It never, ever fails. Put a picture of two naked, ideally white men in the program guide to your gay and lesbian film festival, sit back, and watch the hordes rush to the advance box office and surrender their cash.
Even those who can easily download more graphic images of gay sex, or buy them at the local newsagent, can't resist. There's something about a story line and a collective viewing experience that lends such relatively tame photographs (and the films they advertise) an undeniable appeal.
This year's Inside Out, Toronto's 14th annual lesbian and gay film and video festival, running from Thursday to May 30, is no exception. The first of its screenings to sell out -- Sugar; Latter Days; On the Couch, Toronto -- all featured program photos of the requisite buffed men in various stages of sexual ecstasy.
And why not? Such images affirm the sexual freedom at the heart of the gay-rights movement, and, while by no means inclusive, certainly represent the gay
, white, male culture that has come to stand in for homosexuality in the West.
At the same time, though, these images are also contested in a number of the documentaries and films -- short and feature-length, Canadian and international -- spread throughout this year's festival. Yes, there are screenings of works by and about lesbians, non-whites, transgendered people and youths, which shouldn't come as a surprise in a festival that tries to be all things to all homosexuals.
But something else is also happening this year.
Many filmmakers are reaching out to other societies and cultures to seek the different meanings attached to homosexuality. Others, meanwhile, are going back in time to perform an act of anthropological excavation of past homosexual lives and traditions.
The "queer gaze," to quote a phrase popular in gay film theory, reflects many of the artists' own reluctance to take for granted easy-to-digest definitions of gay identity, behaviour and labels. As the gay-rights movement in the West goes forward -- but against a rising tide of social and political conservatism -- it seems to be seeing the need to step back in time, and look outside European and North American models. Film and video artists are, as always, ahead of the curve.
"The further along we go in terms of public life, and as we go mainstream, this gives us the possibility to question fixed assumptions about identity," says Toronto-based director John Greyson. "The more public gay life is, the more we see it in all its complexity, the more shades of grey we see."
Proteus, a film by Greyson and Jack Lewis, combines a historical perspective with a cultural one as it resurrects a relationship in 1725 South Africa between a young black herder found guilty of steeling cattle, and a white Dutch sailor serving time for sodomy, both sentenced to hard labour on Robben Island, Cape Town's penal colony.
By linking the case to a contemporaneous "moral panic" in Amsterdam that focused on the hounding of a thriving homosexual subculture, Proteus challenges definitions of homosexual identity as a late-19th-century invention in the Michel Foucault model. Through deliberate anachronism in costume and sets, the film not only attempts to read back documents from the era, but also questions how we interpret them to reflect our contemporary concerns.
"Making a film about a past haunted by the present seemed to be an interesting reverse to how a lot of films have approached history," Greyson says, contrasting his own work with such films as Possession and Portrait of a Lady. "They're using the contemporary framing device and allowing the present to be haunted by the past, and we're doing the opposite."
While the technique creates startling images, the thinking behind it is more unsettling. It implies that what we see as archaic case histories are not that remote from present realities, in Canada or elsewhere.
Indeed, while the Amsterdam moral panic may have been three centuries ago, its details are strikingly similar to events in Cairo just four years ago, when 52 men were arrested on charges of debauchery in a crackdown on gay subculture in the Egyptian capital. The Egyptian case is the focus of John Scagliotti's earnest but important Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World, which traces the emergence of gay and lesbian politics outside the West.
Narrated by Janeane Garofalo, the documentary links experiences from Pakistan, Malaysia, Namibia, Egypt and Honduras, many of which are, as one gay man says, "like England 70 years ago." As the gay communities in those developing countries came out of the closet, there was a price to be paid. "Visibility attracts the bullet," is how one interviewee puts it.
Beyond the outward pressure in such places, however, there is an internal one -- debating how to "be" gay or lesbian in cultures where the word only exists as an imported concept. The Egyptian media's coverage of the case focused on the men's "Western" behaviour. "I was accused of being Westernized," says one of the men, who has since claimed refugee status in Canada. Another goes further: "Talking about homosexuality is a Western thing. But homosexuality is not."
Montreal-born videomaker and writer Steve Kokker, who is now based in Tallinn, Estonia, explores similar concerns in the Canadian-Russian co-production Komrades, in which he follows a group of Russian sailors studying at St. Petersburg Naval Academy. What begins (and remains in part) the stuff of gay masturbatory scenarios develops into a serious and evocative examination of the very definition of masculinity in Eastern Europe -- and of a homoerotic interplay between men that defies Western sexual categorizations of "gay" and "straight."
While Kokker explored similar themes in his earlier short film, Birch, he takes his argument further in Komrades. "With Birch, I was viewing through my Western filters a lot of behaviour between men that I would have called 'suspicious,' " says Kokker, on the phone from Tallinn. "Experience taught me otherwise. . . . I think it's us [in the West]looking for that idea of self-delusion, or our need to categorize sexuality."
The documentary reconciles the harshness of life in what Kokker calls "fatherless Russia" with a romantic view enhanced by footage from classic Soviet films. Throwing away the shackles (responsibilities?) of a documentary filmmaker, Kokker doesn't shirk the fact that many of the men he interviewed have also ended up as his sexual partners. "My impulse was personal," he says. "I wanted the film to parallel my own journey. I was especially naive and prone to fantasy when I began, and I wanted that element to still be there."
The definition of gay may be too limiting for a culture like Russia's, but for middle-class Indians, it's a model worth importing, flaws and all. Canadian photographer and videomaker Sunil Gupta's (A World Without) Pity -- one of many works in this year's spotlight on India -- is a lyrical documentary on the emergence of gay identity in India against the devastating shadow of HIV and AIDS. And it suggests that a gay identity, like Western-style democracy, is something Indian society can introduce with minor adjustments.
Although historical research by Indian academics (and others) has unearthed a hidden history of homosexuality in India, the modern gay urban experience baffles even Gupta, himself a gay, HIV-positive man. "In my lived experience of it," says Gupta on the phone from his adopted home of London, "modern urban men in India may say they are gay -- and I used to wonder what that means, because they don't have any of the trappings of what that means in the West: publications, movies, bars, an identifiable politics or collective activity or vocabulary."
Gay Egyptians on trial; Russian sailors in naval institutions; Dutch and South African prisoners in the 18th century; Indian gay men without gay cultural identifiers: They seem so far apart in time and place. But are they?
"These films remind us not to be so smug about our culture here," suggests Greyson. "Those truths about Russia, India or South Africa are equally true here. Whether it's South Africa in 1735 or India today that makes us look at our lives here and now, that always ends up happening."
Adds Greyson: "Hopefully, the films will make us think about ourselves too."
For more information on Inside Out: 416-925-9872, extension 2229, or http://www.insideout.ca