In the Life: Ep. 603, "Image, Identity & Diversity"

On this edition of "In the Life": [Narrator:] Image. Identity. Diversity. Sometimes I have to go "incog-Negro". [Narrator:] And gay culture. And controversy - Southern-style. Lesbians! [Narrator:] All up next on "In the Life". America's information line on gay and lesbian issues and culture. [music] [Narrator:] "In the Life" is funded in part by The H. van Ameringen Foundation. Additional support provided by: Jeffrey B. Soref; The Michael Palm Foundation; The New York Community Trust; The Advocate, the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, since 1967; and In the Life members nationwide. [theme music] [Katherine Linton:] Welcome to "In the Life" and New Orleans. I'm Katherine Linton. In this episode we travel to the South where gay culture and expression is being met with both growing acceptance and great resistance. We'll visit Savannah, Georgia which has embraced a flamboyant new celebrity. And Louisiana, where lawyers are mounting an innovative suit against the sodomy law there. Later in our program, we'll explore in several stories, the impact of identity and labels. As more and more images of gays and lesbians appear in the media, a homogenized look of gay America often conflicts with other aspects of personal identity. But we begin in New Orleans, where an annual Mardi Gras celebration gives this city a reputation for "anything goes". [saxophone music] A reputation that's at odds with the strict sodomy law that still exists in the state of Louisiana. But that law, may soon become history, as a gay lawyer and a straight law professor, with his students team up to erase the Louisiana Crimes Against Nature statute from the books. [Linton:] There are currently sodomy laws in 21 states. Louisiana's is one of 15 that apply to both heterosexual and homosexual sex. [John Rawls:] The Louisiana Crime Against Nature statute was first written in 1805, two years after this French and Spanish colony became American territory. It tracked the exact language still used by our sister state of Mississippi, against the "abominable and despicable crime against nature," and it penalized any form of proscribed conduct by life imprisonment without any chance of parole or pardon. [Linton:] The current statute punishes oral or anal sex with a five year sentence. So what this means is, that while in this former French colony, there has never been a law against adultery. And there has never been a law against fornication. Vive la France. There is a five year felony for a man or woman to have oral or anal sex with another person, whether, in the elegant words of the statute, "with a person of the same sex or the opposite sex or with an animal." [Linton:] Convinced that the law was used to harass lesbians and gay men New Orlean's attorney John Rawls is bringing a civil suit against the sodomy statute, one of only a few challenges to sodomy laws nationwide. [Linton:] He's involved people in the community to act as plaintiffs, who submit affidavits arguing how the statute threatens them. I was working for the city of New Orleans and I was also appointed Commissioner to the Governor's task force on violent crime and homicide by Governor Edwards. And under both those positions, I had to take an oath to uphold the laws of the state and the city. And it was just kind of a, ironic, as a lesbian to take this oath when, you know, certain laws infer that we're criminals. The statute in my judgment stays on the books as a way of maintaining our status as second-class citizens, or third-class citizens, or worse. [Laurence Best:] Uh, in Louisiana, Crime Against Nature is a felony. And of course, as a lawyer, if I'm found convicted of a felony, I can be sanctioned or disbarred by the Bar Association. The crime of, the Crime Against Nature in Louisiana is also considered a crime of violence and a sex offense. So imagine your name on a list of sex offenders. But then, Louisiana, of course, never does anything the same way everybody else does. Napoleonic code, and all that. So they've added a second definition of Crime Against Nature in Louisiana, which is "solicitating unnatural carnal copulation for compensation." And, for the way this works in practice is, a gay man sees another gay man on the street or in a bar, offers to go home and have sex with him, turns out to be an undercover cop. He doesn't have to actually go through with the nasty in order to make the arrest. All he does is lie and say that the propositioner offered money. And all of a sudden, it's a five year felony. [Linton:] John Rawls has already been to court twice to challenge the sodomy statute. [Rawls:] The second time that we took this to the Louisiana Supreme Court they said that because the statute on its face applied to people without regard to gender or without regard to sexual orientation, that we could not prove that it was written with a discriminatory intent. Hard-headed redneck that I am, I took the challenge