Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Arthur Dong

80 Arthur Dong Filmmaker Arthur Dong is perhaps best known for his documentary trilogy Stories from the War on Homosexuality, films that examine some of the institutions and cultural attitudes that have often been hostile—in some cases, brutally so—to gay men and lesbians. Dong had been making films for over a decade when the first of the trilogy, Coming Out under Fire (1994), based on Allan Berube’s history of gays and lesbians in the military, secured his place as a major voice in documentary filmmaking. Described by Stephen Holden in the New York Times as “quietly devastating,” the film earned the director several major awards. His subsequent films—one has appeared about every five years—have continued to win critical acclaim. We meet at his home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles , a pleasant residential area known for its ethnic diversity and home to the city’s largest population of same-sex couples outside of West Hollywood. Dong ushers me into his studio, which also serves as the play area for his young son. Tables of editing equipment agreeably coexist with a playpen and toys. Album covers—he’s got over forty of them—from various LP recordings of Flower Drum Song— are mounted on the walls. It turns out that the film version of that Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, based on the novel by Chin Y. Lee, was the first English-language movie Dong ever saw in a theater. 81 Ar thur Dong “In Chinatown”—he’s speaking of San Francisco, where he was born in 1953—“there were four theaters playing only Chineselanguage films.” It was in one of those theaters, when he was about eight or nine, that he first saw Flower Drum Song, a film he once described as “a refreshing change from the low-budget films from overseas that we sat through week after week.” (Over forty years later, Dong was instrumental in getting the film accepted on the National Film Registry. “No film since,” he wrote in his nomination statement , “has had such a major and lasting impact on projecting a three-dimensional portrait of Asia America.”) Hooked on American movies, Dong was soon a regular at the repertory houses in the city. “I was fascinated that you could watch a film made thirty or forty years ago. There is no doubt that I’m fascinated by history. I’ve always loved the movie The Time Machine because you could go back in time. I’d love to have dinner with Jean Harlow. That would be so cool.” In 1967, when he was thirteen, Dong saw his first documentary film, a CBS television special called The Homosexuals. “It was a slanderous portrayal. They showed the cheesiest, sleaziest images.” But at the time, what he was primarily aware of is that much of the film had been shot in places he knew. He remembers thinking, Oh, is that where they are! Bright and popular, in high school Dong was a cheerleader and boys’ vice president. “All a façade. It was really hard for me to take gym classes, very difficult to be in that machismo environment.” A high school art project introduced him to the world of filmmaking, giving him a medium to express his growing sense of alienation. His project, shot in his bedroom with a little Brownie movie camera, focused on the life of a five-year-old Chinese American boy confronting social mores and cultural bias. It took first prize in the California High School Film Festival, a prize that included a thousand-dollar award and a public screening. The evening the film was shown, Dong “just freaked out. The impact of watching my film—a very political film. I remember thinking, This is scary stuff. This isn’t just about watching Greta Garbo or Nancy Wong.” It was about this time that Dong told his high school counselor that he was gay—he’d known since he was thirteen—and was planning to drop out. In response, the counselor arranged for Dong to complete his senior year without having to be on campus. Together with a female classmate, he took a studio apartment in the Tenderloin district. “We said we were common-law man and wife. It was preposterous , but we got away with it.” Between his independent study classes, he worked at various jobs, which were credited as “workstudy experience” on his...