Arts & Entertainment

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Live Musical Theatre Fun at Occidental Cent for he Arts This Weekend

Saturday August 28 & Sunday August 29 @ 4:30 pm. Occidental Center for the Artsproudly presents: ‘Something’s Coming..Something Good’! Join us for an afternoon of musical theatre fun for all ages in our amphitheater! Enjoy popular selections from Wizard of Oz, West Side Story, Hair and The Drowsy Chaperone, performed by talented children and adults from our community. Directed by Starr Hergenrather, Musical Direction by Miles McKenzie. The safety of our audience is always a priority. Limited capacity for this outdoor event – get your tickets early! Advance tickets required. $20 adults/ $10 children,15 and under. Discounts for OCA Members. www.occidentalcenterforthearts.org Please bring cushions or stadium chairs to sit on. Wheelchair/special needs seating will be facilitated. Fine refreshments for sale including wine/ beer. Become an OCA Member and get free tickets! 3850 Doris Murphy Ct. Occidental, CA. 95465. 707-874-9392. OCA is a nonprofit arts center staffed by volunteers.

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The Tender, Canonical Queerness of “All The Gay Saints”

Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s second book of poetry All The Gay Saints, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, is a stunningly sentient collection of ekphrastic love poems inspired by Herman Baspaintings that unpack the intersections and intricacies of rural America, masculinity, queerness, and the body.

In “My Body is Constantly Conjuring a Tempest (Or, Weighing the Pros and Cons of Attending My High School Reunion),” “On Trespassing,” and “I Wish All Children Could Touch the Sky At Least Once,” Candrilli creates portals to an “unsafe house” of a “past life,” teeming with toxic masculinity–“raised fists, those/ holes in drywall”–and the generational violence and destruction it breeds, the “boys that threatened to rape me in high school.”

Body and land, boyhood and Appalachia–where “beware of dog signs are security systems” and “the warning is to draw blood first”–are inextricably and excruciatingly linked. Yet as much as Candrilli’s narrator is entrenched in their homeland, they are just as hyper-aware of its patriarchal mannerisms, its influences and after-effects:

Everything has its doppelganger and nowadays I plagiarize men’s
bodies indiscriminately. I have a right to take what’s not mine;
this is what both men and the earth have taught me.

Although they were taught by their “father and the land” to be “small and quiet,” they overcome these repressive lessons by “opening [their] mouth” and “[using] it” to reclaim and rename their narrative and body, to detach the body from the aforementioned version of earth. They will, as asserted in “On Wanting Top Surgery in the Fascist Regime,” “rip myself apart,” but “drink/the body to solar power and…make a beautiful mother.” In this way, Candrilli’s poetry is the raw pink of (re)birth and beginning, each poem a root or tendon trusting it’s own vitality and resilience, finding cohesion within transness.

Nowhere is this resiliency more palpable and deeply resonant than in “Our Root System is a Tangle of Pipecleaners (Or, Being Your Man Has Made Me One)” where Candrilli’s narrator and their “future-husband wife,” a transcendent and healing refuge of a human, “lick my wounds/ and yours”and “[together]…have no time/ to be anything less than large.” 

In “There is a Point at Which I Tire From My Own Fear,” the dangerous realities and descriminatory histories of being LGBTQ are acknowledged:

Queers are killed

and have always been    killed in any number

                       of ways.

And conquered:

                            But my partner tells me again and again

how they love me, and I know one day I’ll try to die

in their arms.   I know this     is how     we will win.

All The Gay Saints is a book of vital reminders that a distinguishing quality of our love is it’s protectiveness – loving for survival and both self and communal preservation. That the dichotmous, conflicting truths of “glitter, glitter, glitter, and guns” musn’t deter or demoralize us from loving ourselves and our queer/trans siblings, but instead fortify and fiercen our queer love. And that:

At the end of the day 
all we have is this ritual

of love, and that, I think, 
will be enough

to live forever.

