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Everything in Between

Queer Asians in time and space

by kevinjamesgardner

Critical Mass

Slipping a toothbrush-like device into his mouth, filmmaker Nguyen Tan Hoang demonstrates the latest in saliva-based HIV tests to the sold-out audience at the Victoria movie house. On the narrow stage between the screen and the viewers, hanging in that theatrical dusk before the curtain rises, this cultural producer cum community educator smiles for the camera as he waits for his saliva sample to coalesce. We all wait, holding our breath, though we’ll never know his results.

We give a similar reaction to his 4-minute flick Forever Bottom: legs in the air, rear to the camera, Hoang leads us through a crazy barrage of personal times and places he creates to experience and convey submissive sexuality. Crammed in between car seats and shower curtains, building toward the inevitable climax we never actually see or hear, Hoang sucks us into his love space of suspended time and pleasure.

Edd Lee of API Wellness Center collects the cheek cell sample of director Nguyen Tan Hoang, demonstrating a less-invasive HIV test. Photo by kevinjamesgardner.

Suddenly, gigantic exotic flowers engulf the silver screen as Mandarin music swirls around close-ups of passionately kissing couples of mixed races, spinning around in intimate ecstasy. The only unchanging element in this 6-minute Field Guide to Western Wildflowers is the Canadian filmmaker himself, Wayne Yung, the Asian half of every smooching pair and our intermediary guide to this whirling wonderland. Like a fast-paced video game, Yung’s sensual environment changes every few seconds, switching amongst flowers, kissers and dialogue, but his participation and pleasure remain constant — as do ours.

He’s mom and dad rolled into one: A still from Everything in Between, a film by Fatimah Tobing Rony.

Then, Fatimah Tobing Rony’s Everything In Between (USA) ensnares us in a romantic relationship between a “straight” woman and a “gay” man, and keeps us waiting for their consummation. The main characters, wedged between jobs, nightclubs, and family ties, find themselves betwixt each other, trying to get to the proverbial “other side.” Sometimes, it seems, to get from one point to another we have to be in between.

This is the kick-off of Everything In Between: Gay Asian Shorts, just one cluster in the galaxy of Asian and Asian American films shown at the 25th International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival which ran June 14-24. Of 350 films and videos from 26 different countries, no less than 17 were from Asia and Asian America. Many of these filmmakers, struggling to map out these in-between realities of interpersonal and interethnic sexual cultures, also played a strong part in Frameline’s Persistent Vision conference of queer media makers, cultural producers and academics who convened for the first time ever last week at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts under the auspices of the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Critical Thinking

Both the conference and the festival seemed all about “in-betweenness.” The Hello Kitty store right next door to the Metreon conference room highlighted the cultural edge of this experiential limbo. And the bounty of bisexual and global gender-bending film and video works clued us into the growing efforts of independent filmmakers, and those who love them, to burst out of the traditional and stifling boxes of Western dualistic thinking about race, gender and sexuality — black/white, man/woman, gay/straight.

“It’s a disruption of binary identities,” points out Erik Sudduth, a graduate student from Ohio State University, at a workshop entitled The Trouble with Normal: Queering Identities. Boldly throwing film thinkers and makers in bed together, the Persistent Vision conference provided a three-day, raw intellectual forum for figuring out the state and future of queer media. And there’s a lot of talk about going between and beyond labels to reach less-understood, yet no less real, experiences of fluid feelings, changing bodies and drifting desire.

Many conference participants seem relieved they can voice their evolving understandings — and misgivings — about rigid categories of racial, gender and sexual identities. “These terms box us in,” explains Shari Frilot, programming co-director of the Outfest Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. “Lesbian/gay are political constructions, not essentialisms, and provide a point for mobilization, bringing people from the margins into a place of normalcy where we don’t feel excluded.” Frilot believes the original motivation for such identity-based categories had to do with being on the margins, perceived as transgressive. Now, during this less-definable, transitional stage of growing post-identity consciousness, people can celebrate transgression without having to claim identity and all the baggage that goes along with it.

This may partly explain why up to 40 percent of Japanese and Korean audiences for queer films are straight women, according to filmmaker Takao Kawaguchi, at the Witnessing a New Queer Asia workshop. “They want to see gay images — they feel cleansed,” he says. As a result, the unchallenged, uninterrupted heterosexual subject is changing, adds Hok-Sze Leung, a researcher from the University of British Columbia, and many “heterosexual” viewers want to watch this process unfold. With so many mainstream films showing queer content in Asia (check out the Hong Kong Movie Database at www.hkmdb.com), Leung suggests thinking in terms of a “queer scape,” rather than “queer cinema,” to describe this in-between space.

