Out on Screen Turns 20

My interview with the founders and current Out On Screen staff appears in this week's Xtra! West.

LOOKING FORWARD TO 20 MORE YEARS. Out on Screen's programming director Vanessa Kwan (right, with executive director Drew Dennis) says she's thrilled with the growth of The festival. (ANDREA WARNER PHOTO) Originally just three days long and managed by a half-dozen volunteers without any funding, Vancouver's Queer Film Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary this year when it opens Aug 14. Though it scarcely resembles its humble origins, the festival has continued to thrive by staying true to its film fest roots while expanding its role within the queer community. Out on Screen (OOS), the society that produces the annual festival, now boasts paid staff, year-round programming, and over 250 volunteers. Even its modest headquarters on Hastings St are a long way from the West End living room where the original board members gathered to hash out everything from the festival lineup to gender politics. Conceived as a cultural component for the 1990 Gay Games, OOS held its first film festival in 1989 as a trial run and is now the second oldest festival of its kind in Canada. Louise Pohl, one of OOS' founding board members, recalls some of the initial challenges. "I hadn't done anything like this before, and then before I knew it I was president of the board," she laughs. "We had no money. In the first year we did a 24-hour Worst Movie Marathon and used the money from that for the first festival." Chris Adkins, also part of the founding festival board, recalls the challenge of finding films for the first festival. "There were a lot fewer outlets then," Adkins says. "It was tough finding out about films and where to get them. Now there's a huge circuit of queer film festivals." That first festival showed just four features and a couple of short films; the first film the festival screened, Salut Victor, offered a rare glimpse of two men falling in love in a nursing home. This year, there are 110 features and shorts in the festival lineup. Pohl says she was particularly drawn to volunteer with Out on Screen as it offered her a chance to work with both gays and lesbians towards a common goal: finding films to reflect as many queer realities as possible. "It was lesbians and gay men working together for the first time, and I think there's a lot of polarizing that goes on in the community," she says. "I wanted to do something that would cross that divide." Another founding member, Graham Peat, recalls the difficulty in uniting these voices under one festival. "It was a challenge because there were never as many films made back then for women or by women about lesbian issues as there were about gay men, who had more power, more cameras, and everything else," Peat says. As the community became more united in its efforts to promote the arts, there was also an internal shift towards stabilizing the administration, taking OOS to the next level by providing more opportunities for community involvement and engagement. Having survived its first five years without funding, OOS received its first grant in 1993, beginning its gradual evolution into a multi-faceted arts and culture organization. Vanessa Kwan, OOS' current director of programming, says she's thrilled by the festival's expansion into workshops, master classes, performances, parties, visual arts shows and musical events. "Film is a really great medium, and we kind of treat it as a gateway to all the other things that artists are doing in tandem with their film practices," Kwan says. "In terms of pushing the medium forward, we're really interested in seeing all those other art forms that intersect with film in a meaningful way." In 2004, OOS launched the Out in Schools project, bringing independent queer film into high schools. The Queer History Project started in 2007, commissioning works that will help document local queer voices and their stories. On Aug 14, the history project's online component will launch as an interactive website where queer people will be invited to share videos, audio, photos, and other art forms. "It's the idea that the community will be able to recreate, recapture, re-imagine, and explore queer histories," says Drew Dennis, OOS' executive director. "[The community] doesn't really have an oral history that's passed down from generation to generation. Very rarely are we born into queer families." Pohl too is grateful to see OOS continued expansion. "It just makes my heart warm getting the program every year," she says. " It was all so grassroots compared with how it is now. It was a lot of hard work and a very steep learning curve. We were there because we really wanted this to happen." Dennis and Kwan are equally committed to making it happen, and neither wants to dwell too long basking in the glory of OOS' 20th anniversary. It's "important to think about the next 20 years now," says Dennis.

VANCOUVER QUEER FILM FESTIVAL. Aug 14-24. www.queerfilmfestival.ca.

