Festival celebrates GLBT community

A colorful crowd of jugglers, rainbow flag-weilding roller derby girls and belly dancers boogying to the beat of drums created a vibrant explosion of color and sound in celebration of the PRIDE Film Festival on Saturday night in front of the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.

The festival finished its sixth year with an international theme, focusing on directors and films from around the world. Each day of the festival, Thursday through Saturday, featured films about and parties for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and
Transsexual Alumni Association.

Thursday night featured the film “Ready? OK!” by director James Vasquez. The film centers around a 10-year-old boy named Joshua, whose role model is Maria Von Trapp from “The Sound of Music.” Joshua hopes to become a cheerleader, much to his parents’ chagrin.

Deb Cowdell-Slikkers, a Bloomington resident who has attended the festival for four years, said the film showed a realistic depiction of how society says it is “not OK” to be different.

“It was really cute,” Cowdell-Slikkers said. “It really showed what it was like for a kid growing up different.”

Following Thursday’s film was Friday’s reception at the Kinsey Institute, also the site of the exhibit “Pre-Revolutionary Queer: Gay Art and the Culture Before Stonewall.”

The institute stayed open during special hours Saturday morning for the festival.
Catherine Johnson-Roehr, the curator for the Kinsey Institute, said the special hours are right before the films so people can see the exhibit before the festivities. Johnson-Roehr said no one at the institute is paid for the weekend hours.

“Last time we held special hours, we had 20 people come in,” Johnson said. “So it’s worth it.”

The exhibit has pieces from before the New York Stonewall riots in 1969, and many are from Kinsey’s personal collection. There are many images and drawings of gay men but very few depicting lesbians, except a cocktail napkin from a 1947 club called “Mona’s: Where the girls will be boys.” The exhibit opened Oct. 24 and will remain open until Feb. 14.

The final day of the festival started with the free-of-charge feature film “Gay ... So What?” by French director Jean-Baptiste Erreca.

The film documented the lives of drag queens, gays, lesbians and transgendered people in Madrid, Paris, New York, Havana and Beijing. The documentary focused on the happiness and hardships the subjects faced in what the director called a present-day “post-gay” world.

Danielle McClelland, executive director of the Buskirk, introduced the film as not being of the highest quality, but said it was chosen because of the questions it makes viewers ask about the present integration of gays into society and whether society really is “post-gay.” This, McClelland said, was the starting point for the panel discussion, led by six Bloomington panelists.

The panel found fault in using the term “post-gay” to describe current society. It said “post-gay” entails a sense of general acceptance of the gay world, as implied by the title “Gay ... So What?”

Freshman panelist Casey Metheny brought up the lack of knowledge about what is “post-gay” because many students were born in the generation that it applies to.

“I am young, and I have not experienced this change,” Metheny said. “I am passionate about the present-day changes. I think the question is, ‘Where are we now?’ We should never be complacent with the way things are.”

Leah Russell, an IU junior, has attended the PRIDE festival for the last three years.

Before leaving for the dance floor, she announced her interview with the Indiana Daily Student would truly “out” her, but she said she didn’t care – she said she was glad to be gay and in Bloomington.

“Straight” people, she said, are missing out.

“We have more personality,” Russell said. “We are more vibrant, and we win every day.”