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Page-Turning Thrillers, Bath Haus and Yes, Daddy, Expose Power Dynamics Between Gay Men

With their suggestive titles and gorgeous, pink-suffused covers, P. J. Vernon’s Bath Haus and Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s Yes, Daddy seem like frothy beach reads—and, to a certain degree, they are. But woven into twisting plots, shocking scenarios, and lush settings lies a deeper, more disturbing concern: how trauma experienced by young gay men can propel them into unhealthy, even dangerous, adult romantic relationships.

In Bath Haus, recovering addict Oliver Park from rural Indiana has everything that should make him happy: his partner, Nathan, a handsome, attentive, and wealthy trauma surgeon; a sprawling townhouse in Washington, DC; and, most importantly, his sobriety. Why, then, in the opening pages, is he going to a local gay bathhouse for anonymous sex? When he follows a stranger into a private room, everything goes horribly wrong, and he barely escapes with his life. He has crossed a forbidden line and cheated on Nathan. His choices have nightmarish consequences, and his desire to keep his transgression from his partner leads him deeper into dangers both from outside and, due to his slowly crumbling sobriety, from within. The questions linger: Why risk destroying a good thing? Is it a good thing after all?

What makes Bath Haus so engaging is that Vernon gives Oliver many layers. He’s not superficial or hedonistic or merely foolish. You can’t write him off. Trauma clouds his past, including a “bad boy” ex-boyfriend and an abusive father, and confusion fills his present—does Nathan love him or want to control him? Does he need that stability, or is it suffocating? As the screws continue to turn in the story, Oliver journeys through hell, navigating a vicious psychopath, Nathan’s manipulative mother, rampant snobbery from family and friends, and his own self-destructive impulses. Vernon knows how to grab you from the first line and not let go; he also knows that plot means nothing without a character we can root for, even when he’s making terrifyingly dangerous choices.

Like Bath Haus, Yes, Daddy is the story of another twenty-something gay man seeking financial security and, in this case, career advancement. Jonah Keller moved to New York City to ignite his playwriting career but has ended up waiting tables at a dead-end job. In the mode of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Jonah ingratiates himself with an older Pulitzer-prize winning playwright, Richard Shriver, and manipulates himself into the older man’s bedroom, but the power dynamic quickly turns. When Richard takes Jonah out to his vast and austere compound in the Hamptons, Jonah is confronted with Richard’s staff of zombie-like young men—all buff and beautiful, like something from a gay Stepford Wives. In addition, Richard’s high-toned social group smirk and leer at Jonah, reminding him of his place, testing him, and gradually hinting at their much darker intentions. 

Parks-Ramage suffuses his narrative with a rich atmosphere, somewhere between the Gothic and The Great Gatsby, all while horrors await Jonah just under the surface of his lover’s lavish estate. Early on, you sense that this book may be a morality tale, a Faustian bargain about trading freedom (artistic and otherwise) for wealth. But what it becomes is more disturbing and difficult to parse. It takes its main character through a nightmare of controlling personalities, drugs, and sexual violence. Unlike Tom Ripley, whose cleverness causes us to align with him despite his amorality, we sympathize with Jonah because horrible things happen to him far beyond anything he may deserve for his earlier manipulations. Also, unlike with Ripley, we are given a layered backstory about Jonah’s homophobic religious parents and brutal experience with conversion therapy, eventually helping us to understand why he was drawn into danger and what he must do to heal from his experience.

The glossy “summer-read” marketing for these books tells only part of the story. As you read, the pages fly by—the writing is very good—but these writers have more on their minds than sheer entertainment. In each, we have an indictment of the wealth and status-obsessed circles of some urbanite gay men. This culture’s drug-infused superficiality belies a darker truth that gay men can—and do—prey on each other as a means of establishing and maintaining control; this particularly applies to the young men in these novels whose traumas have made them vulnerable. Gay culture isn’t immune from the damaging patriarchal systems that all too often govern straight culture.