of the Louisiana Supreme Court. I managed to find a person who is just the opposite of redneck, John Penny, married, wonderful man, started the Criminal Justice program at Southern University at New Orleans. [Linton:] John Rawls and John Penny teamed up to prove the statute discriminates against gay men and lesbians. One of the things that we had in common, was the strong feeling against discrimination of any kind. [Linton:] John Penny volunteered to research each arrest under the sodomy statute in every parish, Louisiana's version of a county. He's been working with his students at the Southern University of New Orleans to determine if there's a pattern of harassment against gay men. This kind of state-wide survey has never been done in this country. We have a computer print-out of all arrests across the state in terms of what has been indicated to us from the various sources around the state, the District Attorney's, the Sheriff's departments. What we expected, of course, was the more backward, the more conservative, the more homophobic the area, the higher the suppression rate. What we did find, was in many cases, just the opposite. I don't know that we'll ever be able to prove it, but I think that the more visible a gay community is the higher the arrest rate will be. Figure this. Orleans Parish with 11% of the population has three-quarters of the arrests under this statute. And when you take in the big suburb, that's the second biggest parish next door, the two of them put together have 22% of the population, and 96% of the arrests. [Linton:] They also found that demographically, very similar parishes might have drastically different arrest rates, pointing to the capricious way the statute is enforced. [Penny:] When we look at parishes that connect, one parish which has the heaviest population may not have the heaviest arrests. And may not even have any arrests, and they are both heavily, culturally the same, in terms of religion, family structure, and outlook. My favorite, we have two bayou, Cajun, Catholic parishes down on the Gulf: Lafourche and Terrebonne. One of them has no arrests a year, the other has two arrests a year, and it's the smaller one. The only possible conclusion is that the Sheriff of Lafourche Parish wants to keep [with accent:] them lesbians and gay men down, and the other sheriff is more busy fighting real crime. Just by going over all the many cases and arrest records, I've, I see patterns that really are vague and ambiguous. It's as if the state uses it in a manner to suppress a group of people, rather than to enforce a law that they feel is in the state's interest. It educates me because we don't see the kind of pain, that's caused. If any other group would be treated in that manner, I think we would be absolutely appalled and angry. [Linton:] Possibly the most interesting aspect of this civil suit is who's working on it. Professor Penny and his students are not the usual champions of gay rights. [Cherry Blanks:] I was against that lifestyle. And I still am. I will not try to cover that up. But I can say, when we're looking at issues that affect the way people are living - and I mean, living, people in general, citizens - then you're talking about a whole different issue. It's not whether or not I feel it's morally right. [Blanks:] So then, that kind of does away with the prejudice, and then says, to me, "Cherry, maybe you need to look at what's going on here. Maybe you're, you're maybe one of the others that needs to come and get involved with this." They haven't been an old civil rights worker. I recognize the fact that if we start pulling people's civil rights and liberty, then we set it up for everybody. [Penny:] One of the things that I always challenge my classes to do is to look at the way things are, and if you're pleased with them, then do nothing. If you, if you're going to sit and complain about what's going on, then you need, you need to avail yourself of the opportunity to do something about it. Get involved and don't - you may never change the world, but you don't have to leave it the same either. [music] There still may be a long way to go before the Louisiana sodomy statute becomes history. But regardless of what the letter of the law says, the spirit of this city has always been attractive to gays and lesbians. In fact some very famous gay people have been proud to call New Orleans home. We traced their steps, along with many others with historian Bob Batson, leading the way. [Batson:] This neighborhood, in and around Jackson Square, has long attracted artists and writers. And it was in this apartment that Tennessee Williams lived at the end of 1946. And was writing on a short play called "Ten Blocks on the Camino Real." Tennessee Williams returned to New Orleans in 1947. And it was under the skylights you can see through the open windows that he completed the writing of "A Streetcar Named Desire". Right here at this location is where Truman Capote said he lived when