The film opens with Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena, a female-to-male transsexual (in his/her
own mind - issues of class have a lot to do with why s/he has not transitioned 'officially', not to
mention age, as s/he is only twenty-one) in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1993. After making the
'mistake' of dating a local woman and incurring the wrath of that girl's brother and friends, s/he
decides to flee town, with the styling/hairdressing aid of a gay friend, Lonnie (though it turns out
s/he is fleeing a great deal more, of which a criminal record of considerable proportions is just
the surface).
At a bar on the way, s/he meets Candice, Tom and John, a generally bad bunch of
convicts/junkies, and Lana, a 'lost soul' with whom s/he falls in love and goes to Falls City with.
These characters lead desperate, self-destructive lives for the most part, leavened by impossible
dreams, and Brandon is by no means much better than them.
The fact that everyone in this film is a liar and is running (or driving) as fast as s/he can to no
avail cannot be easily discarded as foreshadowing, but it's one of the few heavy-handed
elements in a film of very deliberate, sometimes leaden, pace.
Eventually, Lana notices Brandon's cleavage, 'pack' and lack of facial hair while they are
making love, but she does not seem to care.
Meanwhile, trouble has been brewing with John, who used to be Lana's boyfriend and is a
wildly jealous, irrational man, particularly as he begins to realize that Brandon is with Lana.
When Brandon makes the foolish mistake of trying to pay a traffic ticket, s/he gets thrown in jail
(in the Girls' House, of course) for outstanding theft warrants.
Meanwhile, Candice finds tampons and bloody jeans (from a period) in Brandon's room and
tells Lana.
Lana goes to jail to confront Brandon with this information, who fibs and says s/he's a
hermaphrodite; based on this, Lana gets Brandon out.
Unfortunately, while drinking, Candice tells John that Brandon is a girl.
Meanwhile, Lana has run off with Brandon.
Lana is the only one who doesn't seem to care about Brandon's gender, and she is the one that
John and Tom are trying to 'protect' by tracking them down, once the boys find more 'evidence'
in Brandon's room.
They find Brandon, and drag him/her into the bathroom where they find s/he is not 'male'. Lana
and her mother, albeit reluctantly on the latter's part, 'rescue' him/her.
When Brandon leaves, the boys outside grab him/her. An extremely brutal rape scene follows,
which I could not really stand to watch.
When Brandon goes to report this, the cops are the sleazy, voyeuristic, unsympathetic fucks they
usually are, reducing Brandon to tears.
Of the townsfolk, only the nurse at the hospital seems at all sympathetic to Brandon.
Brandon runs to Candice, who finds some kindness in her heart and shelters Brandon.
Lana's mother makes the mistake of telling Tom that the rape has been reported. In a nod to her
multi-layered personality, it is abundantly clear that she BELIEVES that the rape took place,
thanks to her seeing the boys washing out Brandon's bloodstained clothes - but that her
dislike/fear of Brandon and anyone else who challenges 'normalcy' is too strong to fully
overcome.
It is interesting that, when Lana and Brandon make love for the last time, it is as 'girls' and is not
shown. Voyeurism, or at least conventional voyeurism, is not on Peirce's agenda.
Things accelerate from here to the inevitable, tragic, bloody ending.
This would be a sad enough story if if were a work of fiction, but it is based on Lana's account of events. I suppose there is some consolation in the fact that John is on Death Row for 1st degree murder and that Tom got consecutive life sentences for turning state's evidence - but not much, since I'm opposed to the death penalty and would rather see Brandon alive, and no more dead Brandons, than have to arrest a lot more confused people that the system then disingenuously describes as 'sick' - who made them ill, then? Society can't wipe its hands clean until it stops regarding gender rebels as threats to its existence - the evidence of this film suggests quite the opposite on that point...
______________________________________________________________________________
by Miss Ivy
I went to Reelout!, the first yearly Queer Film Festival in Kingston. First of all, I attended the
opening gala, and met a transsexual Queens' student, along with Tim and Arne (ed. note - we
really are everywhere!).
The following day, I attended my first set of queer films - the series called Working, Out, which
consisted of American and Canadian films.
The first film, Out At Work: Lesbians and Gay Men on the Job, was made by America's
Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold in 1996, and dealt with cases of lesbian and gay employees
trying to better the workplace for others.
The first example was the famous Cracker Barrel controversy, which happened in Bremen,
Georgia. Here, a shop and restaurant that sold racist dolls and Confederate battle flags decided
that a lesbian chef was bad for its 'family image' (ed. note - you go, Miss Ivy! You're fierce!).