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Anne Raeff’s “Only The River” Weaves Through Time, Borders, and Desire

“Old man,” he said, for he did not know his name, but the old man did not stir, so he remained in the old man’s bed, waiting for daybreak, watching him sleep, thinking about, if he had to choose, would he choose Pepa or the ship, wondering whether love was just an excuse for cowardice. When dawn came, the old man was still sleeping, so he left him to his dreams and found his way back to the river.” (98)

And here we have Anne Raeff’s newest novel, a celebration of time, space, and woven narrative. The novel traces the stories of a half dozen people all intertwined, over the span of about fifty years.  Throughout the passage of time and the history of the world (wars, guerrilla movements, the spread of yellow fever, the coming and going of queer tourists, and love lost and found) the central crux of the story is the celebration of connection—however fleeting.

Fleeing to Nicaragua from Vienna during a worn-torn era, Pepa and her family settle in the jungle town of El Castillo. While there, Pepa’s parents contract yellow fever, leaving her to wander, learn about, and fall in love with both Nicaragua’s lush landscape, and its inhabitants. In particular, Pepa finds herself thrown into a love story with a local named Guillermo, who shows her how to find home in a new place, and a new way.

Pepa’s world comes further into chaos and heartbreak when her family abruptly decides to move to New York. Straddling the boundaries and borders of love, passion, and geography, Only the River shows two things simultaneously: what parallel universes can look like, writ large, and also the fragmentation that happens due to war, fleeing, and settlement. The idea of home, in people and places.

It is wonderful to see multi-generational narratives that involve queerness as fluidly as queerness happens—that is to say, queerness as normalized. Guillermo and his foray into blurred spaces with the two German lovers, Liliana, left by her wife and pining. In this novel, queerness is not a static land that one enters or leaves—it is as running and evolving and changing as the river around which this story revolves.

In our modern world, we need more depictions of love like this, more depictions of landscape like this, more depictions of what love can look like when it is told from many angles—with both the light and the dark. As in her novel about WWII (Winter Kept Us Warm), Raeff has a remarkable ability to be able to take us to new places—fantastical new places—on often well-trot soil. What’s more, the stories Raeff tells, and the fluency with which they are told, earn their place in a canon that is timeless, classic, and necessary. This is a triumph of a novel and a must-read for our times.

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OUTwatch – Wine Country’s LGBTQI+ Film Festival presents 2 Films in August

Thursday August 12, 7 PM
No Ordinary Man
No Ordinary Man is an in-depth look at the life of musician and trans culture icon Billy Tipton. Complicated, beautiful and historically unrivaled, this groundbreaking film shows what is possible when a community collaborates to honor the legacy of an unlikely hero.
For decades, the life of American Jazz musician Billy Tipton was framed as the story of an ambitious woman passing as a man in pursuit of a music career. In NO ORDINARY MAN, Tipton’s story is re-imagined and performed by trans artists as they collectively paint a portrait of an unlikely hero. Together, the filmmakers join Tipton’s son Billy Jr. to reckon with a complicated and contested legacy: how do you tell the story of someone who was hiding in plain sight yet desperate to be seen?

Thursday August 19, 7 PM
Swan Song
Retired hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger is the Liberace of Sandusky, Ohio!. When he is offered $25,000 to style an estranged friend for her funeral, he does the only sensible thing: he escapes his nursing home and hitchhikes into town with a sign boasting “free beauty tips.” As Pat makes his way through his now-alien hometown shoplifting beauty supplies, he finds himself reconnecting with friends, confronting old rivals, and facing the demons of his past. This is based on Pitsenbarger’s real life.

At Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol

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Q&A with I Carry You With Me” star which will have Sunday July 18 screening to benefit LGBTQ Asylum Seekers

“I Carry You With Me” is Based on true love, this decades spanning romance begins in Mexico between an aspiring chef (Armando Espitia) and a teacher (Christian Vázquez). Their lives restart in incredible ways as societal pressure propels them to embark on a treacherous journey to NYC with dreams, hopes, and memories in tow.

Armando Espitia stars as Iván in his first romantic film.  He starred “Heli” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. He his appeared in many films TV shows and theater productions.  He is presently in Mexico City premiering the film.

A special screening of “I Carry You With Me” will be a benefit for Queer Asylum Accompaniment which is a local organization that helps LGBTQ+ Asylum Seekers in our community.  It happens Sunday July 18 at 4:15 pm at Rialto Cinemas In Sebastopol.