he was about 20 years old, and wrote his first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms". [Batson:] Clay Shaw was a leading citizen in New Orleans. You can read a little about him here, but he was also a writer, a war hero, active in a lot of civic activities. [Linton:] In March 1967, Clay Shaw was arrested by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison for conspiring to assassinate John F. Kennedy. People of New Orleans were shocked on the night of March 1, 1967 to turn on their television sets and see this leading citizen - who was homosexual, and Jim Garrison knew it. The public didn't, but Garrison did. - being lead into the court in handcuffs and charged with conspiring to murder the President of the United States of America. When Jim Garrison was asked, "What case did he have against Clay Shaw?" He said one of the most cynical, frightening replies. He said, "I have no case against Clay Shaw. But I don't need one, because I expect it will never come to trial 'cause he will commit suicide first." Because that's what homosexuals were expected to do in 1967 New Orleans, rather than risk exposure. [Batson:] This is the convent of the Ursuline nuns, the oldest building standing in the entire Mississippi River Valley. And I think the perfect place to discuss... Lesbians! I want to tell you a story about a term I use. Some years ago, an elderly woman, she's in her 80s now, leaned over to me and she was a little uncomfortable with all of our younger people's visibility and confrontation and gay pride and gay politics. A world that was just different from hers. She leaned over to me, and I guess she wanted to participate. She patted me on the hand and said, "My dear boy, I come from an age where we didn't have closets. We had armoires." [Batson:] And I thought what a perfect term that was, 'cause when these houses were built in the 19th century, they had no closets. They had armoires. So those are our closets. [Batson:] Almost a decade before the horror of AIDS hit us here in New Orleans, we had a dress rehearsal. [Linton:] On June 24th, 1973, 32 people died in a fire in a gay bar called the Up Stairs Lounge. [Batson:] Almost the entire congregation of the little Metropolitan Community Church here in New Orleans died in that fire. Reverend Troy Perry, head of the MCC, came from Los Angeles to New Orleans and conducted a memorial service the following Sunday, here at St. Mark's Methodist Church. [Linton:] After the memorial, Troy Perry announced that news cameras were at the front entrance and that an exit out of the back of the church had been arranged. And I don't know what happened in that church that day. There was no discussion. But everybody in that church walked out this door and down these steps. [Batson:] Four years after the horrible fire, Anita Bryant gained fame in Miami with the Dade County Referendum. And her first public performance after that referendum on June 7th, 1977 was here in New Orleans. So a great protest rally was held right here in Jackson Square. Three to five thousand people came out of their armoires and into the streets to protest what Anita Bryant represented. And out of that moment, out of that energy, our community of lesbians and gay men as we know it today really began to grow. [music] [Linton:] The next stop on our Southern tour is Savannah, Georgia. When John Berendt's book, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" first hit the stands in 1994, the true story about the eccentrics of beautiful Savannah quickly became a runaway best seller. Now one of the most colorful characters in this narrative is The Lady Chablis. And, for The Lady, or The Empress, or The Doll, being ordinary is out of the question. And her desire to be fabulous is a priority, even if she sometimes flies in the face of the conservative South. We bring you now, a day in the life of The Lady Chablis. Come here [T...] You're making Momma late for her appointment at the wig store. Wig shopping time! [Chablis voiceover:] I'm a female impersonator, and it's not to make fun, or to kick and poke at the females. Let's go! [Chablis voiceover:] It's my salute to women. The little flip thing going on, that's nice. They got a big assortment in here. What I'm gonna do - oh, I do like that one - would you bring that one over? [Chablis, voiceover:] You know, women got the power baby. My being in touch with my feminine and my masculine side, I know, that the feminine side is where the power is. Very white girl hair. Valley girl! I think I almost look good in anything. Let's try on something ugly. And see if I look good in it. Perfect, yes. Perfect. Perfect, we'll take this one. Whoohoo! Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I guess I'll take that back. I guess I don't look good in every wig. [Chablis, voiceover:] Passing, to me, is being able to get out in public without people staring and pointing. Hi, Hon! [Woman:] Hi Lady, how are ya? [Chablis:] I'm fine baby, how you doing? [Woman:] You're looking marvelous as ever. [Chablis:] Thank you. You got a table ready for me? [Woman:] I got a table ready. [Chablis:] You're looking great. The Lady Chablis is my name. That's my legal name. So I think I'm one of the few people with the first name The. And if you're from the South, you can call me The. But The Lady Chablis is my, uh, real name. The Doll is sort of my fantasy character. It's my fun thing. When I'm dressed up for my shows to entertain, then I'm The Doll. People would comment on the way that I looked as a female. And I liked that. It made me comfortable on the inside and the one thing that I believe in, with any human being, is that if your soul and your spirit says it's the right thing, then it's the right thing. [Linton:] The right thing for The Lady Chablis was to do a book about her life story. It's appropriately titled, "Hiding My Candy". [Chablis:] Here we go again! For the book signing. Thank you, hon. I was approached by Pocket Books. It was an opportunity for my story to be told, not only on my behalf, but on behalf of people like myself. Oh, here's a picture of me, before I became a woman. And the caption under this picture reads, "Even at three, I had a nice set of legs." And this is my Negro Scarlett O'Hara look, for the new South. My first choice was going to be, of me standing in the middle of a cotton field with a bunch of white folks dressed up as slaves. [laughs] And... [laughs] and I'm in a beaded gown, going, "Mmm, the new South." But we thought this one would be more appropriate than that. [laughs] These are great! John Berendt and The Lady Chablis. And John is so happy. Could it be because his head is resting against my breast? In the South, and in Savannah, people regard other people's lives as works of art. Chablis is, is quintessentially Southern in this respect. She's made up her own life. She's the star of her own movie. She's very Southern, she's very Savannah. [Linton:] She has also become very famous. And international visibility poses a new challenge. Sometimes I have to go "incog-Negro." Uh, which is my term for incognito. [piano music] [Chablis:] Ladies and Gentlemen, your hostess. A genuine person. The mother of 10 children, plus one, me. The Lady of 6,000 Songs: Miss Emma Kelly. [Chablis:] Emma is a very big part of my life. She and I just went on a tour together. And when I tell you it was like mother and daughter, it really was. We had a wonderful time. [Kelly, sung:] Pardon my Southern accent. [Chablis:] Okay, pardon my Southern drawl. [Kelly, sung:] Or were you saying, or replying, "I love y'all." [applause] [Kelly:] And y'all! [applause] [Chablis, lip-syncing:] I said, "Baby, hey, meet me with your black drawers on." Yeah! [Chablis:] I lip-sync because that's the part of the entertainment part, but my monologues are what people like the best about me. I see a lot of heterosexuals out there. Did y'all get lost? [laughter and cheers] Did you get lost baby? I think you know when you paid your money to get in to see the show, you know you paid your homosexual dues and now you're one of us. My act is semi-X-rated. It is not for anybody who's into Disney movies. You like chocolate? You like chocolate with nuts? [audience laughs] Yeah. Yeah. You're just a cute little fellow. What's your name? And I never know what I'm gonna say until I get out there and I feed off the crowd's response. Every time I look out there, I see someone who's got a look on their face like [audience laughs] Yes, girl, it's me. I'm for real. I'm not a fictional character, honey, I am for real. [Kelly, sung:] It had to be you... [Chablis:] I've always been very fortunate. You know, I have to admit I'm one of the luckiest people on Earth. I'm the luckiest, as they say, drag queen. I'm the luckiest female impersonator and I'm definitely the luckiest Lady. [Kelly, singing:] some body who... [music] The Lady Chablis goes beyond the ordinary challenges of being Black and gay in America, by facing yet another challenge: that of passing as a woman. Historically in this country, people would attempt to pass in order to gain access to rights denied to them, because of racism or sexism. For example, Black people attempting to pass as white, or women, for men. In 1997, there's a greater variety of reasons and ways in which people pass for something they're not. Multimedia artists Hillary Leone and Jennifer MacDonald travel to yet another Southern city, Miami, to tackle the concept of passing on video. [Woman on video:] I have friends that used to say to me, "TG, you could never pass. You know, you look like a baby dyke in a mini-skirt." They put white male, and that was because they never asked me if I was Black or white. Uhh, you're a man! I'm like, "I told you." [laughs] [Linton:] Hillary Leone and Jennifer MacDonald have been working together for 10 years. And although "Passing" was their first video project, the concept behind it grew from years of previous work based on language and