Filmmakers P.J. Raval(100% Cotton) and Paula Gautier (Steers and Queers) schmooze at the Persistant Vision Conference closing party. Photo by kevinjamesgardner.

Dangling between morphing sexual identities, many APIs also float between worlds of origin, where an Asian mindset rooted in heritage and the past, collides with a “transnational queer space” focused on the future, according to Canadian American video-maker Richard Fung in his critique of three films at the same workshop. In Hoang’s 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven, Asians don paper masks of white Western women as they gush about the wonders of a new sticky rice cooker, á la late-night infomercial. In Yung’s The Queen’s Cantonese, Asian and white Canadians “cantonize” API queer spaces in Vancouver, in a well-done twist on the whole notion of “expat” communities. And in Michael Shaowanasai’s Adventures of Iron Pussy III from Thailand, scenes of interethnic relationships with love-hate dynamics play out in a highly campy, John Waters-like confrontation between Iron Pussy, her friends and antagonizers. Trapped between tradition and modernity, Asian and Anglo, friends and enemies, all these films poke fun at the queerness that spurts out in the middle.

Left to right, front to back at the "Now You See It Now You Don’t: Queer Takes on Race, Class and Gender" panel discussion: Theresa Gellar of Rutgers University; Kelly Kessler of University of Texas, Austin; Cynthia Fuchs of George Mason University; Eve Oishi, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at California State University, Long Beach; and Gayatri Gopinath, assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at U.C. Davis. Photo by kevinjamesgardner.

Eve Oishi, an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at California State University, Long Beach, throws another of Hoang’s video films, Pirates, into the mix at a subsequent workshop Now You See It Now You Don’t: Queer Takes on Race, Class and Gender. The video pirates typical straight beefcake images of Hollywood and mixes them with multi-layered narratives of Vietnam from both the U.S. and Vietnamese American media. Hoang “brings them together into a celebration of queer Asian American desire and identity as well as a critical exploration of the relationship between memory, history and desire,” Oishi explains. “Pirates is formed out of the meeting between two kinds of history — the official and the unofficial — between memory and fantasy; and as a result, we are no longer able to distinguish which image, which story belongs to which side.” Oishi believes this is a mutable, unstable domain now being explored by media makers, a cross-cultural, otherly sexual, intermediate space. “There’s an assumption that the gay community is exclusive of APIs, and that the API community is exclusive of gays,” Oishi continues. “Keanu Reeves as Cunanan in the media: Is he biracial? Is he queer? He’s put in that intermediate space.”

“There’s a cultural bias in this country around images and stories worth watching,” points out Ann Li, a communication professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. “Metaphors of space help to (re)articulate.”

New API queer cinema attempts to reclaim and re-imagine queer Asian icons, identities and voices that chart this intermediate space(s), and changing vocabularies are springing up to help us navigate them. “Tongzhi,” for example, a new and trendy Chinese word for same-sex romancers, also means “comrade” and plays on a similar word for “same,” Leung throws out. And throughout the conference, one can hear “queer” used as a verb, as in “to queer” something, make it queer.

In this exciting celluloid market of stimulation and emancipation, “queer” seems to capture the overall feeling of this strange halfway cinema house of evolutionary sexual identities and criss-crossing racial boundaries. “The community is increasingly based on political affiliation, not biology or phenotype,” asserts philosophy teacher Darrell Moore from Chicago’s DePaul University. The difficulty is embracing and depicting this unfamiliar, barely articulated space, without erasing the political histories, commitments and solidarity that came before, Moore cautions.

“What is our responsibility to the past? What are the costs of abandoning it?” These are some of the burning questions the queer film avant-garde asks itself as it pushes things forward, melting down categories and dissolving distinctions. Where are the new borders being drawn? Perhaps around a new love space that celebrates difference in lifestyles and individuals, without divisive social constructions, and without abandoning collective ideals.

“Libertarianism seems the ideology of queer cinema today,” remarks film critic and cultural commentator B. Ruby Rich, as Persistent Vision draws to a close. “But there’s still a real sense of communitarianism.”