Gary Carnivele:  Armando, you are fantastic as Ivan in “I Carry You With Me. What attracted you to the role of Ivan? 
Armando Espitia:  First because it was a love story and I’ve never played the lead in a romantic movie. It was a deep and layer epic story. Then there is the social and political aspect because it deals with homophobia and immigration in both Mexico and the US. So this movie offered me everything as an actor 

GC:  Did you meet with Ivan to help prepare for your role and if so, what did he offer you?
AE:  We didn’t meet until the last week of shooting the film. Heidi the director didn’t want us to meet because she wanted us to play the memories that Ivan had. This playing memories allowed us artistic freedom   Ivan and I have become friends so I think he liked my performance 

GC:  Was it more or less difficult to play a real person compared to a fictional character?
AE:  At first it was difficult because I felt pressure to play his life with dignity. Later I learned to not try to be perfect and tried to have some fun and take risks as an actor

GC:  Did you feel a responsibility playing a gay man, as well as an undocumented person living in American?AE:  I am a gay man so I felt proud to play a gay man which doesn’t happen in many Mexican movies. Also an immigrant who ate sting people and important to the country they work in. They deserve our respect. I felt a responsibility because movies travel around the world 

GC:  What was it like working on location in Mexico and New York?
AE:  Mexico is beautiful and my home. It was my first time in New York and I loved it. It was great when I returned to present the film. I felt like I already knew the city

GC:  Were you very satisfied with your performance?
AE:  Never. (Laughs). I feel insecure when watching myself but so many people on social media have written beautiful things about my performance. 

GC:  What do you hope audience members take away from “I Carry You With Me?”
AE:  “I Carry You With Me” will make LGBTQ people and immigrants and Dreamers feel good and appreciated. I am very happy the movie does that because the story is important.

GC:  Talk about your background and what if anything your experiences brought to this role?AE:  I grew up in Mexico and many members of my family and neighbors are unable to find work here to support their families. They want to be responsible fathers but need to leave to work in US. It is very hard for them 

GC:  Tell us about your career.  How many films have you made and which are you most proud of?
AE:  15 maybe. My first lead in a film “Heli” premiered at Cannes and I am very proud of that.   It was right after university.  I do many films and TV and theater. My friend and I started a theater company in Mexico. I also teach film acting classes 

What advice would you offer to young actors just starting out?
Come to Mexico and take my free classes.  (Laughs).  Ask many questions. Lead with all your senses. Never stop learning.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions.  Best of luck to you.

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Forging Meaning through Love: Jane Byers’ “Small Courage”

Acclaimed poet, documentarian, and lifelong activist Jane Byers takes a courageous dive into modern LGBTQ parenthood in Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family. At once a unique story of a transnational lesbian couple raising biracial twins adopted in Canada in the aughts, and a parallel narrative about coming out and finding oneself, Small Courage represents multiple journeys rolled into one. Adopting is a journey, parenthood is a journey, finding oneself is a journey…coming out is not a singular event, it is a lifelong process that repeatedly occurs during these journeys. And while being lesbian in no way defines Byers’ parenthood journey, it is this powerful part of her identity that gives her much of the strength she needs to overcome challenges in conceiving and raising a loving family.

Small Courage begins with detailed accounts of the adoption process that Byers, who is Canadian but immigrated from England at a young age, and her wife Amy, an American, undertake to build a family. Byers vividly illustrates the amount she and Amy must “explain” themselves throughout the adoption process–the simple desire, and ability, to provide a loving, safe home for children is not enough. The reality of having to assert her identity beyond being a lesbian, to everyone involved in the anxiety-inducing adoption process, peaks in a moment inside the home of an evangelical Christian family fostering the 15-month-old twins that eventually become Jane and Amy’s children. In preparation to bring the twins home, Jane and Amy spend two weeks with the foster family. In a lull between diaper changes and spilled sippy cups, the foster mom asks Jane, “So how does it feel knowing you will go to hell because of your lifestyle choice?” As she does with many similar encounters throughout, Byers responds with mental fortitude: “I chose not to engage and instead focused on cleaning the sippy cups, while thinking up rebuttals (“Hell will be more fun”).” In a testament to Byers’ compassion toward others, by the end of the journey, she and Amy are friends with the foster parents, people who, at one point had a “deeply held belief” that “a family is a mom, a dad, and children, and that anything else is somehow less.”

