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					Also this issue: Fest Shorts Reviews for the first week. First Sight Larry Clark On Making "Images You Can't See Anywhere Else." -Sam Adams

July 10-16, 2003

cover story

Over The Edge

Dangerous sex and second thoughts at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. By Sam Adams

by Sam Adams

Ray Murray, artistic director of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (PIGLFF), has never made any secret of his predilection for controversial fare, movies that challenge the festival’s audience to rethink their assumptions, not only about what queer film should and shouldn’t say, but even as to what might or might not constitute a queer film. Years before François Ozon was crowned the new hope of French cinema, Murray embraced his movies, those with gay content and those without, some of which would not have played Philadelphia otherwise. (Synchronicitously, Ozon’s new Swimming Pool opens theatrically this weekend, although you can wait until the festival’s over to see it.)

As gay and lesbian film festivals echoed the general trend of film fest proliferation, "gay and lesbian film" became less a descriptor, more a genre: Gay road-trip movies, gay crime dramas, endless romantic comedies, coming-out and -of-age tales seemed to spin out endlessly, chasing fame and market share. But as the studios’ fortunes tumbled with everyone else’s, the red ink began to show. Few breakout hits materialized; for every Kissing Jessica Stein, there were dozens of movies that never made it off the festival circuit (which is no party, financially speaking). Take the case of P.J. Hogan’s Unconditional Love. Originally titled Who Shot Victor Fox, the Australian director’s follow-up to My Best Friend’s Wedding and Muriel’s Wedding involves the posthumous un-closeting of a Tom Jones-y lounge singer. Despite Hogan’s track record and a cast that includes Rupert Everett, Dan Aykroyd, Kathy Bates and Jonathan Pryce (not to mention cameos from Barry Manilow and Julie Andrews), the movie is making a token pit stop at a few film festivals before being unceremoniously dumped to video. (See Ryan Godfrey’s review of Unconditional Love)

Murray, for one, couldn’t be happier about the dearth of gay-themed studio product, though the lack of a Jeffrey or Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss might cost the catalog some production value. "Even when [the studios] were making [gay] films, they were popular stuff, but never anything that really stood out," Murray says. "Now what you have is a lot of indies that vary in quality, but are getting better and better, and a solid core of international filmmaking that seems like it’s strong, and it was strong five years ago, and 10 years ago, and keeps being made."

Perhaps that’s why it seems like this year’s PIGLFF buffet, open from July 10 to 22, has more entrees and fewer desserts. For every gay strip-bar drama or lesbians-on-the-run adventure, there’s a movie like A World of Love, which reenacts the life of a young Pier Paolo Pasolini, or The Event, which tackles the issue of assisted suicide and end-stage AIDS. Even the festival’s closing-night movie, Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin as homicidal club kid Michael Alig, is more cautionary tale than celebration. (Or so you’d assume; tapes were not available for review.)

Celebration, it seems, ain’t what it used to be. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Supreme Court’s recent decision declaring anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional -- which the Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein called "the most momentous gay rights decision in American history" -- was how quick people have been to move past it. The response has been less "Let’s get it on" than "What next?" (Data regarding the success of "Wanna get constitutional?" as a pickup line is currently unavailable.) Goldstein’s article spent most of its length considering the likelihood of an anti-gay backlash to the Court’s decision, while another lengthy article in the same Voice issue was already moving on to the viability of gay marriage.

So it’s appropriate that, while a healthy sex-positivity still reigns over the festival as a whole, a number of movies in this year’s festival look beyond the politics of dancing, questioning the equation of sex and liberation. The documentary Hooked investigates how the ease of online cruising can shade into sexual addiction, while The Gift, also a documentary, uses the fringe phenomenon of "bug-chasers" (gay men who deliberately contract HIV) as a window into the popularity of bareback (unprotected) sex. In other times, either might have been attacked as counterproductive, self-loathing, hysterical or simply taboo, but the directors of both films report that they’ve been finding receptive audiences at gay film festivals around the world.

While Murray himself thinks the existence of bug-chasers is largely a myth, he says The Gift "raises much bigger issues." And, he confesses, "I can’t wait to see the reaction."

Murray expects to take criticism for programming the films, "particularly from older gay men. There’s a thing that we’re an oppressed minority that needs strong positive reinforcement to move the struggle along -- that criticism is really just homophobia and self-hating. Where I come from is we’re there already. We can criticize ourselves all we want, and it’s not self-hating."

Driven to distraction

Todd Ahlberg’s Hooked began with self-criticism in the most direct form. The hourlong documentary, which eventually encompassed hundreds of interviews and an 11,000-mile road trip around the country, was inspired by his own experience with online cruising, and the sensation that an over-reliance on the Internet for providing sexual partners had cut him off from the very thing he was looking for.

"I realized, looking at myself, I was meeting quite a few different people online, and hooking up with them, and I found myself questioning what I was doing and why I was doing it," Ahlberg says from his home in L.A. "But at the same time, I started noticing more and more of my friends talking about it, and the reason was there were more and more of these sites popping up, and boasting an increasing number of users."

Ahlberg was used to relying on the Internet for business as well as pleasure, most recently running the now-defunct website rotor.net, an interactive entertainment company whose clients included Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney. Due in no small part to the long hours he was putting in at work, Ahlberg frequently found himself up late, alone and in need of companionship, and without the time or inclination to try his luck at a bar. As some of the men in Hooked relate, the promise of immediate, no-strings-attached sex can be a heady one: More than one subject relates a common scenario where the "host" lies face down on his bed, leaves his door unlocked and never sees or speaks to the man he’s having it off with. One unrepentant gent recalls setting up encounters with seven different men in a 24-hour period.

