GLASGAY!
OUT NOW
The film strand at this year’s Glasgay! features an eye-catching mix of documentary, features and much-loved classics
The Stonewall riots of summer 1969 have been the subject of a feature film and numerous documentaries, but the new historical documentary, Stonewall Uprising, gives more information than any other film to date, telling the birth of gay liberation through archive photographs and film as well as the testimonies of a drag queen, a street kid, a Village Voice journalist and the policeman who led the arresting party. Other powerful documentaries to look out for at this year’s Glasgay! include Assume Nothing, which celebrates the lives of five gender- variant New Zealanders through Super8, fun animations, family photos, body parts and gender theory, and City of Borders, a moving insight into Jerusalem’s only gay bar and her patrons. Meanwhile, Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement traces the lives of two New York- based lesbians, who are finally getting married after 42 years together.
Elsewhere, the screenwriter of the 1995 feature Stonewall, Rikki Beadle Blair, returns with a new film, Fit, highlighting the challenges faced by a group of teens struggling to come to terms with their sexuality. The film, which tackles issues of bullying and homophobia in schools, is the result of years of in-school presentations across the UK.
Feature films include Prayers for Bobby, based on a true story and starring Sigourney Weaver as a suburban American housewife, whose religious faith and conservative views are challenged when her gay son Bobby commits suicide. On a
lighter note, Is It Just Me is a fruity comedy of errors, in which a young gay man finds his Mr Right in an online chatroom, only to realise he’s been chatting under his roommate’s ID. Strella: A Woman’s Way, meanwhile, is a camp melodrama in the Almodovar vein, about an ex-con who falls in love with a cabaret singing prostitute.
If it’s a good, old-fashioned queer classic you’re after, look no further than Orlando, Sally Potter’s imaginative adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, starring Tilda Swinton as the eponymous hero/heroine, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I who changes sex and lives for four hundred years. Or why not proceed directly to the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters, and his hilarious, outrageous masterpiece Pink Flamingos, which stars the late lamented Divine as an underground criminal who competes with a sleazy married couple for the title of ‘filthiest person alive’. Worth a watch just for villains Connie and Raymond Marble’s rather fetching brightly coloured dyed pubic hair.
16 THE LIST 7–21 Oct 2010
‘SUICIDE’S
STILL A TABOO SUBJECT’
Wendy Miller & Rachel Amey Having met at last year’s Glasgay! Wendy Miller and Rachel Amey were keen to work together again. The result is a thought- provoking new play that explores teenage suicide and issues of guilt and blame in society
T he creative partnership behind one of the chief commissions at this year’s Glasgay! 2010 is one that the festival was itself instrumental in fostering. Wendy Miller met Rachel Amey last year, after Amey was cast in Miller’s Glasgay! 2009 drama Even in Another Time. They’ve kept up a dialogue and become friends since, meeting frequently at poetry evenings such as Monosyllabic, the spoken word and performance night at Mono which Miller runs. As Glasgow’s annual celebration of queer culture rolled around again, the pair were approached to collaborate once more, and co-write a production that would become The Bridge, a provocative play examining some serious issues faced by young Scots today.
‘Glasgay! had this idea of looking at teenage suicide and we agreed to take that general theme and shape it and try to find characters and develop them,’ director Miller, a former Evening Times reporter, explains. ‘Suicide’s still a taboo subject, and we wanted to take that and look at it, and explore characters who are not just case studies. We also wanted to look at a lot of surrounding issues – issues of blame and guilt in society, as well as among family members.’ In what Amey describes as ‘a brother’s quest’, 17-year-old Tam goes in search of his twin-sister Nicole who, together with her friend Steph, has been missing for over a week. They were last seen on ‘the Bridge’ – a crossing that dually serves as a metaphorical device spanning the gap between teenage years and adulthood, life and death.
On paper, the play brings to mind a heart-wrenching case which hit headlines in October last year – that of two girls, aged 14 and 15, who disappeared from a Renfrewshire local authority care unit and were later discovered to have killed themselves by leaping hand-in- hand from the Erskine Bridge. Yet, Miller and Amey insist there’s absolutely no direct correlation. ‘We’re really explicit in the play that we’re not basing any of the characters on real people or anything that’s actually happened,’ says Amey.
While undoubtedly shocking, that particular case was but one high profile example among many recent cases of young people taking their own lives in profoundly sad circumstances – as Miller and Amey, who researched intensively for The Bridge, point out. ‘There were four young men who hanged themselves in Dundee just this summer,’ Miller says. ‘And two students who killed themselves by lethal injection in a hotel room in Ayr.’ There’s a crucial tie-in with queer issues – that of ‘emotional censorship’ as Miller puts it. ‘The fact that we can’t talk about these subjects,’ she says, ‘kind of chimes with LGBT themes, of families who can’t discuss their son or daughter being gay. There are studies about the effects of negative attitudes towards LGBT children, and how that affects their self-esteem and rates of self-harming and attempted suicide. So I think it’s right that Glasgay! should be exploring these difficult issues.’
The Bridge, the Arches, Glasgow, Sun 26–Thu 30 Oct.