By braiding her now decades-long journey in parenthood with powerful personal anecdotes regarding her growth as a woman, a lesbian, and a feminist, Byers illustrates why her courage–derived from having her own identity challenged by society, the organized state, and even her own family—is exactly what is needed to be a loving parent. Byers is deeply attuned to her children’s and partner’s physical and mental well-beings, largely because of her life experience learning not only to survive, but to overcome and thrive, despite carrying the trauma of sexual abuse at age 9, frequently feeling invalidated by her parents and close family, and first coming out during a challenging time historically (she writes: “When I was first starting to allow cracks of queer light to enter my consciousness, homosexuality hadn’t long been off the books as a disease, and only a radical few had dared to think of it as an identity”). Her strength and courage are inspirational.

While the courageous act of raising children becomes validating for their relationship, Jane and Amy are also hyper-sensitive to ensuring the children feel validated too. “Perhaps because of my mother’s inconsistent parenting,” Byers says, “it seems to have been my parental mission to see the shit out of my children. Perhaps being seen is just another definition of loving. To love is to see and not to try to change.” Identity and validation are also important to Byers in relation to addressing adoption trauma and recognizing her children’s multiracial backgrounds, two of the other many challenging topics astutely addressed within her memoir. Byers regularly deliberates about whether she is doing enough to expose her kids, whose birth mother is Indian and whose father is “likely Caucasian,” to “cultural heritages and to other transracial adoptees…to usher them through to adulthood with a healthy sense of self.”

Readers will delight in Byers’ interspersed poems, which nicely complement her practical encounters with parenting, marital, and physical and mental health challenges.  As a transgender writer married to a cisgender schoolteacher with two young children of our own, I adored the applicability of Byers’ memoir in thinking about my own journey as a parent and partner (e.g., “it is the quality of the relationships, not the gender of the parents, that matters”), while at the same time indulging in her more artistic portrayals of love and family. Byers’ voyage to becoming herself, finding deep love, and conceiving a family is full of stormy weather, but, movingly, she sails through life’s storms with strength and determination, leaving rainbows of vibrant poetry in her wake.  

It is worth noting that Byers also pays ample homage to LGBTQ pioneers throughout her memoir, for example, with a pilgrimage to the Stonewall Inn with Amy on their tenth anniversary. Byers’ recognition of those who made it possible for her and Amy to love more freely, and to legally marry, adopt, and raise a family, seamlessly detaches Byers’ narrative from the personal and elevates it to the communal. Small Courage is more than a familial memoir, it is an ode to the power of community, and a call to courage.  

The memoir ends with joyful, reflective notes: “Heck, if a lesbian couple can spend every waking moment for two weeks with a Christian fundamentalist couple and come out at the end as friends, there is hope in the world.” In addition, Byers concludes with somber reminders that finding meaning is synonymous with living our truths. “I spent a long time forging meaning,” Byers writes, “it took me a while to get to changing the world. How do I change the world? I came out. I walk through airports with my wife and our children and we don’t hide being a family.” Small Courage is continually coming out–it is the journey, the meaning, and the joy.

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Outwatch Wine Country’s LGBTQI+ & Rialto Cinemas presents ‘Films for Everyone!’