identity. [Leone:] Jennifer and I met in 1987. And our very first, kind of formal collaboration was a piece called, "Ashes Ashes We All Fall Down." And what this is, it's actually a sand box, and on the surface of the sand we embossed a Braille text that contained the names of people who died of AIDS. [Linton:] Another code language that Leone and MacDonald worked with besides Braille was shorthand. Symbols describing familiar words in a beautiful yet unfamiliar form. [MacDonald:] Code was something that started an interest in language and how we're all sort of formed and deformed through language. Um, became sort of our theme. [Linton:] Clothing was a code that held a particular fascination for the artists. In the installation, "Double Foolscap" at the Whitney Museum blank pieces of paper were displayed, created from the pulp of the artists' own clothing. [MacDonald:] It's the fantasy of remaking yourself. Of having this opportunity to have a blank slate. And it is a fantasy really because what happens is, you cut up all your clothes, and then you still have to put something on when you get up in the morning. And after we did "Double Foolscap" we started to think about, not just how we dress ourselves to construct identities but how other kinds of things that we do, read to others as identity codes, for instance, hair is a huge one. Um, accent, skin color, gesture, movement. All of the ways in which we move through the world that other people can read and understand who we are. [MacDonald:] So, this was the beginning of our making video - of thinking about video. [Linton:] And the result, was "Passing". To create their first video installation, Leone and MacDonald traveled to one of the most diverse of Southern cities, Miami, to conduct over 60 hours of interviews on how and why people pass in America. [MacDonald:] I think most people, when they think of the term "passing", think about Blacks passing as white. That's sort of the tradition of passing. We wanted to sort of broaden that notion in a contemporary context. [Leone:] Anytime you are outside of mainstream privilege, you will be motivated to take on a certain identity in order to access that privilege. [Woman on video:] I'm very comfortable being able to pass as heterosexual. I'm happy to pass as heterosexual, because the kind of access it allows is, just, you know, unbeatable. Like I would never want to be so incredibly isolated and ghettoized, that even by appearance, I couldn't really blend in, or dissolve in part of larger mainstream culture. I think that when you really look at how people pass and why, what you discover is something about what our society teaches us to value, and what our society teaches us to fear. [Man on video:] No, they had no clue about my HIV status. Not at all. If they really knew, the real me, what was, what was, the things that I just didn't volunteer, they would really freak out. They wouldn't be able to cope. They would hate my guts. They would literally hate me. Passing is also about misrecognition. It's, it's not always active, it's always - it can be passive, in the sense that I walk down the street and people think that I'm straight. Now do I take on that misrecognition and do I say, "No, I'm a lesbian."? What is a Jew supposed to look like? So he must have thought of a, somebody from Florida. Said, "well, he's got a long nose, and he wears sunglasses, and he wears shorts." That's the, that was his interpretation [laughs] of a Jew. [Linton:] The style of the final product made reference to imagery from popular culture. Ranging from "The Brady Bunch" opening sequence to the work of Andy Warhol. [Leone:] We thought that these stories were incredibly compelling and we wanted to make sure that people actually listened. And we thought it would be an interesting strategy to try to separate the audio from the video in order to focus on the audio. [Woman on video:] I have a 12-year old son. And I don't really relate too well to most of the other mothers. Partly because I'm older. And also because I'm gay and I don't feel comfortable about telling them that. He's wanting to be very normal and he wants to be like the other kids and he's concerned that I'm not like the other parents in many ways. [Leone:] I think if we've learned anything from interviewing people and making this work and working with these narratives, it's that everybody has a right to choose who they want to be, and how they want to be and how they want to move through the world. The rest is left to your imagination. [laughs] [Chablis:] Okay. [Kelly singing:] Now didn't I hear you drawl. I'm The Lady Chablis from Savannah, Georgia, and you're watching "In the Life". [applause] Still to come, on "In the Life": [Linton:] It's a fact. Fiction by Black gay writers is hotter than ever. Also, two views on what it means to be Jewish and gay. And history with a twist. But first: More and more images of gays and lesbians are popping up in mainstream advertising, from billboards to