They fired her, despite the fact that she had a child and spouse to support and was working hard.
She had no legal grounds to fight the firing, since Georgia was one of forty-one states where
gays and lesbians had no labour rights at all in 1991, so she went to Queer Nation and the Martin
Luther King Centre of Civil Rights. Together, they picketed and boycotted the Cracker Barrel
shops. While she didn't win her job back, and Queer Nation broke up, they still occupied a
Cracker Barrel store for an hour.
The second case was about an automotive electrician in Michigan who happened to be gay. He
was hassled by his co-workers, including a man who claimed to be a member of the Ku Klux
Klan. He went to the U.A.W. (United Auto Workers) and found that his loyalty paid off. They
helped him find work at a new site and he represented them in a California convention, at which
he introduced a widely supported ban against discrimination based on sexual orientation in the
U.A.W. and auto plants.
The third case is about a gay, African-American librarian at the Brooklyn Library in New York,
who changed the spousal benefit law to include same-sex partners, since his HIV+ positive
couldn't find work. His efforts were helped by public employee unions and library guilds.
The Canadian film, The Pinko Triangle (Chris Patrick Crowe and Ruthe Whiston) was made in
1998 about queer life in the Northern Ontario town of Sudbury. It takes on INCO, the
International Nickel Corporation, makers of giant nickels and 'lunar surfaces' used on Earth to
train astronauts. Using a collection of stories from Sudbury's newspapers (and Stompin' Tom
Connors' "Sudbury Saturday Night"), it tells of the town's multi-cultural, blue-collar heritage,
reinterpreting stories about sports and ladies' dances, while telling why young people in some
cases went to Toronto. Sudbury had Northern Ontario's first gay pride march, with a dance
number featuring a drag queen with a beer-can wig, and this is shown.
These films show an important part of queer life, both in employment and the communities we
live in. Breaking the mold of rich artsy types protected by social networks from harsh realities,
they show that queers are more like anyone else than some are comfortable with, and that those
detractors should get over it.
After the profound, I then saw the sexy.
Slutty Shorts were films that explored queer reality in the real world.
Alien Kisses (Canada's Dara Gellman) is a black-and-white film about two lesbians making out
in a bedroom flat.
Why I Stopped Going To Foreign Films (Canada's Steve Reinke) is a mix of black-and-white
post-war films and sex scenes of two gay men in colour.
After Morning (Canada's Kelly O'Brien) shows the hardships of sex in the city, in which the
travails of finding contraception in NYC on a Sunday are explored (ed. note - yet another reason
to dance on Archbishop John O'Connor's grave in cha-cha heels...).
Fuck This Ginger (Canada's Jennifer Conroy) shows black-and-white lesbian and gay sex and
challenges bias within the gay community about crossing colour boundaries.
Andy (Steve Reinke again) is a tongue-in-cheek look at the stereotypical gay man's love of
interior decorating and sex, in which the narrator describes his purchase of fixtures at Canadian
Tire (ed. note - I'm not sure of an American equivalent - some big hardware store that the sort of
people who grumble that no stores are open at 7 AM on a Saturday were designed for the
putative amusement thereof...), while men pose in boxers, briefs, jockstraps, cock rings and even
naked.
Makbul, His Favoured One (Turkey's Huseyin Karagoz) explores homoeroticism in Ottoman
Turkey during the reign of Suleyman I, the Magnificent.
Jangri (Canada's Safiya Fandera) shows an East Indian woman dealing with both culture shock
and her own sexuality amid bias from both cultures against it, which she overcomes and is
changed by the experience.
Two American films wrap it up with definitely-not-Hollywood productions about queerness.
The first, Below The Belt (Laurie Colbert, Dominique Cardona) examines the relationship of a
lesbian and bisexual woman who box. Boot Camp (John Scott Matthews) is a comic romp in a
leather bar by a novice gay man. He enters, and everyone is so butch...until it comes to show-tune and piano-bar music starting up.
I found the Queer Film Festival the best Queer event in Kingston for a while. It was a change of
pace from mass commercial movies and explored issues I couldn't explain in a support group.
Its humour and realism allowed me to escape the heterosexist world in life and media.
It's a paradox they make queer mainstream but keep the avant-gardeness, and I really hope there are more Queer Film Festivals in Kingston. We need them, since it's enjoyable to find we are not alone.
