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July 31, 2009
Preserving people's history
Vancouver Queer Film Festival has Jewish-related fare.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
When the Georgia Viaduct was built some 40 years ago, many of the hotels and bars along Main Street were destroyed, including the Vanport Hotel Bar. Not much information about it remains, but The Portside, a 20-minute film that will première at this year's Vancouver Queer Film Festival, offers a glimpse into what it might have been like and its significance in queer history.
"It's a short drama, a work of the imagination, [though] certainly based on people's stories and memories, as most history is," said co-director Aerlyn Weissman.
"I collaborated with Daphne Marlatt on this piece. She wrote the screenplay," she continued. "Daphne is an amazing poet and she actually just won the Dorothy Livesay Prize for poetry this year. We've recreated a collage of memories; it's all packed into one night at a bar that these two older women are remembering. So what happens with the characters and what happens in the bar are actually a combination of Daphne's memories ... she certainly was in them on occasion and, for me, in the course of other documentary work I've done, have done dozens of interviews with people who were out in those bars in the '50s and '60s. So between the two of us, we had some stories.
"Daphne had also written a short story that was set in a place much like the Vanport, that's a bit our model for the bar.... And we certainly talked to people and got some wonderful history from people who did go to the Vanport and described it but, of course, everyone described it differently."
Weissman said this is one aspect that appeals to her about filmmaking. "As a historian who works in popular media," she explained, "this is something I find so interesting and actually a really important element. Things are remembered differently."
Weissman is originally from Chicago, but has lived in Canada for some 40 years and in Vancouver since 1990. She never had a chance to visit the Vanport, even though she had been to Vancouver before on business trips.
"These were dumps," said Weissman about the Vanport and other such bars. "I mean these were pretty low-rent places and, basically, your money was good. The owners didn't really care. If you more or less kept the peace, you could come and spend your money there. They weren't gay bars as we understand them today at all. They were medium-safe places where lesbians could have a public presence; they were about the only ones actually.... It's just another really different era. And in fact, we've set our piece in 1974, which is at a time ... of a lot of change, where both other feminists and queer kind of community institutions were starting to emerge, so there was actually an alternative to that bar culture."
Back then, said Weissman, "there were a lot fewer options and there was a lot more fear and a lot more secrecy. Even in the beginning of the '70s, it was starting to change, but certainly anything in the '60s, and certainly going back to the '50s and the '40s, if you were found, recognized or busted in a place like that [the Vanport], you ran the risk of losing your job, your family, your housing. It was – I'm not sure of the status in Vancouver – but in many, many places in North America, it was a felony for two people of the same sex to dance together in those places."
While today there may be some situations in which people need to be circumspect, she said, "I think young queer people aren't growing up in the atmosphere of fear and just outright oppression that existed at that time – and it was a legally sanctioned oppression. That was part of the issue, it wasn't just that people maybe took an attitude with you."
Weissman said she is involved in the Jewish community peripherally, attending synagogue occasionally and celebrating some of the holidays with friends. "It's certainly is part of my identity," she said.
"Many of the issues are the same as we would find in the Jewish community," she said of the work she has done in the area of gay history, "which is that, historically, our histories as outsiders have either been misrepresented or erased. For me, there are some very clear analogies, and also some very significant overlapping of those communities."
She said that gay history consistently has been erased over the centuries, "whenever there was a flowering of gay culture." Among other examples, she pointed to Germany in the 1920s and '30s, "which had a vibrant gay culture. In Berlin, there were newspapers, there were clubs, there were bars and a very creative, very artistic gay community; a very open and very public gay community which was also, in significant numbers, Jewish. And that community was absolutely destroyed in less than two years ... when the National Socialists came to power."
Weissman said that one thing about being fortunate enough to work in an era of mass communication is that, "OK, I can make a piece that there's going to be so many copies of it, it can't be erased ever again, so that a young, gay person 10 years from now, let alone a generation from now, as would be the case in the past, would have no record and no memory and no way to access the history of gay people who had gone before them, whether they were heroes or pioneers or scholars or villains, it doesn't matter, there would be nothing. I derive a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that it can't be erased in the same way anymore."
The Portside is part of the Queer History Project (QueerHistoryProject.com), a series of five short films that record queer experiences from the past to ensure that they are captured for future generations. The Portside screens at Vancity Theatre on Friday, Aug. 21, 9:30 p.m.
Other Jewish links
First there was New York, then Berlin, now Tel Aviv. F---ing Different Tel Aviv is the third in a series that has local queer artists make a short sexuality-themed film: gay filmmakers must make their intimate vignette about lesbians, and vice versa.
The work of directors Elad Zakai, Eran Koblik Kedar, Ricardo Rojstaczer, Eyal Bromberg, Sivan Levy, Hagai Ayad, Nir Ne'Eman, Yossi Brauman, Avital Barak, Sie Gal, November Wanderin, Galit Florentz, Yasmin Max, Hila Ben Baruch, Stephanie Abramovich, Anat Salomon and Yair Hochner is included in this collaborative project. The result is more like a collection of erotic poetry than a movie, because the films are quite brief. They each include a controversial issue, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Orthodox-secular relations in Israel, and, at times, the juxtaposition of political or social commentary with such sexual context is uncomfortable to watch. Reflection on why this is the case is, no doubt, one aim of the film series.
Tel Aviv screens at Cinemark Tinseltown Saturday, Aug. 15, 9:30 p.m. It is definitely for mature adult audiences only.
In City of Borders, director Yun Suh features a place where all conflicts are checked at the door: Shushan, a queer bar in Jerusalem. At Shushan, people of different nationalities, religions and sexual orientations gather to have fun, a few drinks and dance and love each other. The documentary focuses on several people, including a young Palestinian drag queen, who sneaks into Israel through a fenced part of the separation barrier; a Jewish-Arab lesbian couple; and bar owner Sa'ar, who also happens to be the only openly gay member of Jerusalem's city council.
City of Borders won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival this year and it is easy to see why. It tries to explore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from another angle, while also providing insight into what life is like for homosexuals in both regions, and it succeeds to a large degree. However, not surprisingly, its slant is to the left and while there is some merit to drawing a parallel between the attitudes among Arabs and Jews towards homosexuality, the rights of gays and lesbians are protected in Israel.
City of Borders is at Cinemark Tinseltown on Monday, Aug. 17, 5 p.m., and at Vancity Theatre on Thursday, Aug. 20, 7 p.m.
Daryl Wein's documentary Sex Positive is about Richard Berkowitz, a gay hustler-turned-AIDS activist, who, in the 1980s, with pioneering AIDS researcher Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and musician/activist Michael Callen, were the first major promoters of the safe-sex lifestyle for gay men. They did so amid great opposition from other activists in the gay community because the trio believed – and said publicly – that promiscuity was contributing to the spread of AIDS. In 1983, the three wrote a small book, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, and its impact was eventually felt, though years later. The intriguing documentary ends with a note of warning: the fear seems to have worn off and AIDS is on the rise again, particularly in young men.
In addition to being featured in Sex Positive, Berkowitz has written Stayin' Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex (Basic Books, 2003). It offers more details about his experiences as a safe-sex advocate long before much was known about HIV/AIDS.
Sex Positive won the Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2008 Outfest. It's at Cinemark Tinseltown, on Friday, Aug. 21, 7 p.m.
The Vancouver Queer Film Festival takes place Aug. 13-23 at several different theatres. Tickets are $10/$7. For more information, visit queerfilmfestival.ca.
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