I just heard that the Frameline LGBT Film Festival will open this year with "Affinity" based on the novel by Sarah Waters! I'm a big fan of Waters' novels and watched the BBC version of her novel, "Tipping the Velvet," so many times I could almost recite the lines w/the correct, working-class, British accent.

I feel so hungry to see real, in depth, complex portrayals of Lesbians on screen I can hear my heart growling.

I know that this culture hates women and is afraid of Lesbians but it's so demoralizing sometimes to see how poorly or erratically we're reflected in the media. Even our own LGBT community is ignorant of our misrepresentation. I've heard many of our other initials claim that Lesbians are too demanding, exacting, exclusive, etc. etc., as if by our endurance we've gained some power. I wish they could tell me where that power is because it certainly isn't in Hollywood.

In the first Lesbian movies I saw Lesbians had to die:
"The Children's Hour" (1961) Lesbian hangs her self so her love object can marry her fiance
"The Fox" (1967) Lesbian is hit by a falling tree and her love object can settle down with the man who caused the trouble

Then there was "The Killing of Sister George" which many conservative women hated. There's no actual dying only the main character's character is killed off in her TV soap opera. But it was sexy and had real and deep characters and a lot of Lesbians live on.

But it's hard to find mainstream Lesbian characters on TV or in the movies now. We can remember some we like clearly and add them to our rental queue:
"November Moon" WWII Lesbians who don't die
"Bound" mobster Lesbians who spill a lot of blood but don't die
"Late Bloomers" middle-aged Lesbians who fall in love and aren't dead yet
"Fire" Indian Lesbians who don't die...just barely!

But what do we make of "Notes on a Scandal" the brilliant turn by Dame Judy Dench (see earlier blog). What Lesbians is it about? Is it about Lesbians at all? I don't know.

Sometimes we do better not to star in the movie but rather be the secondary character: Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne's sister) in "Internal Affairs," or Cher in "Silkwood."

But I prefer a life-sized Lesbian with backstory and depth so I'll keep looking. The Brits seem to do better and if Sarah Waters keeps writing we'll be in good shape. Now if they'd just add a Lesbian to the very queer "Torchwood" series!

The Frameline Festival isn't perfect---it's often short on Lesbian films. But still it's done a good job of finding fabulous Lesbian films and filmmakers to showcase.

And there's Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project Festival June 13-15 at BRAVA Theatre!!! Now there will be Lesbians!!!! On screen and in the audience.

I just watched a remastered (hate that word) print of the magical movie musical from 1961, West Side Story, at the classic Castro Movie Palace in San Francisco. It was the first time I'd seen it on the big screen since it was originally released and probably my 20th viewing. And it holds up. The music (although it barely shows an acquaintanceship with a Puerto Rican musical idiom) is brilliant in that Stephen Sondheim way. Unresolved, poignant melodies that swell without becomeing too Andrew Lloyd Webber-like and they still carry the story forward.

The dancing is exquisite---athletic, sexy, and, like the songs, carry the story in an integrated way. Okay, I know that Natalie Wood didn't have a PR bone in her body, but she did have those big liquid brown eyes and even if her trilled 'r' was over the top...she did still have those big liquid brown eyes! And I know Richard Beymer didn't really sing and George Chakiris was really Greek but they were emoting with enough life for every ethnic group put together.

There was a time when those inconsistencies made me politically unhappy and they still do on my most Virgo days. But the artistry is so magnificent, the story so compelling (yes, it's Romeo & Juliet cliche squared) and most importantly it had a powerful message that we as human being are still failing to heed: horizontal hostility only benefits those w/their feet on our necks. The friction between ethnicities and different classes helps keep us in our 'place'---that's not the place they were singing about.

'There's a Place for Us' the starcrossed "PR" and "Polack" (quoting from the movie not my vocabulary) sang and I've always wanted to believe that. That Tony and Maria could find a way to live together w/out cross cultural fear and hatred. That I could marry my partner Diane without cross cultural fear & hatred. That we could educate children, create art, find decent housing, get jobs, immigrate, etc. w/out cross cultural fear & hatred.

But I worry that this is not a belief or dream many of us share. Sitting several rows behind me in the theatre was a group of what looked to be heterosexual, white couples---about 6-8 people----who laughed every time an 'issue' came up on the screen and especially any time the men did anything 'unmanly' like dance. It was a wierdly ominous sensation to have such a group of cynical, unconscious, racist, sexist people sitting at my back.

I know people giggle when they're uncomfortable...and musicals often make younger people, inexperienced w/the genre feel awkward. I have a dear nephew who was incredulous when I shared my disc of West Side Story...he thought musicals were from Mars. I still love him.