6 LGBTQI Films in the next few months We have found SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE – Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Elder, Undocumented Immigrants, Documentary, Narrative – even one on LGBTQI Comix.Instead of having OUTwatch’s Film Festival in October in the middle of fire season, we decided to work with the Rialto Cinemas and present

6 GREAT LGBTQI films this summer and early fall.All films are at Rialto Cinemas, Sebastopol
Thursday July 15, 7 PM
NO STRAIGHT LINES – THE RISE OF QUEER COMICSDid you follow Dykes to Watch Out For? Or Cathartic Comics with African American LGBT characters? Or Wendel by Howard Cruise? Or Rude Girls and Dangerous Women? Or Come Out. Comix by Mary Wings? “No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer comics,” tells the story of five scrappy and pioneering cartoonists who depicted everything from the AIDS crisis, coming out, and same-sex marriage, to themes of race, gender, and disability. Their work is funny, smart, and profound, and provides a unique, uncensored window into LGBTQ lives from the 1970s onward, beginning at a time in which there was no other genuine queer storytelling in popular culture. 
Sunday July 18, 4:15 PMI Carry You With Me. A Benefit for QAA (Queer Asylum Accompaniment)
The story of Undocumented Immigrants. Ambition and societal pressure propel an aspiring chef to leave his soulmate in Mexico and make the treacherous journey to New York, where life will never be the same. It’s based on the real life love story of Ivan Garcia and Geraldo Zabaleta, where their fresh romance is tested by the fact closeted Ivan wants to make an illegal move to the US while openly gay Geraldo is afraid to make the leap. It follows these two men as they fall in love, cross the border and struggle to carve out a piece of the American Dream for themselves.
Thursday August 12, 7 PM
No Ordinary Man
No Ordinary Man is an in-depth look at the life of musician and trans culture icon Billy Tipton. Complicated, beautiful and historically unrivaled, this groundbreaking film shows what is possible when a community collaborates to honor the legacy of an unlikely hero.
For decades, the life of American Jazz musician Billy Tipton was framed as the story of an ambitious woman passing as a man in pursuit of a music career. In NO ORDINARY MAN, Tipton’s story is re-imagined and performed by trans artists as they collectively paint a portrait of an unlikely hero. Together, the filmmakers join Tipton’s son Billy Jr. to reckon with a complicated and contested legacy: how do you tell the story of someone who was hiding in plain sight yet desperate to be seen?
Thursday August 19, 7 PM
Swan Song
Retired hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger is the Liberace of Sandusky, Ohio!. When he is offered $25,000 to style an estranged friend for her funeral, he does the only sensible thing: he escapes his nursing home and hitchhikes into town with a sign boasting “free beauty tips.” As Pat makes his way through his now-alien hometown shoplifting beauty supplies, he finds himself reconnecting with friends, confronting old rivals, and facing the demons of his past. This is based on Pitsenbarger’s real life.
Look for MORE Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay films during September and October.

Tickets for all the films are at the Rialto Cinemas, Sebastopol the week the film is showing.

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“No Straight Lines” LGBTQ+ Comic Strip Film Shows July 15 at Rialto – Q&A with Director Vivian Kleiman

“No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer comics,” tells the story of five scrappy and pioneering cartoonists who depicted everything from the AIDS crisis, coming out, and same-sex marriage, to themes of race, gender, and disability. They tackled the humor in queer lives in a changing world, and the everyday pursuits of love, sex, and community. Their work is funny, smart, and profound, and provides a unique, uncensored window into LGBTQ lives from the 1970s onward, beginning at a time in which there was no other genuine queer storytelling in popular culture. Equally engaging are their personal journeys, as they, against all odds, helped build a queer comics underground that has been able to grow and evolve in remarkable ways

The Film’s director/producer Vivian Kleiman is a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker.[1] She has received a National Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Research and executive produced an Academy Award nominated documentary.  Her films include: “Families Are Forever” “Always My Son” “Out for the Count.”

In 2019, Kleiman was awarded a Eureka Fellowship of the Fleishhacker Foundation, a fellowship program for visual artists. Also an educator, she served as Adjunct Faculty at Stanford University‘s Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video Production from 1995–2004.

Kleiman was a long-time collaborator with black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs. They founded Signifyin’ Works in 1991, which creates and distributes films about the experiences of African Americans. Directed by Riggs, their 1992 film “Color Adjustment” screened at the Sundance Film Festival and received the International Documentary Association‘s IDA Award, the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historiansand the George Foster Peabody Award in 1993

“No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer comics,” which will be screened as part of Outwatch’s Film Series Thursday, July 15th at Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol.  

