Then and Now: Activist Queer Cinema

The films dealing with the GLBTIQ issue (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) at the One World Film Festival can be divided into two categories according to the country of origin. In the first category, there are the ones where homosexuality is illegal and in the second category, the ones where it is legal but where GLBTIQ people do not share the same rights as the heterosexual majority. These two factors define the themes of the four films.

Whereas Secret Years and Love Thy Neighbour deal with the communist past and the ’democratic’ present in Hungary and Slovakia, The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan and Cameroon, Coming Out of the Nkuta focus on victimization and the erasure of homosexuality. However all films have one motif in common - the intersection between culture and homosexuality. Whereas GLBTIQ Eastern Europeans fight for recognition and achievement of the same rights as the heterosexual majority (such as registered partnership and adoption rights), in Afghanistan and Cameroon being a homosexual means to live in constant danger. Interestingly the four films not only depict the relationship between power and sexuality but also unveil the cultural, sexuality and gender discourses in which homosexuality is mythologized, demonized, made taboo and ignored.

Concretely, in Cameroon, Coming Out of the Nkuta homosexuality is demonized based on the myth that it serves as a way of obtaining power: it is the post-colonial remnant of the white man. In the film it is explained that these myths exist as means of decrypting the secret and complex power relations in Cameroon. An anthropologist explains that the gaining of power was very opaque and that it depended on the will of the ruler. To get higher up in the hierarchy, a man had to sleep with other men (which used to be the Westerners). It is the colonizer’s illness that infiltrated Cameroonian culture. Also because homosexuality is illegal, it is a simple means of corruption. The director describes situations in which she needs to bribe the police officers so that her lesbian friends are not charged with homosexuality. In The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan homosexuality is being erased: the word never appears and the men sleeping with young dancing boys do not define it as homosexuality. The film thus depicts a culture of non-existent women that produces loci where young boys serve as sexual objects for those in power – the rich men and the warlords. However, the culture of cross-dressing and gender fluidity in Asia (mostly men taking the feminine roles and performing as women) used to be common in the pre-colonial times. Under colonization this kind of culture was suppressed and marginalized. Contrary to Cameroon, Coming Out, Dancing Boys of Afghanistan does not reveal these hidden cultural meanings and pinpoints only the issue of child abuse.

Secret Years and Love Thy Neighbour depict another issue in two different ways. Secret Years deals with personal stories of lesbians during Communism and in the present, whereas Love Thy Neighbour is an informative short documentary about the second Slovak Rainbow Pride event in May 2011. These two films however have one important motif in common and that is the emancipation of GLBTIQ people by contrasting their culture openly with the hetero-normative culture, either by parading through the streets of Bratislava or by living openly as a lesbian couple in a small Hungarian village. Although it might still be dangerous to be openly queer in post-communist countries, the trend to be traced in both films is the ’commercialization’ of a queer subculture that is fighting for the institutionalization of gay partnership, even marriage – something which it actually used to go against in the 1980s.

All in all, the films show the way in which homosexuality and queerness changes under the influence of different discourses: in Cameroon homosexuality serves as means for greater corruption, in Afghanistan it is hidden and being constantly erased under the pretext of old traditions, and in Hungary and Slovakia it is entering mainstream discourses of marriage and the traditional family.

By Michaela Pnacekova