magazines, even television commercials. Gay people are definitely being noticed and courted as consumers. But is all this imagery and interest, here to stay? Correspondent Tonya Barfield takes a closer look at the gay marketing moment. [music] Ads for mainstream consumer products are streaming into the gay and lesbian community. Gay publications alone brought in an estimated 73 million in advertisement this past year. Sometimes the images in the ads offend. Other times, they amuse. But one thing is clear. Madison Avenue is definitely grappling with the question, "What does the gay consumer want?" We spoke to some of the people that create, critique and solicit these images to find out why there's a growing interest in the gay consumer. And where this drive for the gay dollar is going. [Barfield:] In the early 1990's, market researchers defined the gay community as a desirable untapped resource. Complete with brand loyalty and a large disposable income. In 1991, the Wall Street Journal announced the discovery of this dream market. Two years later, Advertising Age quoted one survey that claimed the income for gays and lesbians was almost twice the national average. The corporate world is extremely aware of a new market, and that's not about political correctness, it's about a new place to make money. Not only were gays and lesbians this desired market, but suddenly we were products too. And you really saw this in the movies. Suddenly everyone wanted a lesbian in their movie. It was really - I don't know - it was astonishing, it was appalling. [Howard Buford:] American society is one is very driven by popular culture and, in fact, a person or group does not exist unless it appears on television or in the movies. And the very fact that there's a presence makes a huge difference in people's minds, if they... [Barfield:] Howard Buford is the president of Prime Access, a company which develops advertising aimed at three niche markets: Gay men and lesbians; African-Americans; and Latinos. As far as marketing to each of these groups is concerned, each of them is on a different cycle, in terms of the longevity of the effort in marketing. African-Americans is probably the longest. Latinos coming in after that. And then the newest, of course, is gay men and lesbians. ["Stand By Your Man" begins:] Even though he's hard to understand, But if you love him, ah, be proud of him. 'Cause, after all, he's just a man. Stand by your man. And show the world you love him. Keep giving all the love you can. Stand by your man. [Buford:] The motivations for advertisers becoming active in this community really are several. And one of the most important motivators is the presence of, of a gay or lesbian internal employee group in the company. And interestingly, we have found that another major contributor for someone moving forward with advertising in this market, is whether or not the person who is making the final approval in the company actually knows someone gay or lesbian. I will say, probably without - probably without exception, in the early months of companies becoming active, those that did were companies where the person in charge of marketing, either had a lesbian daughter, a gay brother, a gay cousin, and really had gone through that issue in their own lives. Mom, Dad, if you're watching, I want you to know, I've finally found the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Mom and Dad, this is Jen. [Jen:] Hi. [giggle] [Ad narrator:] Show your colors. Mistic. [Barfield:] One of the ways marketers have become to approach the gay market, is through the use of ambiguous images and text in their ads. [Buford:] When you talk to gay men and lesbians in focus groups about marketing and what they respond to in terms of advertising, they tend not to like the ambiguous advertising. It's a technique that's actually been used by Parliament Cigarettes. They have an on-going campaign, and they slightly change the casting of their advertising. It's almost exactly the same, except for the dropping in of one additional person. And there'll be a third person that kind of makes it ambiguous when the advertising appears, say in Out Magazine or in CURVE. They clearly want to be addressed for who they are. [Man:] Well, you know, we went to IKEA, because we thought it was time for a serious dining room table and [Man #2:] We have slightly different tastes. I mean, Steve's more into country and it frightens me, but at the same time, I have compassion. [Man #1:] We've been together about three years. [Man #2:] I met Steve in my sister's [Both:] wedding. [Man #2:] I was really impressed with how just well designed the IKEA furniture was. [Man #1:] He's really into craftsmanship. [Man #2:] And these chairs are really sturdy. [Man #1:] This table included a leaf. [Man #2:] A leaf means... [Man #1:] commitment. [Man #2:] staying together... commitment. We've got another leaf waiting when we really start getting along. I think the idea that in the 