Gary Carnivele:  Have you always been a fan of Queer Comics and which were some of the first that you followed?

Vivian Klienman:  I was a huge fan of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For when it was serialized in the local women’s newspaper, Plexus. We all would chomp at the bit in anticipation of the next installment, and learn what exploits our fave characters got into. And of course, Hothead Paisan was a hoot.

GC:  Did they play a part in opening up a new, big, queer world to you?

VK:  Dykes to Watch Out For was so important for many of us – it was the first time many of us lesbians in the 80s actually got to see ourselves represented in comics. Goodbye to the hokey white bread romances. Goodbye funny little animal stories. Instead, it was poking fun at our real lives with elegance and insight. That was such a gift to lesbians as we were creating new networks of connection (eg bookstores, cafés, and community health care providers.)

GC:  What made you decide to make “No Straight Lines” and what were your first steps to get others interested in joining you on this cinematic journey? 

VK:  I was approached by a colleague Greg Sirota and his friend Justin Hall (an expert in the subject) to take on the project. Justin encouraged me to attend the first Queers & Comics Conference (an international in-gathering of a wide diversity of artists) held in NYC in May 2015. It was a casting director’s dream. When I walked in and saw a young person with chartreuse-colored hair talking with an older gentleman with balding head wearing a buttoned-down collared shirt, surrounded by a panoply of gender non-binary non-conforrming (to ANY standards and assumptions), I was drawn in. And once I attended the panels over the next 3 days, and heard the remarkable stories and saw the range of artwork, I knew it would be my next film project. 

GC:  I can imagine you and your team did a huge amount of research.  What was that process like?

GC::Did you and your team straight away know who you wanted to be in the film?

VK:  I knew that I did not want to do a film that replicated Justin’s anthology of queer comics, which would be an encyclopedic history of who did what when. 

Instead, I wanted to create a film that took the viewer on an experience that touched many different emotional notes: from the humorous, to the poignant, and the painful moments.

So, I limited the film to profile 5 pioneer queer cartoonists and that was a challenge: who to omit when there are so many talented and important artists to profile. Justin and I carefully deliberated that decision.

GC:  How receptive were the subjects of your film to tell their stories on camera? 

VK:  All of the comic book artists who I met are eager to tell their stories. While they are content to have solitude and do creative work, contrary to the stereotype of a curmudgeonly artist, these folks are genuinely eager to share their work.

GC:  What surprised you the most about them, their work, and their careers?

VK:  I never expected this band of mischievous artists to be appealing to such a broad audience. I think it boils down to this: a well-made film about people who follow their passion. Instead of the drive to earn money, these artists are motivated to be creative in a world where there isn’t much likelihood of financial remuneration. Their passion for their work is infectious. 

GC:  Who are some of the artists that you weren’t aware of and what do they bring to the medium?

VK:  The new generation of web artists were all new to me. I love the fact that the Internet and tech can continue to be a place where the DIY artform continues to flourish.

GC:  You do a terrific job representing the doc’s subjects creative process in the film.  What did you find most interesting about the development of their work?

VK:  One of the important themes that I braided in the film is that of “the means of production,” as Karl Marx would say. I really enjoy taking the viewer on this historical journey not only of queer history in the U.S., but of the evolution of the art form itself. The journey starts from a pen and paper, then expands to offset printing, to Xerox machines, to major printing processes, and finally the web.

At the same time, the nature of the images evolved. After Rupert realized that he had been drawing only white people, he trained his eyes on his own experience as a Black gay man. Diane diMassa gave voice to the rage of inequality and violence against women. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, queer artists responded with comics that ranged from the tragic to the humorous.   

GC:  Did you have a real sense of what the film would look like or did that come about during editing? 

VK:  During the editing, I realized that the film felt stale. I wanted to infuse it with a vitality and with a connection to my targeted audience: queer youth. So I did an experiment: I spent a day filming “speed interviews” with a dozen Next Gen artists who were attending the 2017 Queers & Comics conference. I had exactly 10 minutes with each artist, enough time to say hello and ask them just a few basic questions. At the end of the day, I didn’t know how I was going to use that material, but I knew I had something special. Those became the “Greek Chorus” in the film, and immensely changed the tone and impact of the film.