But this group's responses were so specifically about the ethnic and class concerns and the things that the men performed it felt like a huge signal that something in our culture had gone awry. The men snorted and suppressed laughter as if they were in elementary school. It was so disturbing I worred that they might make some childishly inappropriate response at the emotional high point of the film and I'd go berserk and throw my diet coke at them. (They didn't and I was determined to hold my temper. no matter what)

There is, however, good news---This was only a small segment of the audience. There were plenty of other younger, white men (and many of them seemed to be straight) who were having no problem with thinking about the unfairness of immigrant sweat shop conditions or relating to the desparate aspirations of the equally poor members of the Jets and Sharks street gangs or admiring the sheer beauty of male dancing.

So on reflection---maybe there is a place for us, somewhere.

I grew up in Boston in the 1950s & 60s, a time when none of my public school teachers thought a person of color was actually born in Boston. We must have 'come up from the South' or 'come over from an island.' They were relentless in upholding the mistaken belief that Boston was an all white, upper crust town where Samuel Adams (the president not the beer) could be found lurking at the corner library.

The entire town was the Kennedy Compound. I thought maybe we were related to the Kennedys from the way my great grandmother talked about the 'Kennedy boys' and 'Rose.' And since my great grandmother been living there since 1897 her accent sounded like she could have been a distant, darker relative . But St. Patrick's Day was always a complex, contradictory holiday.

Everybody wore green. We ate Irish soda bread and made corn beef and cabbage. At school we laughed and joked because it was a special Boston/Catholic thing and we were a part of it. Except for late in the day when the men were drunk. That was when you (if you were a person of color) ran the risk of having a car full of guys throw beer bottles at you. It seemed to be the local sport after 5 PM, as if you were meant to feel the solidarity until sundown.

I still wear green on St. Patrick's Day even though I haven't lived in Boston for decades and I'm certainly not still Catholic. I wear it because I like celebrating ethnicity. That's such a big part of my writing and activism. I write from the perspective of being Native Amerian and African American and I write about it as well. I write about it just like Edna O'Brien or Colm Toibin write from and about their ethnicity.

Ethnic writing is the most elemental, profound, and effective literature of our time. It just seems that when it's not European American ethnic but POC (people of color) ethnic the terms becomes a denigration or box or dismissal. James Joyce was an ethnic writer and Maeve Binchy and Emma Donoghue and J.M. Synge and John Patrick Shanley and Oscar Wilde. And I'm wearing green for them today.

Lawsuit is the first word that came to my mind but that's just because I live in the US. Then breaking the authors' legs came in a close second as an option but that's just because I grew up in a cold water tenement in Boston. All these bad karmic reactions were my response to finding out that a friend and an organization I care about were used, unwittingly, as part of the plot of a local murder mystery.

And it said in the front of the book that it's all fictional! But it wasn't. The organization, Frameline, important in the LGBT community of San Francisco; and my friend, a well known cultural icon and others are named...literally by name. The authors of this mystery novel seem to be novices---but we live in a small town. Why would they do that? Lack of imagination? Lack of home training? A vendetta?

You'll notice I'm not saying the names of the two authors here.

A while back mystery writer, Mary Wings, contacted me because she wanted to include me in a novel she was writing, She Came by the Book. The murder took place at a big library fundraiser and the keynote speaker/suspect looked and sounded a lot like me that time I spoke at the major public library fundraiser. The charcter's girlfriend sounded a lot like mine. And the convertible we drove was a dead ringer for my little two-seater! I loved it. A kind of in joke and a piece of history captured for all time for anyone to read. But she asked me first! And she didn't use my name or my partner's. Anyone reading it who'd been part of the scene would recognize us but a homophobic psychopath picking the book up in a remainder bin couldn't Google me, track us down and harrass me and my partner.

That may sound paranoid but I've been an activist and writer for a long time. People do nutty things. An east coast restaurant owner barred me from her lesbian establishment because I was judged too soft on 'porn.' I once received a telephone call at 8 AM Sunday morning from a man haranguing me about a review I'd written in the SF Chronicle. (According to him it wasn't feminist enough. It's SF, go figure!) I unlisted my phone number for the first time in my life.

In my current novel, happily just dispatched to my agent (hooray!) I talk about civil rights activist Angela Davis and the women in the early 1970's who were arrested for looking like her when she was a 'fugitive' from the FBI. Angela Davis is not a close personal friend but we have shared the same stage and I will make it my business to let her know that she's mentioned in even that tangential way. It seems like good community spirit.

It's one thing when you're writing a memoir, you expect to find actual names and places. Entire towns have stopped speaking to writers like Frank McCourt because of it. But what do other writers do when they include real people in their fiction? It's a wierd dilemma. One would hope we'd be more thoughtful and professional but clearly not everyone is.

When in doubt I always follow my great grandmother's admonition: Good manners can always smooth the path.