While other peoples in the present, and historically, are desperately trying to create real community where we assume responsibility for each other, LGBTQ peoples blindly and unconsciously are letting their community slip through their fingers.
For over half a century, “Outfest: The LGBTQ Film Festival” has been a major, foundational, cultural institution in the LGBTQ community in Los Angeles. [However/ Unbelievably/ Inexplicitly/ Unfortunately Unexpectedly], Outfest has vaporized without even a farewell hug or goodwill “thank you.”
The community found out about the organization’s implosion via a recent article in the Los Angeles Times announcing UCLA’s “Queer Rhapsody,” a de facto L.A. LGBTQ film festival, that came out of nowhere, had no LGBTQ community input, and was programmed to occur at five non-LGBTQ spaces scattered across the city.
Three weeks ago, I did a quick survey of 14 gay/queer people in L.A. who are culturally and politically attuned to what is happening in the LGBTQ community. The disappearance of Outfest was shocking news to all of them, hearing it from me for the first time.
Entrance to 2021 Outfest at the Directors Guild of America theater on Sunset Blvd, in West Hollywood used for decades as the site of the film festival. Vivien Killilea/Getty ImagesHow Could This Happen?
I have written about the problems numerous times in various outlets. Be patient with me as I repeat the reasons again for the sake of newcomers and puja, a Sanskrit-derived word meaning “remember.”
- · The dominant political ideology and practice in the LGBTQ community in L.A. and throughout the U.S. is “assimilation,” sometimes called “hetero imitation,” practiced particularly by the neo-homophile (1985-2010) and parts of the queer generations (2010-present). If assimilation is taken to its logical conclusion, that ideology will gradually and imperceptibly result in the disappearance of the LGBTQ community and the diluting of identity. It is happening all around us, the most recent example being Outfest.The paradox is that, while other peoples in the present, and historically, are desperately trying to create real community where we assume responsibility for each other, LGBTQ peoples blindly and unconsciously are letting their community slip through their fingers.
- With elite capture of the LGBTQ community since about 1985, beginning with the AIDS pandemic, the community’s evolution has been hijacked by that elite. Elite capture has resulted in a radical change in the community’s power structure from a grassroots, community-based effort in which LGBTQ people were creative participants to one in which they have become apathetic and disengaged spectators to the community’s travails. Elite capture represents a hierarchy and values based on wealth, elite education, race, and certain sex and gender determinants—with lots of empty words and tokenism.Very recently, as a result of outstanding investigative reporting by The New York Times, a superb article sadly reports how elite capture looks on a day-by-day basis in GLAAD, an important national LGBTQ media advocacy organization. And, it is such elite capture, to a greater or lesser degree, that is happening everywhere in LGBTQ communities.
- With elite capture, gay-centered journalism has largely disappeared. LGBTQ news sites on social media “curate” news, often at a shallow and sensational level. Local news, like Outfest’s vaporizing, has vanished, thus, intellectually and spiritually impoverishing all of us. Incredibly, no investigative reporting occurs anywhere by the LGBTQ media, thus depriving LGBTQ people of critically vital information about what’s really happening in their communities. It is a historically singular type of new technology censorship.
- Gay men and lesbians over 55 have disappeared at a time they should be assuming the role of tribal elders, providing community stability, tending to our spiritual well-being, and transmitting lived learning and tribal history to our young.
Feedback from LGBTQ People About Outfest’s Imploding
A shorter, different version of this article, titled “Outfest: Call Home,” about Outfest’s mysterious disappearance, ran a week ago on Danny Battista’s and my MailChimp site called “Gay Tribal Elder,” which has been coming out largely weekly since 2015. Astonishingly, of the 200 articles ever published there, this one garnered the most responses from readers. Intelligent, insightful, community feedback was received, which appears below without attribution since there is not enough time in the day to track down all the senders for permission.
- One individual keenly observed that it was interesting that Ms. Ha Duong, of UCLA Film and Television Archive and a central organizer of “Queer Rhapsody,” talked about the importance of the LGBTQ community and then listed five non-LGBTQ spaces where the films would be shown. Does this sound like hypocrisy to you? For over half a century in LGBTQ cultural life in Los Angeles, Outfest played a unifying community role of great historical and political importance. Does screening “Queer Rhapsody” in five non-LGBTQ film sites sound like more disunity and fragmentation to you.
- Another reader linked me to two important articles that suggest that labor union organizing by Outfest workers was involved somehow in its demise. One article in The Hollywood Reporter (September 26, 2023) by Mia Galuppo reported that 11 Outfest staff members announced plans to unionize with the Communication Workers of America Local 9003 as Queer Filmworkers United. QFU requested that the Outfest Board voluntarily agree to the unionization so that a vote supervised by the National Labor Relations Board would not be necessary.
- Additional reader feedback stated that Outfest folded due to a power struggle between the Board and its Executive Director,
- One of the items that caught my eye was the admission by the Outfest Board President, Dr. Nii-Quaterlai Quartey, that the Board was having difficulty reaching a “quorum,” the minimum number of Board members that need to be present at meetings to legally transact its affairs. This is sometimes a dodge, or it more probably meant the organization was divided and in big trouble. Why was there no local community news about this precarious situation in the LGBTQ community in Los Angeles?
- UCLA, which helped to feed my intellectual growth in a doctoral program in 1968 and 1969, has grown into an elitist institution
Martine McDonald, left, May Hong HaDuong and Moi Santos, of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, who were central to organizing "Queer Rhapsody. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times).Local reportage and news about the LGBTQ community in Los Angeles, where are you?
LGBTQ investigative journalists, where are you when you are critically needed?
God Save the Queens (and the LGBTQ communities everywhere).