GC:  Even though the focus of the film is Queer Comics, you truly take us on a trip through LGBTQ+ history.  Why was it important for you to firmly set the work on the background of the Queer experience?

VK:  You know, despite the many successes in the journey towards acceptance of queers in this country and others, the statistics about attempted suicide among queer youth is by far disproportionate to the general population. This is deplorable. And our youth still need our help towards self-acceptance.

I wanted to create a film that I wish I had when I was young and struggling with coming out. And I wanted to offer young queers today who similarly are struggling with their identity, to understand that there were many who encountered similar obstacles along the way. The history of queer comics is a wonderful journey from isolation to the formation of community that I hope will inspire a new generation. 

GC:  You premiered the film at Tribeca and it was featured at Frameline.  At what other festivals was it screened and what was the virtual film festival experience like for you?

VK:  It’s an independent filmmaker’s dream to premiere at Tribeca. But No Straight Lines continued further, and reached the perfect trifecta of major venues for its launch: Tribeca, Sheffield Doc Fest (England), and American Film Institute Doc Fest in DC – this is such a joy! It’s also a testament to the amazing team of collaborators who together helped me shape a film that aimed for more than information and journalism. We all were dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. And that infused the work with a vitality that touches a much larger audience than I set out to reach.

GC:  When you were finally able to experience a live audience’s reaction, what aspects of the doc did they seem to connect to the most?

VK:  I love how everyone erupts in a deep guffaw when seeing two older gay men, who have lived together and loved one another for over 40 years, sit down in front of the tv to watch the morning news with eggs and coffee on the tray. So ordinary and so unremarkably the daily experience of so many.

GC:  What are you working on now?

VK:  I often serve as an Executive Producer on documentary films, especially ones with a challenging subject and filmic approach. Currently, a film by Vicky Funari is in post-production. It’s a profile of a group of seniors who take an aquacize class at their neighborhood YMCA swimming pool – older bodies and souls in water. 

In the Fall 2019, I was honored with a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation that I planned to start this winter. However, with the arrival of Covid-19, and the incredible loss of over 600,000 American lives, I am probably going to change the focus of that film. Stay tuned! 

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Film Review: No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics

The documentary that brings to light the fascinating, seemingly untold story of the queer community within the comic book world. Introducing the vast achievements, as well as obstacles faced by, the queer comic-book artists featured in Justin Hall’s eponymous anthology – including Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, Howard Cruse, Rupert Kinnard and Mary Wings – director Vivian Kleiman, in her first feature-length documentary, reveals the inspirations, creations and adversities unique to LGBQT+ writers. The story not only covers modern-day artists and illustrators, but the earlier “golden age” of comic books, and what issues and images were pushed to the shadows at that time.

No Straight Lines fully captures the queer comic-book experience, though it follows a fairly formulaic structure, moving between the five main featured artists and delving into their unique writing/illustrating styles. We also see their personal viewpoints of the comic world, taking a look at how the mainstream comic franchises (Marvel, DC, newspaper comics, etc.) played an integral part in inspiring each writer, even as they forced queer writers underground at their humble beginnings.

Alison Bechdel in NO STRAIGHT LINES: THE RISE OF QUEER COMICS ©Vivian Kleiman

Outside of its personal reflections, No Straight Lines tackles major world events as they pertain to those in the LGBQT+ community, including the discrimination they face, overlapping themes with the “hippie” era, the AIDS epidemic, Stonewall, and many other relevant experiences. All of this content mixes together well with the informational elements of the film, as we see the emotional (even traumatic) effect the world and its historical content had on the writers profiled.

While No Straight Lines is otherwise strong, as a documentary I found it often quite repetitive. By its conclusion, the film struggles to introduce new ideas, and the freshness of the topic dwindles towards the second half. Without affecting the overall impact for the viewer, No Straight Lines starts to recycle ideas and information as it wraps up its narrative. All the same, the story is a must-see look at representation, and fits in perfectly with our modern-day push for greater inclusion.

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