1989

Honored by the Moon was almost entirely produced at a conference for American Indian gays, lesbians, their friends, and supporters; it tells personal stories of what it means to be lesbian and gay—from a Native American perspective.

Richardson, Colin

1989

Epstein, Robert
Friedman, Jeffrey

1989

Hayes, M.

1989

Dun, Viki

1989

Amanda Drax, a cartoonist whose pet character is a lady detective, is engaged by a mysterious woman to recover her lost sense of humor. This witty lesbian comedy uses the style of film noir to explore the ideal of love at first sight.

Child, Abigail

1989

1989

Nurudin, Azian

1988

Bourne, Stephen

1988

When Basil Dearden's Victim was released in Britain in 1961, it had an enormous impact on the lives of gay men in Great Britain. Starring Dirk Bogarde as a middle-class barrister who confronts his own homosexuality, Darden's film was the first mainstream British film to offer gay men credible representations of themselves and their situations. In Where There Was Silence five gay men, all portrayed by a single actor, recall the film and how it affected their lives. Inter-cut with extracts from Victim, these recollections vividly highlight what life was like for British gay men before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967. As one of them comments, "In those days, to even discuss a film like Victim would have made me nervous and scared that the finger would be pointed and that I would be held to ridicule." Ending with reference to Clause 28 of the recent Local Government Bill, Where There Was Silence also goes on to question the future of gay and lesbian representation on film and video.

Greyson, John

1988

In Urinal, the formal is firmly embraced by a fiery brand of political urgency. With an irreverence for historical propriety and a story structure that doesn't discriminate between burlesque, surrealist tableaux, and bitter fact, Greyson employs a mad pastiche to confound straight narrative, as he seeks a solution to gay harassment.

Curiously transported to the present day, a group of dead lesbian and gay artists, including Sergei Eisenstein, Frida Kahlo, Langston Hughes, and Yukio Mishima, find themselves guests in the home of Toronto sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. They have been mysteriously summoned to Ontario to research the systematic policing of public washroom sex. These artists of wildly differing temperaments embark upon their research with flamboyance and aplomb, examining not only the subject at hand, but their own sexual identities. Each night, one of the six—joined by Wilde man Dorian Gray—delivers a riotous lecture on some aspect of the issue. Toronto artist Greyson's audacious film, which could be subtitled If Only Heads Could Talk, makes a shambles of filmic expectations. The lectures themselves—"A Social History of the Public Washroom" one night, "Washroom Sex Texts," the next—are mini-parodies, taking some facet of film discourse and knocking it off kilter.