It’s hard to think of another point in time when LGBTIQQ youth have been so visible across media, for better and for worse. Thousands of young male and female fans watch Kurt Hummel, the openly gay teen on Glee played by Chris Colfer, even as elsewhere on the hit show’s network, conservative pundits try to downplay the problem of anti-queer bullying and rail against the evils of same-sex marriage. And of course, there is the It Gets Better Project, an unprecedented outpouring of direct address aimed at queer youth that has outgrown YouTube and to some degree–with each successive PSA from a politician, sports team, celebrity and corporation—its original target audience.

So, when I wrote last year that Frameline34, “truly belongs to the young,” my estimation might have been premature. It is especially fitting then that at this year’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival three of the showcase features—Spork, Mangus! and Tomboy, along with opening night selection Gun Hill Road all centered around the lives of young folk. Each of these films eschews the more egregious clichés that have glommed on to that perennial favorite of LGBT film festivals, the coming of age narrative, by shifting the drama from coming out to the more complicated art of getting by.

Once upon a time (1987 to be exact), two young men who were old friends moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to take in all the big city had to offer. Like many 20-somethings, Eddie Lee “Sausage” and Mitchell “Mitch D” Deprey didn’t have a lot of money and wound up living in a somewhat derelict apartment in the Lower Haight with a bright pink exterior they dubbed “the Pepto Bismol Palace.” The paint was peeling and the walls were thin but the rent was cheap.

What Eddie and Mitch didn’t count on was having Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman as their neighbors. “You blind cocksucker. You wanna fuck with me? You try to touch me, and I will kill you in a fucking minute.” “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, little man!”

(After Roland Barthes’ “The Face of Garbo”)

Cher’s face belongs to our current moment in cinema when the female visage represents a kind of absolute non-state of the flesh, which can be reached through a variety of (as-yet-not-entirely-confirmed) nips, tucks, filler injections, makeup and post-production airbrushing.

Cher’s is indeed a formidable face-object. In Burlesque, her makeup is thicker than her costars’ because the paint has been applied atop an increasingly contoured plaster surface. What was once a Byzantine icon — heavy lidded eyes and elongated nose framed by an oval countenance — has become a Noh mask. Her famed mile-long cheekbones are no longer defined by their underlying hollowness, but by the gibbous moon-like protuberances of her cheeks. So too does the plumpness of her lips, the lower line always under-drawn, exhaust the descriptive powers of “bee-stung.” Amid the snow of her foundation, her eyes remain her most expressive feature, narrowing slightly whenever she offers a bemused smile and wetting at the edges (glycerin?) to indicate sadness. This face, with the dark vegetation of its eyes and totem-like countenance, comes to resemble Louise in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) or Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns.

Yet how many actresses have consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty? Not many, unless it’s Oscar season. Their essence is not to be degraded, their faces are not to have any reality except that of their perfection. The face of Cher — whose character Tess, also a showbiz vet, has probably been around the block as many times and could claim as many comebacks as the actress playing her — openly testifies to the existence of this unspoken entertainment industry mandate, “forever young,” and burlesques it into a form of extreme beauty.

Viewed as a transition the face of Cher reconciles two iconographic ages, it assures the passage from actual plasticity to a molded mask. As is well known, we are today at the other pole of this evolution: the face of Heidi Montag, for instance, is homogenized, not only because of its peculiar thematics (woman as child, “real girl” as reality star) but also because her face, which has nothing of an essence left in it, is constituted by an infinite complexity of cosmetic enhancements. Cher’s enhancements only further enhance her “Cher-ness,” whereas Montag’s sundry “improvements” ultimately render her (or say, Madonna) less distinguishable. The face of Cher is an Idea, that of Montag an Afterthought.

[Originally published in the SF Bay Guardian]

On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called “the shot heard round the world” for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement.

By and large, the consensus among the movie-goers, fellow film critics, and critically minded queer pals I’ve informally polled seems to be that Frameline34  has offered some of the festival’s strongest programming in recent memory (full disclosure: I was on this year’s shorts screening committee and contributed program notes to the festival’s publications). Chalk it up to the fact that there are far fewer fluffy coming-out narratives or romcoms this year; or to the bumper crop of Showcase features by established and emerging international directors; or to the large portion of documentaries that speak relevantly to hot-button issues—military service, same sex marriage, body image—currently contested within the LGBT community, as well as those that retrace queer history. It’s as if Frameline’s audience threw down the challenge: “Show us something different.” The festival has largely obliged.

I’ve had a bit of a crush on the young Argentine actress Inés Efron since Frameline31, when she played one corner of the teen love triangle in Alexis Dos Santos’ Glue (2006). There was something in the way Efron used her gangly build and heavy-lidded eyes to telegraph her character’s mix of trembling desire and adolescent ungainliness that brought to mind Kids-era Chloë Sevigny. […]

When Cruising (1980) finally arrived in Bay Area theaters Feb. 15, 1980, San Francisco’s gay community had long been up in arms. The 1978 murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone were still fresh in many people’s minds. Gay bashing was still a regular occurrence. Word had spread through the gay press about efforts to disrupt the movie’s filming in New York, and the verdict was clear: Hollywood was profiting from gay murder. […]