and golden boy (London: Routledge, 2010), 70.

[11]

Propaganda (also known as PP) was the very first gay clubs in Hong Kong. Founded in 1991, PP was one of the most popular gay clubs, which was seen as part of Hong Kong queer culture. However, it was closed in February 2016. For more information: https://www.thestandnews.com/lgbtq/本地老牌 gay-bar 將結業-折 射 25 年來同志圈變化/.

[12]

Fung ManYee 馮敏兒, ”Art Centre 30th Anniversary,” AppleDaily HK, 28 February 2007, available online: http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/supplement/culture/art/20070228/6855023 (accessed 8 October 2017).

[13] 

From the official website, http://www.hklgff.hk/about-us (accessed 6 October 2017).

[14]

Established in 1995, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) is a statutory body set up by the Government to support the broad development of the arts in Hong Kong. Its major roles include grant allocation, policy and planning, advocacy, promotion and development, and programme planning.

[15]              For more information: http://www.hkadc.org.hk/?p=2242&lang=en.

[16]              Pang, “Herstories,” 54.

[17]

Denise Tse-Shang Tang, Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong lesbian desires and everyday life, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 176.

[18]

Stuart James Richards, The Queer Film Festival, Popcorn and Politics: Popcorn and Politics, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 82.

[19]

Denise Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation: Emerging Independent Film and Video on Lesbian Desires,” in Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures, Olivia Khoo and Sean Metzger (eds.) (Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2009), 176.

[20]

Raghan Rhyne, “Comrades and citizens: Gay and lesbian film festivals in China,” in Film festival yearbook 3, ed. Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung (St Andrews Film Studies: 2011), 116.

[21]              Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation,” 187.

[22]

Skadi Loist and Ger Zielinski, “On the development of queer film festivals and their media activism,” in Film Festival Yearbook 4, ed. Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 49–50.

[23]

Danae Clark, “Commodity lesbianism,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove (London: Routledge, 1993), 192.

[24]

Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2002), 112.

[25]

Alan Sears, “Queer anti-capitalism: What’s left of lesbian and gay liberation?” Science & Society 69, no. 1: Special issue (2005): 108.

[26]              Zhen, “Shishi Feifei”.

[27]

Renee Penney, “Desperately Seeking Redundancy: Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience,” (Master Thesis, The University of British Columbia, 2010), 30.

[28]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 82.

[29]

Day Wong, “Hybridization and the emergence of ‘gay’ identities in Hong Kong and in China,” Visual Anthropology 24, no. 1–2 (2010): 157.

[30]              Ibid.

[31]              Pang, “Herstories,” 99–101.

[32]              Ibid.

[33]              Pang, “Herstories,” 90.

[34]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 202.

[35]              Pang, “Herstories,” 122.

[36]              Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation,” 175.

[37]

Siu Chuen Ou 區少銓, “zhongchande dingyi he lifestyle,” 中產的定義及lifestyle [The Definition of Middle Class and Lifestyle] latest updated, March 15, 2013, available online: http://www.liberalstudies.hk/blog/ls_blog.php?id=1415 (accessed 8 May, 2018).

[38]              Ibid.

[39]              Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation,” 176.

[40]

Travis SK Kong, Sky HL Lou, and Eva CY Li, “The fourth wave? A critical reflection on the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong,” in A critical reflection on the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong, M. McLelland and V. Mackie (eds.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 192.

[41]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 232.

[42]

Chan Cow 陳奉京, “Jinjie Jujiao Kuaxingbie, Zongjian: Tongzhiyingpian Buzhigei Tongzhikan” 今屆聚焦跨 性別 總監:同志影片不止給同志看 [Focusing on Transgender, Festival Director: queer films are not only for Tongzhi], HK01. latest update, September 13, 2017, available online: https://www.hk01.com/藝文/117137/同志影展專訪上-今屆聚焦跨性別-總監-同志影片不止給同志看 (accessed 13 October, 2017).

[43]

Hsiu Wen Liu “Heart to heart: HK gay film festival seeks emotional appeal,” Asia Times, latest update, September 12, 2017, available online: http://www.atimes.com/article/heart-heart-hk-gay-film-festival-seeks-emotional-appeal/ (accessed 12 October, 2017).

[44]              Ibid.

[45]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 83.

[46]              Chan, “Jinjie Jujiao Kuaxingbie.”

[47]

Richard Malin Ohmann, Selling culture: Magazines, markets, and class at the turn of the century (London and New York: Verso Books, 1996), 91.

[48]

Michael Barrett, Charlie Boudreau, Suzy Capo, Stephen Gutwillig, Nanna Heidenreich, Liza Johnson, Giampaolo Marzi et al, “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One: Curators Speak Out,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 4 (2005): 591.

[49]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 133.

[50]

Julian Stringer, “Global Cities and International Film Festival Economy,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 141.

 

Notes on the Contributor

Heshen Xie is a PhD student of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham, currently doing a research on the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. His research attempts to explore the relationship between the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the global queer film festival circuit. Heshen completed the Master degree of Film Studies at King’s College London in 2016.

 

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