On the death of Outfest and the work of building a community
Queer people deserve to be paid for their work, and aren't beholden to "elders" for approval or permission.
I don’t usually post lengthy responses to articles published in papers I work for, but an opinion piece that appeared in The Los Angeles Blade this week – and is currently the most-read article on the site – has left me feeling frustrated.
“Outfest implodes amid LGBTQ assimilation and elite capture in Los Angeles” is by Don Kilhefner, a founder of the LA LGBT Center, and describes the downfall of the city’s premiere LGBT film festival, decries some other group that is trying to build a new LGBT film festival, and sputters at how this is all because of “assimilation” of some sort.
My apologies to international readers if this all feels a little provincial. But Outfest was a major queer cultural festival in the heart of the global film industry. It had the potential to be a really, really important element of global queer culture. And I care about queer culture. (I’m even a bit of a filmmaker myself. You can watch my last short film, Ext. Toronto. Night. here.)
The article begins by noting that Outfest has a storied history of over 50 years, but disappeared with a whimper, and barely any notice in the gay press. The slow death of Outfest was covered more extensively in the LA Times, Variety, and Deadline.
It is true that The Blade seems to have overlooked Outfest’s demise. I can’t speak to historical coverage or the editorial choices behind it, but in the past when I worked at Xtra, the local queer film fest InsideOut would get extensive coverage, with lots of previews and reviews of the movies and parties. There’s been a lot of attrition in the gay press since then, and unfortunately in news-y sites, a lot of that has been in the arts coverage.
But there’s some important context that’s missing here. Los Angeles is chock-a-block with local film festivals, celebrating every genre and community imaginable. (I even wrote about a monthly queer film showcase last year for The Blade). There’s a lot to cover, and a lot of alternatives.
More importantly, as a queer film festival, Outfest was pretty fucking awful.
Outfest’s programming choices were bad. They revealed that the organization’s priority was not building community with queer filmmakers, it was making connections with Hollywood. Frequent programming selections – including the highest profile screenings – were mid-level studio fare that featured an incidental queer character (if that!) in hopes that a big star might lure out audiences. The stars often didn’t even show for the screenings.
Ironically, Outfest wasn’t even big enough to attract prestige Hollywood queer films to do their premieres there – those Oscar bait-y films prefer to premiere at the major festivals (Toronto, Cannes, Sundance, etc. or even the bigger queer festivals like Frameline in San Francisco). So the mainstream films were usually not even good or exciting.
Lure patrons out to mid films that don’t even satisfy a hunger for queer stories long enough, and you sour your audience.
And this was all done at the expense of programming work by local queer filmmakers, which would’ve made those Hollywood connections useful.
That Outfest’s loss wasn’t even noticed by its thousands of patrons, volunteers, and filmmakers – is more of an indictment of the festival than it is of the community. Aside from the fact the organization didn’t deem it important to send out even an email blast thanking people for being a part of it, the organization just hadn’t done the work over the years to make itself valuable to the community.
Obviously, the pandemic hurt the festival’s revenues. But to be blunt, this is not a community without money. If the festival had been at all important to the queer community or the filmmaking community in Los Angeles, people would have rallied to save it.
(At this point, I should note that Outfest is actually still going on as some kind of shell of itself, with a single staff member and a board, per its web site. It helped program a slate of films at the Dances With Films festival in June. Maybe it’ll eventually make its way back. Maybe it won’t.)
But even more troubling in Kilhefner’s opinion piece is his criticism of UCLA’s “Queer Rhapsody” film series, a mini festival of queer features and shorts that he says “seemingly came out of nowhere, had no LGBTQ community input, and was programmed to occur at five non-LGBTQ spaces across the city.”
Come out of nowhere?! How dare they! Don’t they know that when queer people to do anything, a tribal council of octogenarians must be given at least two years’ notice and grant their blessing?
Had no community input? Queer Rhapsody’s programming team is made up of three women of color, including, um, Outfest’s former director of creative development, whose layoff Kilhefner criticizes in this same article. The rest of the staff appear to be young queer and trans people who are deeply involved in queer arts scenes in LA and across the country. The festival also lists 23 community partners, most of whom are queer and trans organizations or organizations that work for minority representation in film. Maybe this isn’t as scientific a method of collecting input as Kilhefner’s, uh, “quick survey of 14 gay/queer people in L.A.,” but it’s not “no community input.”
Finally, programmed at non-LGBTQ spaces? Bitch, Outfest was hosted at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood. The gayest thing about that space is the guy dressed as Spider-Man for the tourists outside.
And really, what “LGBTQ space” would have been appropriate to hold a film festival? The Abbey? The Equinox steam room? The alley behind Circus of Books? Please.
Somehow, wanting to watch a gay film in a cinema packed with gay people at a festival called “Queer Rhapsody” programmed by a panel of queer people equals “hetero assimilation.”
It’s just too stupid.
But Kilhefner is also using this whole story as a frame for his thesis of “elite capture” – that all LGBTQ organizations have been captured and controlled by an elite group, depriving us of the community-led grassroots efforts that existed before about 1985.
Leaving aside that his prime example of “elite capture” is the shuttering of an organization that was run by a shadowy board of Hollywood chasers and the founding of a new organization led by young women of color programming a festival without any major corporate sponsors, Kilhefner takes a detour to level a broadside against the queer press.
“As a result of 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 disappearance, has vanished, intellectually and spiritually impoverishing all of us. Incredibly, no investigative reporting occurs anywhere by the LGBTQ media, depriving LGBTQ people of critically vital information about what’s really happening in their communities. This is a historically singular type of new technology censorship.”
Look, no one got rich from the shuttering of gay media across the country. Queer outlets disappeared because of the shifting technology landscape and the outlets’ poor response to it (see also all other legacy news media).
I am surprised that The Blade would publish such a paragraph lambasting its own output, however.
The truth of the matter is that investigative journalism has disappeared at queer outlets because no one pays for it. Investigative reporting takes a lot of time. And sometimes that time doesn’t even pay off with a usable story. Outlets are reluctant to spend money on that, and freelancers like me, who get paid per article regardless of the time it takes to write it, can’t afford to.
(Yes, ironic to write that in an opinion piece that I don’t get paid for either… Of course, if you’d like to support my work, you can always upgrade to a paid subscription!)
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in queer journalism. Advocacy journalism is still important. It raises awareness of issues and perspectives that the mainstream isn’t talking about. It shares news and experiences with our community of queer people. It celebrates our victories and builds our culture. In that sense, maybe doing deep reporting on the downfall of an organization that was already covered in the mainstream press just isn’t that important.
Fuck you for arguing that I’m upholding an elite power structure because I’d like to get paid for my work.
Fuck you for arguing gay community life was so much better pre-1985, when community organizers didn’t get paid for their work, and community options were so much more limited.
Fuck you for essentially telling a group of queer women of color to get of your lawn because they didn’t consult you or your 14 friends before starting their own queer festival.
It would be nice for Outfest to reevaluate itself and rebuild with a true commitment to building up the community in Los Angeles. But if it doesn’t it’s good to know that there are people out there still willing to do the work without asking permission first.