Lucky Thirteen

For its 13th year, the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is
running with a light “homo horror” theme, actualized in the fest’s
camp-slasher trailer and carried out via screenings of choice queer-friendly horror flicks. These films range from
scrappy new works (Jason Davis’s Scab, about hot young
bloodsuckers) to hall-of-fame hits like 1983’s The Hunger (starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, and homoerotic wine
spillage) and 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s
Revenge (hyped as the most gay-subtext-ridden horror flick in
history).

The fest climaxes with a pair of special events: On Sunday, October
19, at the Central Library, Harry M. Benshoff hosts a (free!)
lecture/screening based on his book Monsters in the Closet, exploring the role of the “monster queer” in cinema. And on Sunday,
October 26, at the King Cat Theater, the fest wraps up with a
closing-night extravaganza devoted to Elvira, Mistress of the
Dark—aka the only goth worth taking seriously—created by
actress Cassandra Peterson in the early ’80s and exhumed by SLGFF to
host a 20th-anniversary screening of her 1988 horror parody Elvira,
Mistress of the Dark (and subject herself to an onstage interview
by fellow psycho-dragster Peaches Christ).

But hidden within the hit-and-miss horror is an impressive
collection of gay documentaries, by which I mean documentaries about
gay people—musicians, artists, writers, porn stars, drag queens,
and activists—which add up to a fascinating minifest of queer
life stories you won’t see anywhere else.

Actually, you may have already seen Derek, the Tilda
Swinton–powered portrait of filmmaker Derek Jarman, at this
year’s SIFF, where it took the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.
Directed by Isaac Julien and narrated (and produced) by longtime Jarman
collaborator Swinton, Derek is a smart, artsy film about a
smart, artsy man—a painter who figured out early that his
painting was average and turned to cinema, where he excelled on his own
terms. Jarman’s early films—1976’s aggressively homoerotic
Sebastiane, 1977’s sexually violent punk chronicle
Jubilee—established him as a fearless, one-of-a-kind art
star, and Jarman soon found himself making films for such kindred
British spirits as the Smiths and Pet Shop Boys.

Things took a turn in the late ’80s with Jarman’s HIV positivity, a
diagnosis he bravely acknowledged, only to be accused by British
tabloids of “mass murder.” Feeling crucified, Jarman filmed his own
bloody Passion (1990’s The Garden); galvanized by the
punk-with-a-purpose gay activism in the face of AIDS, Jarman shot a
richly queer spin on Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. In
Derek, Jarman’s life and work emerge through an inspired weaving
of film clips, interviews, home movies, and the intimate words of
Swinton, who lays it on a bit thick: Written as a open letter to her
departed friend and mentor, Swinton’s narration is oddly solipsistic
and slightly off-putting, but also provides a vivid description of what
makes a Jarman film a Jarman film—”the whiff of the school play”
that ran through all his works.

Another one-of-a-kind (yes it’s a cliché, but when it’s true
it’s true) gay artist is at the center of Wild Combination: A
Portrait of Arthur Russell, chronicling the fascinating trajectory
of the idiosyncratic composer, cellist, and dance-music producer of the
late ’70s/early ’80s. An avant-garde cellist obsessed with pop, Russell
dreamed of making music that was both deeply experimental and massively
popular—”Buddhist bubblegum,” he called it—but the closest
he came to success was “Go Bang!,” an African-influenced dance track
released under the name Dinosaur L that became a disco hit. Sadly,
Russell’s oddball artistic gifts came with a side order of crazy (what
could have been a breakthrough collaboration with Robert “Einstein
on the Beach” Wilson was foiled by Russell’s erraticness) and his
bittersweet life story adds up to a more compelling work of art than
any of his individual creations—thanks in great part to director
Matt Wolf, who wraps Russell’s fractured-oddball story in an
intoxicating swirl of words and music and artsy visuals.

Not so artsy in either subject or execution is Wrangler, a
straightforward star bio rescued from E! True Hollywood
Story–dom by its fascinatingly odd star: Jack Wrangler, the
stage and film professional who made his first and biggest splash as an
iconic, Marlboro Man–esque gay porn star in the 1970s. From
there, the self-avowed homosexual Wrangler branched out into straight
porn (a hole is a hole to a born performer) and eventually straight
life, if a gay porn star entering a celibate marriage with a female
semicelebrity 20 years his senior (New York songstress Margaret
Whiting) can be considered “straight.” Throughout the film, Wrangler’s
oddly—almost compulsively—endearing persona shines through,
and the ultimate value of Jeffrey Schwarz’s film is its comparative
study of image and reality. To his gay fans, Jack Wrangler was a
larger-than-life macho persona capable of projecting palpable lust. As
Schwartz’s film makes clear, this Jack Wrangler was the inspired
creation of a sweet and shrimpy nelly guy who talks about fucking an
entire pool hall full of guys as if it were picking daisies.

At the fluffier end of the gay-doc spectrum is Eleven
Minutes, following Project Runway season-one winner Jay
McCarroll as he puts together his first Manhattan fashion show.
Unfortunately, the film is a messy drag, offering an unflattering
portrait of a reality-show casualty and climaxing with a horrifying
sentence no human should ever have to say (“J. C. Chasez will only come
if we send a car”). Even worse, the time I devoted to Eleven
Minutes is time I could’ve spent watching other,
certainly-less-sucky SLGFF documentaries, including but not limited to
The Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany,
Gentleman; Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band; The
Kinsey Sicks: Almost Infamous; and the sure-to-be-sobworthy For
My Wife…, about the death of Seattle’s Kate Fleming, the
award-winning audio-book narrator killed by a torrential rainstorm in
2006, and the life of Charlene Strong, Fleming’s partner inspired to
influential activism by the loss. SLGFF 2008: Come for the Abercrombie
vampires, stay for the multifaceted menagerie of complicated gay lives.