Thanks to the University of New Mexico Queer-Straight Alliance for co-sponsoring the Southwest Gay & Lesbian Film Festival screening of THE SKIN I’M IN. (Sunday, 1 PM, Southwest Film Center on the UNM Campus)
My greatest hope for the film is that it engages young people in an intergenerational dialogue, so I look forward to attendees joining the online conversation here on the site.
Check out the Tmes Colonist article on Rande by Amy Smart: “Totem goes Dutch: Victoria-based carver’s work part of First Nations exhibit in the Netherlands”
An excerpt:
Kwakwaka’wakw history – from the mass loss of art during the potlatch ban in the 1880s through persistent poverty on reserves – is all connected in his art. But at the same time, Cook is conscientious of defining his own voice and moving across traditional boundaries that have separated First Nations art from others.
“I push myself, not only to create my own distinctive style, but to continue to tell stories – stories of today,” he said. “I want to connect with the rest of the world.
A compelling cover story this week in the LA WEEKLY by Patrick Range McDonald entitled Gay Happiness, the New Frontier: Are mental and physical health problems really a reaction to bigotry? resonates strongly with questions and experiences I’ve tried to explore and express through THE SKIN I’M IN. The article tries to go beyond simply blaming cultural persecution for gay men’s problems, challenging gay men and LGBTQ organizations to explore how the (American, and increasingly globalizing) gay version of “community” with its preoccupation with surface and substance (abuse) foster a large component of the sense of alienation, illness, and self-abuse that continue in gay males.
Feeling outside of mainstream culture, young men turn to the gay community which, as currently structured around bars, design, fashion, physique, and corporate sponsorship, often leads to an equally, but more troubling sense of alienation and outsider-ness from within. Gay men are also searching for a way to explore a sense of spirituality outside of organized religions that so vocally reject them, and this can be a major challenge. Of course, a new brand of spiritualized, self-exploring gays run the risk of becoming as much a trope, commodity, and clique as its nightlife, beauty, and retail therapy counterparts…
Check out the article , and share your thoughts and experiences in the feed for this post.
Rande Cook is at it again, this time collaborating with artist Peter Lewis to create the coolest “drinking fountain” I’ve ever seen.
The original was commissioned for Duncan, BC’s centennial. Rande’s sculpture will be cast in fiberglass by artist Richard Gibson to produce the finished piece. In all, 25 clones will be cast and “sold at $45,000 to global collectors, institutions and cities saluting the City of Totems” with funds going back into the Duncan treasury.
Read the full article on their collaboration by Peter Rusland for the Cowichan News Leader.
Shortstop of the Toronto Bluejays Yunel Escobar was suspended by his team for three games today for playing with “Tu Ere Maricon” written in his eyeblack. It’s great that the Bluejays took public action to discipline Escobar, but his own apology speaks to a level of continued ignorance: “I don’t have anything against homosexuals. I have friends who are gay…” Then in direct reference to the word Maricon, “It’s a word used often within teams…it’s uh, as uh, it’s a word without meaning in the way [I] used it.”
This coming off the anonymous Fluter Online Magazine interview last week with one of Germany’s leading Bundesliga soccer superstars who says that he is gay but afraid to come out (English coverage of the article in Der Spiegel Online here). The player is apparently out to teammates and team brass, all of whom he says have no problem with his sexuality. But he has a fear of the media frenzy coming out might ignite and the reaction of fans. Some select quotes: “I have to put on a show and deny my true identity every day…I don’t know whether I will be able to take the constant tension between the model heterosexual player and the possible discovery, until the end of my career.” All this told to a 25-year-old reporter for publication in Fluter which is youth magazine published by the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
Bundesliga officials and even German Chancellor Angela Merkel chimed in on the interview, on a weekend where ironically, all soccer players donned jerseys reading “Geh Deinen Weg” (Go your own way) as part of a campaign to promote soccer as a means of transcending religious and racial intolerance. Merkel told press, “He lives in a country in which he need have no fear of outing himself publicly…We have to acknowledge there are still fears when it comes to the social environment [in football]. We can only give a signal: You need not fear.”
Meanwhile in U.S. NFL football, a storyline of another sort plays out as a Maryland state delegate Emmet C. Burns’s attempt to censure Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo for supporting a gay marriage proposition on the state ballot backfired, making both Avanbadejo and Minnesota Vikings player Chris Kluwe (who posted a colorful open letter to Burns in defense of gay marriage and free speech) internet heroes of the week.
These stories coming in such close succession after an Olympics in which the number of out athletes was a marked topic of media conversation (only 23 of over 10,00o competitors and only 4 of them male were out at the games), seem like revamped headlines to old news. In May of this year former Redskin player LaVar Arrington said in a radio interview that the first active NFL player to come out would be a “national hero.” Granted he was already retired at the time, but it is sobering to remember former NFL player Dave Kopay came out in Lynn Rosellini’s Washington Star cover story way back in 1975…
What do yo think? Do these three incidents speak to progress and substantive discourse, or are we simply going round and round in mediated cycles of progress and prudery?
My friend Volker Beier recently shared this YouTube video with me of college student Matthew Vines, delivering the result of two-years of independent research and scholarship on the Bible and homosexuality at College Hill United Methodist Church in Wichita, Kansas earlier this year.
Matthew’s critical approach is fueled in no small part by his own longstanding conflict between his own innate identity and contemporary religious interpretations of scripture. Aside from the fact that it is heartening to watch a young adult speak articulately and comprehensively on any subject, I’m especially taken by his points (beginning at 45:30) about the cultural/historical specificity of language, or more appropriately, language’s frequent failure to appropriately capture the nuanced matrices of identity.
These failures of language, or more appropriately, the frequent failure of humans to acknowledge the fact that language is mere sign, continues to tie up our cultural and political debates with moral stands against homosexuality based solely on precarious translations of scripture across language, culture, and time. The consequences of such semiotics are very real, however, demonstrated by the human lives impacted by and all-too-often, lost in translation.
Even in our attempt to include all categories of identity that deserve protection or inclusion, we combat the restrictiveness of language and labels with more language and labels: L, G, B, T, Q, I…
What are your thoughts on the possibilities and limitations of language as a means of recognizing specific experience while also leaving space for plurality and difference? Can we get beyond language, or somehow invite a greater sense of reflexivity and play in its engagement?
THE SKIN I’M IN will screen in Albuquerque at the Southwest Film Center on the University of New Mexico’s Main Campus at 1 PM, Sunday September 30 as part of the Southwest Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Full details here
I thought this poster from Wipe Out Transphobia was really helpful not only for being an effective trans ally, but also for thinking about identity more universally. The point that “gender identity is not sexual identity,” applies to anyone. In the end, we are all “trans” to whatever degree our sense(s) of self or performance(s) of identity differ from culturally-constructed/popularly-accepted “norms.”
For anyone in Korea, the Asian Premiere dates at DMZ DOCS have been announced. The film will screen twice, on Sept. 22 and Sept. 27.
DMZ DOCS is an international documentary festival held in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, using this symbolic space to showcase a program of world documentaries that promote peace and human understanding.
Particularly given the status of LGBT issues in Korea, we’re honored to have THE SKIN I’M IN be a part of this festival.