1990s, advertisers have to pay to reach our people, and that they have to make an investment in our community, is very important. And I think that gay people now understand that they have buying power. And that's not about selling out. It's about saying we will not be taken for granted. [Stuart Elliott:] Some gay consumers want advertisers to show that they have more interest in gay people than just as a target market. These people are asking for - asking that companies show that they have non-discrimination policies at their workplaces, that they have, say, that they offer spousal benefits to partners, and other sorts of, of, uh, of workplace issues. [Barfield:] Many people believe that the power of the gay dollar can be used to gain civil rights. And some think that the presence of gay images, is in itself, a sign of progress. [B. Ruby Rich:] It may be glamorous for a moment, for the gay and lesbian community to be stereotyped as this group of wonderfully wealthy, powerful group of people with lots of leisure time. For one thing, it's not true. There's lots of income disparity between lesbians and gay men, for instance. Between different races. People are earning much less or much more than each other. [Barfield:] Current market studies reveal new data about gay consumers. Their finding suggest that lesbians and gay men actually make the same or less than the national average. There was one survey by Yankelovitch, which showed that in terms of income, gay men and lesbians were roughly about the same, or even slightly less in terms of income than the mainstream population. The other thing is, that it creates a lot of resentment. You know, if you're passing so successfully, um, where's your need for human rights? What's your need for protection under the law? This is the kind of thinking that really plays into a very conservative atmosphere. And an atmosphere that ultimately is going to deprive gays and lesbians of their rights, just for a moment of flash. [music] [music] Mainstream commercial culture may be opening up to images of gays and lesbians, but there are other cultures where that may never happen. Orthodox Judaism for example, like many other religions, maintains strong views against homosexuality. Imagine the dilemma then for Orthodox Jews who come out as gay or lesbian. That dilemma is at the core of a documentary now in production called "Trembling Before G-d", a film by Sandi Dubowski. Raised an observant Jew himself, Dubowski introduces us to Orthodox and Hasidic Jews who are also gay, and trying to figure out how their faith, and their families, and their sexual identity fit together. [klezmer music] [Dubowski:] One of the translations of Hasidim means "those who tremble before God," so the title of the film refers not just to that literal translation but also those who are grappling with their sexuality, who stand before God and fear that they are condemned. [Linton:] One of the people interviewed for the film was Mark, a gay man living in London. [Mark:] My father was a very Orthodox rabbi. I come from an extremely Orthodox family. I had told them that I was gay. And he couldn't cope with it. And it just got too much for me and at the end of the term, I was really ill. And it was decided that I'd go to Israel, where there were no gay people. Big mistake, 'cause that's where I came out completely. [Linton:] After being kicked out of six yeshivas and the Israeli Army for being gay, Mark left ultra-Orthodoxy. Now living with AIDS, Mark recently returned to Israel. [Dubowski:] We went to Mount Meron, for Lag B'Omer. which is a mountain in the north of Israel for this religious pilgrimage, where bonfires burn all night long. So Mark and I made a pilgrimage to Mount Meron for this holiday, um, to film our immersion in this world again. A world that he hasn't been connected to for a long time. I had a very bad experience coming out as HIV positive, within the Jewish community. And, a lot of the rabbis wouldn't help me, for spiritual guidance, for... lots of different issues that I needed. Like when I was in hospital and Orthodox rabbis wouldn't come to visit me because they thought it was the wrath of God. I think, there are many lesbian and gay people who face rejection from their community. But I think it's institutionalized in the Orthodox community. The absolute... abomination of homosexuality, from every public pulpit. [Dubrowki:] The majority of people that I've spoken to for this film, cannot appear on camera. So it's very difficult to try to create a film with invisible people. But I am trying to find creative visual strategies, to bring their stories to the screen, whether I do voiceover or hide their identities. You know, I'm working with the Orthodykes in Jerusalem. I'm working with a lesbian and a gay man who are married as a closeted Orthodox couple, with kids still in yeshiva, a religious school, in Europe. It's very important that this film is not just about people who have left Orthodoxy, but