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  • The New Homosexual Film Festivals
  • B. Ruby Rich

"What position do film festivals occupy, exactly?" That was the question I posed seven years ago, then buried unanswered in my initial GLQ meditation on what were then known quaintly as "lesbian and gay film festivals." 1 Now, less than a decade later, the retitled LGBTQ film festivals inhabit a substantially changed cultural and political landscape, transformed by predictable as well as unforeseen pressures from both within and without the queer communities. Such pressures include the rise of a homophobic and right-wing Christian fundamentalist politics in the United States, the tightening of all zones of tolerance under a "national security state" intent on militarizing civilian life, increased xenophobia masked as ignorance and indifference, generational differences within queer communities, chronically underexamined class and race differences, the impact of the Internet and digital technologies on live events, and the transformation of audiences brought about by niche marketing and increased seduction of queer viewers into willing consumers serviced by commercial representational products.

Investigations are more urgent than ever into what positions exactly the festivals today inhabit not only in the body politic but also in the political imaginary of their publics, those viewers who constitute themselves in hundreds of movie theaters and screening spaces around the globe as communities of identity. Gathered to bear witness to film and video products with which they claim a connection, these audiences continue to turn out, constituting visible communities, if only for a brief time each year, and ensuring the continual growth of the festivals themselves in however conflicted and ambivalent a space. It is time that reception theory gets a hearing in the academy again, and high time that sociology students liven their statistics classes by securing data on the lives, experiences, tastes, and subjectivities of today's LGBTQ audiences.

To be sure, all is not well on the festival front: in a double bind particular to the LGBTQ festivals, they are charged year after year with outlasting their mandate and invited, if not ordered, to cease and desist. The frequency with which critics inside and outside the queer communities issue this call to arms—or, rather, to disarm—is perplexing. The frequency is as constant as the message: critics contend that choices have become available enough in the mainstream to obviate the need for such specialization; that queer audiences have been transformed [End Page 620] into a niche market no longer in need of "ghettoized" events; that the film/video festivals are a stale holdover from the early post-Stonewall era, surviving only in the form of an evolutionary redundancy that ought, by now, to succumb to the pull of cultural Darwinism.

Such critiques generally hold, in keeping with current political and economic theory, that the marketplace takes care of everything: insofar as queer audiences provide subject matter and box-office dollars, popular culture will reward that presence with product. Ha. What has become apparent is the extent to which the LGBTQ festivals may instead become repositories of that which mainstream popular culture does not intend to embrace. The same pattern has stamped itself indelibly and chronologically on other communities—such as feminist viewers in the 1970s, African American viewers in the 1980s—that have entered the embrace of popular culture: each time, the audience that was open to experimentation and challenge when that was the sole route to representation turned its back on these alternative image strategies after commercialized versions were offered. It is not far-fetched to see the pattern repeated with LGBTQ audiences. On the other hand, such a development may well force the hand of the festivals and focus their mission on underrepresented arenas.

Here three trends bear mention: the transgender revolution represented not by mainstream characters bent on Oscar nominations but by increasingly accomplished works entirely framed and produced by trans sensibilities and talents; the rise of a brilliant "third queer" cinema outside the North American–Western European axis; and the fruition of digital storytelling realized by low-budget toolboxes.

The MIX festivals in Mexico and Brazil have been powerful seedbeds for local production in this regard, a function that paid off with one of the most exciting queer films of...

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