STOP IT, YOU'RE KILLING ME!

For the last few months, since I started working in the wonderful world of gay and lesbian media, I've been reminded of something that first irritated me back when I was a volunteer member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival's programming committee.

Positive images. Positive representation of gays and lesbians in the media.

The reason I first got involved with the MQFF was because at the time I was hanging out on Melbourne's punk scene and publishing my own queercore zine The Burning Times, and I was rapidly getting pissed off with the festival's lack of diversity in the film it showed. There was a thriving scene of gay punks, lesbians goths, etc around the world, but no sign of it on screen. I wanted to change that.

The final straw for me was a decision by the then-director of the festival to ban the film Frisk (based on a novel by Denis Cooper about a guy who may or may not be a gay serial killer) on the basis that is didn't represent 'positive images of the gay and lesbian community.'

I can understand such an attitude, but I can't condone it. Yes, queers have been misrepresented constantly on the silver screen, as Vitto Russo explored so eloquently in The Celluloid Closet, and which I discussed here, in an article about Brokeback Mountain earlier this year. But in this day and age, surely we can be allowed to present more realistic explorations of gay and lesbian life?

I got my own back, though - after I became a festival programmer, not only did I program Frisk, I also programmed Hard, a hard-hitting albeit badly acted film about a gay serial killer toying with a closeted cop. Plus I got to screen several films, often documentaries, exploring queercore and other GLBT subcultures, but that's a whole other blog entry...

Now don't get me wrong, I haven't been forbidden to write articles for MCV that show the queer community in a bad light, but having just finished a piece about a transgendered killer in NSW whose parole has been repealed, the whole issue has bubbled back to the top of my memory.

Because, let's face it, there have been some pretty murderous queers from time to time:

• John Wayne Gacy - not only the subject of a beautiful song by Sufjan Stephens, but a cold-blooded killer of young men who dressed up in a clown suit (pictured, right).
• William Bonin, the 'Freeway Killer', described as 'the poster boy for capital punishment' by Californian Governor Pete Wilson (himself the subject of a Dead Kennedys song).
• The quietly-spoken, necrophilliac, cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer (the subject of a bad B-grade film), pictured right, who confessed to killing 16 young men and boys in the US city of Milwaukee.
• Over in the UK there was Colin Ireland, who claimed to be straight, but if you ask me, anyone who sets out to become a serial killer by specifically targetting gay men has got more than a few screws loose, one of which was probably related to his sexuiality...
• And of course, there's Dennis Nilsen, who killed his victims because he couldn't stand men leaving him, and who, amongst other things, inspired a work called Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men by UK dance company DV8 Physical Theatre...

So let this be a warning to all the gay-bashers out there: be careful - or one of us might kill you and eat you!


And apologies to anyone who's been told via Bloglines that I've uploaded this post numerous time - I've been editing some spelling mistakes and trying to get the placement of the pictures right...