"It’s incredibly efficient," Ahlberg says, "and I think there is a way to integrate this activity into your life. The danger, if you want to call it that, is when you get accustomed to cutting out all of that middle stuff, that stuff being going to bars, projecting body language, reading body language, that certain energy that happens between people, whether or not you’re going to have sex with them. When you cut all that out, there’s the potential of forgetting how to be social, which means you forget how to be intimate." Hooked shows footage of several hookups in progress, and how, with a few carefully honed phrases, the boundaries of an entire sexual encounter can be set in a matter of a minute or two.

As his interest in making a documentary grew, Ahlberg used the tools of his trade: After setting up a website and posting a link to it in several cruising chat rooms, Ahlberg narrowed down the more than 1,200 responses to a little over a hundred. Then, he used conferencing software to set up live video chats with each of his subjects, sending out digital video cameras for each subject to tape his side of the interview, then send it on to the next participant. Eventually, though, the irony of making a documentary about the lack of human connection without actually meeting any of his subjects must’ve gotten to Ahlberg; he decided he couldn’t finish the film without piling into his car and driving around the country, meeting "a few dozen" of his subjects face-to-face. (Even then, Ahlberg couldn’t resist an online hookup on the road, though nowadays, he says, "It’s completely lost its flavor for me.")

"By and large, the stories were sad," Ahlberg says. "They were from a community of lost people. Not everyone -- some, all they talked about was all the fun they were having. But for a lot of kids, the emerging generation, they were coming out in these chat rooms. Their first experience with being gay is having conversations with strangers and/or hooking up with them. If that’s how you learn to be social, what’s going to happen in five to 10 years?"

There’s a sense in which Hooked reinforces some of the oldest and most pernicious anti-gay stereotypes: that homosexuality is pathological, a sickness. (The word "addiction" is used frequently.) But for Ahlberg, who funded the entire project himself, there was simply no choice but to make the film. "I can’t not talk about this stuff," he says. "If anybody could read the responses that came in, they’d probably understand that this thing needed to be made. The fact that screenings are packed at every festival is a testament to that. As a culture, as a gay community, we possess the ability to be introspective, to look at each other, to be a little bit more conscious."

Hooked screens Sun., July 13, 9:45 p.m., Independence Seaport Museum.

The "gift" that keeps on giving

If criticism of the gay community is implicit in Hooked, it’s explicit in Louise Hogarth’s The Gift, which investigates a sub-subculture of gay men who "eroticize the virus," willingly getting and passing on HIV. In February, a Rolling Stone article quoted a San Francisco psychiatrist as saying that "at least 25 percent" of new HIV infections among gay men were deliberate, a quote he subsequently denied having given, but not before the piece had been seized on by right-wing moralists as evidence of gay depravity. The furor abated somewhat after another source claimed his quotes were entirely fabricated, casting the entire article into doubt.

Though it’s impossible to even discuss the issue of bug-chasing without sounding sensationalistic, The Gift does its best to put it in context, rather than exploiting it for shock value. For Hogarth, the issue isn’t bug-chasing so much as what it says about what’s happened to gay culture. Two young men who contracted the virus on purpose speak of a sense of relief, in that they no longer have to worry about when they’re going to get it. And besides, says one, "there’ll be a cure soon."

As a tragic, unintended consequence of advertising designed to lessen the stigma of HIV, the idea that AIDS is not a death sentence has become, to some, a license for unsafe sex. The film features interviews with several men who’ve attended sex parties, some facilitated through www.barebackjack.com (the site run by one of The Gift’s bug-chasers), where condoms and discussion of HIV status is taboo -- one even posts a sign at the door advising entrants to assume that everyone inside is HIV-positive. A lexicon emerges as well: The virus is "the gift;" those who willingly pass it on are "gift-givers."

Hogarth provides context via interviews with Walt Odets, author of In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS, and a support group of HIV-positive men who discuss the inadequacy of AIDS-awareness campaigns. Looking at one poster of a toned, rippled torso, one quips, "I look at that, and I just get hard."

"We’ve almost made it positive to be positive," Hogarth says. "I’ve heard of dinner parties where people will talk about what medications they’re on, and the negative guy will lie and say he’s on something as well. It’s a very strange thing that’s happened. When I show this film to mixed-status groups, they will get into quite a heated discussion, and often the negative-status men will say they feel pressure from the community to be positive."

Hogarth doesn’t claim to know the extent of the bug-chasing subculture, though she points to rising membership at barebackjack and an article in last month’s Seattle Times detailing a 100-percent-plus spike in local infections over the last two years as evidence that the virus is gaining ground, though the two phenomena don’t necessarily seem connected or conclusive. (Links to related articles can be found at www.thegiftdocumentary.com.) And in her desire to get gay men to re-evaluate their sexual practices, Hogarth focuses almost obsessively on the issue of personal responsibility. I mention that Hooked, which Hogarth hasn’t had a chance to see, is playing in the same festival as her film, and when I describe it as a film about "sexual and Internet addiction," Hogarth immediately bristles at the word "addiction." "It isn’t an addiction," she says. "They’re choosing."

The Gift isn’t perfect, but it points in the right direction, enough to start an important discussion. And that, ultimately, is what Hogarth wants. "I was told by so many people, you’re going to get in a lot of trouble for this movie. But it’s been overwhelmingly supportive. Because the gay community, the masses, they know we’re in trouble. They know what’s going on."

The Gift screens Tue., July 15, 7:30 p.m., Independence Seaport Museum. Hogarth and Doug Hitzel, one of The Gift’s subjects, will attend the screening.