A Jihad for Love-Parvez Sharma interview

My interview with A Jihad for Love's director, Parvez Sharma appears in Xtra! West this week. Pick up a copy if you can!

Making A Jihad for Love
By Andrea Warner

A Jihad for Love is a film over five years in the making, spanning 12 countries, and nine languages, but director Parvez Sharma feels all the hard work was worth it, if only to give a voice to the Muslim world's most unlikely storytellers: Queer people.

Sharma arrived in New York just as the city experienced the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre that sent shockwaves throughout the planet—ones that can still be felt today. Sharma's existence was fraught with duality and he began to experience a wholly different kind of intolerance: it was one thing to be gay in America in 2001, but to be Muslim? That was just asking for trouble.

"No one was speaking about the kind of Islam I knew when I was growing up and I felt that I needed to come out as a Muslim," Sharma says, over the phone from his home in New York. "[The film's] not just about being gay or lesbian. You are claiming your faith and that was the primary imperative for me--to take some of the discourse about Islam away from the violent fringe."

For starters, he named the film A Jihad for Love. In the Western world, the word jihad has come to be associated with terrorist attacks, CNN stories, and has fueled a tremendous amount of Christian fundamentalist propaganda. In actuality, Sharma says, the term means a deep, personal struggle, and this struggle for love is what he documents as the film's subjects reconcile sexuality with religious beliefs.

Sharma acknowledges that homosexuality is not a very visible part of current Islam, but insists that this is a relatively recent development (the last 30-40 years, documented in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), and that there is still space for gays in the Muslim world, even if those spaces flout conventional ideals.

"Very often we adopt an arrogant Western perspective towards analyzing life in Muslim countries," Sharma says. "Islam has a tradition of homosexuality being celebrated in the arts and the culture for hundreds of years. And it has existed even as a part of the mainstream."

According to Sharma, it's sometimes even a rite of passage for people to have same-sex relationships before they enter into marriage, and that due to its patriarchal structure; this actually creates a uniquely double-edged sword regarding lesbianism in Muslim society.

"Women's sexuality is often denied, it's simply not discussed, and sometimes in that realm of invisibility, [lesbianism] can exist in a much more fluid way than male homosexuality, which would be seen as threatening," Sharma says.

The question of coming out takes on an entirely different scope when committing one's story to film for the entire world to see. Sharma spent many years carefully crafting relationships with his subjects, building friendships between people who had often struggled alone, insular in their religious and sexual identity. Though prepared for the obvious obstacles of secretly filming a gay documentary in Muslim countries, Sharma found some unexpected opposition from the gay Muslim community.

"Anytime when a community is repressed and silenced, and when someone steps out of that silence, dares to do something, then people react to that." Sharma says. "People didn't want to trust me. But, being a Muslim, I was filming with that Muslim lens; I was very critical of how much of myself I had to give. Many of the really remarkable people in this film were breaking a tremendous silence, sharing what is deeply personal."

Despite the initial wariness from the community, the film has resonated with audiences of all varieties: queer, straight, Muslim, Christian, even atheists have been fascinated at Love's intimate examination of faith and sexuality, but the real challenge is getting the film shown in Muslim countries.

"I showed the film in Turkey and the response was amazing, and in my home country, India," Sharma says. "But I really hope I can take the film to Arab countries one day, that I can show the film in Iran. A few people have been smuggling tapes into Pakistan, for example, where they've organized screenings already in the last few months, so I hope efforts like that will continue so that people who really need to see the film are able to."

This is where Love works on multiple levels: aspects of the movie are meant to lift the veil of silence on homosexuality for Muslims and people in Arab countries, while other parts of the film serve to expand the Western idea of what it really means to be gay and Muslim. Sharma, for one, is wary of the North American tendency to impose its Western ideals.

"The question really, is who gets to define freedom, and on whose terms?" Sharma says. "Are we going to dictate freedoms based on our concepts of what it means to be gay in the west to more traditional ancient cultures? Or, are we going to allow them to develop their own concepts of sexual freedom? I very much lean towards the latter."

Ultimately, Love is also meant to reach out to gays who feel an affinity for a higher power, but may have felt the need to sacrifice their religious beliefs when they claimed their sexual identity. Sharma himself comes from a relatively secular background (he did not attend religious school like many young Muslims) and had already dealt with coming out during his late teens, but he says he developed a great respect for Islam through his film's subjects. He hopes Love will assist other queer people to reconcile their spiritual beliefs.

"I realized through the most trying times, these people (the film subjects) drew sustenance from Islam and what they believed to be their Islam. And that, for me, was very empowering," Sharma says. "I think the film is expanding the consciousness of the audience who is watching it. Not just expanding the understanding of Islam, but faith, which many queer people abandon because they don't find spaces for themselves within faith."

Queer + Asian = ?

My story appears in today's Xtra West!

Caught Between Two Sets of Expectations
By Andrea Warner

A panel discussion at the University of British Columbia (UBC) raised more questions than it answered when it brought together an assortment of participants to talk about what it means to be queer and Asian.

Hosted by UBC's Asian Canadian Cultural Organization, the Mar 7 discussion capped off two days of workshops regarding Asian experiences.

Titled Queer + Asian = ? it was touted as a safe haven for people to share their own stories about being queer, racism in the gay community, struggles with coming out, and the cultural give and take between Asian family values and more Western norms.

The most wide-ranging discussion stemmed from the concept of coming out.

"Western culture advocates the individual, whereas Asian culture is more about the collective," says Allen Chen, a 21-year-old UBC student, who says being Asian-Canadian and queer means being caught between two sets of expectations.

For many of the panelists, being gay is only one facet of their identity — and not the dominant facet at that. In contrast, many felt the norm in Vancouver's gay community is to identify first by sexual orientation, then by ethnicity, cultural association, or career.

Being gay isn't a topic generally discussed with family members, panelists noted.

"In Chinese culture, straight or gay, we all hide our relationships," says Lydia Luk, who works at The Centre on Bute St.

Luk has been in a relationship with a woman for over four years but has never told her family. But, she points out, several of her straight friends are also in long-term relationships and haven't told their families either. It's not so much a secret, she says, as a culture founded on respect and privacy.

"There's the idea of a Confucian duty to carry on the family line," Chen says. "As long as you fulfill the public duty, you can live your private life." It's not uncommon for men to marry, have children, and continue to have sex with men on the side.

Asian communities can be incredibly small and close knit, notes Luk, so word gets around very quickly if someone comes out. That's why, she explains, "sometimes we're out in certain communities and sometimes we're not."

Coming out to family also means finding the right words, something that can be difficult in some languages.

"I haven't been able to say I'm gay in Chinese," Chen says. "It's a bad word. It's immediately connoted as negative."

Several people echoed having similar difficulties. For instance, there is no equivalent to "coming out" in Cantonese, as the terms are all very technical. Even if some people wanted to have the conversation, it could prove almost impossible.

For Asian Canadians who do decide to come out, many have difficulty finding resources that reflect their own cultural realities. The majority of resources target English speakers, and while translations are available, language barriers may muddle the meaning and intention of the words.

Additionally, many Asian cultures don't seek support networks outside the family. There are currently no Asian members of PFLAG, a statistic the organization is desperately hoping will change in coming years.

Asian Canadians may also face discrimination within the gay community, an idea that's referred to as a "pecking order" of idealized looks, cultures, and experiences. One of the questions raised by the panel was: is racial preference simply preference or is it racism? And, just because you're attracted to people of the same sex, does that mean you're automatically accepted into the gay community?

Several people in the room pointed to gay personal ads that tell Asians not to bother responding.

"We're supposed to be a community that is oppressed, so we should be aware but I just as quickly realized, no, it doesn't necessarily work that way," says Luk. "And that's too bad."