people who have remained religious and are lesbian, gay or bi, or transgender. [Dubrowski:] It's very hard for people to leave what they know. It's very hard for people to leave their family, to leave their home, to leave every tradition they grew up with. You have to create your own relationship to God. You have to struggle with the Bible, with biblical texts, with rabbis' responses. You have to find a way to be lesbian, gay and bi in the Orthodox and Hasidic world. A second film in progress called "Treyf" tackles similar questions about the intersection of gay and Jewish identities, but from a different, more secular perspective. The filmmakers are two lesbians, Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky, who met and fell in love at a Passover seder. Their film explores what it means to be Jewish and progressive and lesbian in America. [music] [Alisa Lebow:] What is "treyf"? "Treyf" means literally un-kosher, or impure. And it's used usually to talk about food and dietary habits. We use it to describe ourselves but also to problematize our relationship to Judaism. Our film is dealing with issues that are really relevant to a lot of different communities. We deal - we're thinking a lot about the issues of assimilation as Jews. Many of us have white skin, many of us pass as white or even understand ourselves to be white. And our culture is often - is many times in our experience, losing a lot of its specificity. [Madansky:] I think we chose to focus on our story versus a traditional documentary, because we thought that, we come from a very rich Jewish background, both of us. [Jewish prayer sung] [Lebow:] My parents like most Jewish-American parents of their day, tried to raise their kids Jewish. The first thing we learned was that everyone hated us. We, in turn, were to hate no one. No one except Hitler, of course. I refused to believe in astrology since he and I shared the same birthday. German products never tainted my house. Polish was a forbidden language. And I was taught never to forget. "Scratch a goy, find an anti-Semite." [Madansky:] There haven't really been very many Jewish lesbian pieces or films out there in the world. And Jewish lesbians really need to start talking about their identity, their secular identity, how they were brought up. And we really found through making this film that there was an incredible need for this. [Lebow:] A big part of Jewish-American identity is nostalgia. You know, there's a real romance for the old country. In our film, our nostalgia is somewhat mitigated. As lesbians, we're not sure that we would have had much of a place in the old country. Even in the old country on New York's Lower East Side. So, we - the way we deal with nostalgia in the film is sort of bitter-sweet. [Lebow:] The public image of American Jews and now Israelis as well, tends to be quite conservative. And we think it's extremely important that progressive Jewish voices are heard. And that other Jews know about it, and non-Jews know, that the conservative Jews don't speak for all of us. There are certain watershed events that link a community together forever. For the Jewish community, the Holocaust is one such an event. And for the African-American community, it's the legacy of slavery. And one of the pivotal events in that chapter of American history was the Nat Turner rebellion, in which slaves rose up against their white owners. Last fall, playwright Robert O'Hara brought that event to life, with a twist, here at New York City's Public Theater. [sung spiritual] When you think of telling the history of slavery in America, musical production numbers, comedy, and a gay protagonist, doesn't usually come to mind. But first time playwright and director, Robert O'Hara, takes an irreverent look at a volatile event in his new play "Insurrection". And, being gay, O'Hara saw a place for gay people in African-American history. [sung] I'm going home! [music] [O'Hara:] I'm doing "Insurrection" as a series of love stories. Between, a father and a son, a mother and a daughter, a man and a man, past and present. So I think of it as this, these series of love stories that are played out on different landscapes. On a plantation in a technicolor dream fantastical world. [music and clapping] [Darius de Haas:] In O'Hara's play, a 189-year old paraplegic ex-slave, TJ, takes his great-great-grandson Ron, back in time to witness history first-hand. [music] Ron is gay. He's a black Ivy Leaguer. He's, I think, going through a bit of a spiritual change in his life. He's kind of questioning whether he believes in God, or not. He's consumed with his thesis, based on Nat Turner's insurrection and, and the atrocities and the loss of life. [de Haas:] In 1831, Nat Turner launched the most successful slave rebellion in American history in Southampton, Virginia. Over the course of two days and nights, he led a group of 75 slaves in rebellion against their white owners, killing 60 men, women and children. With "Insurrection", O'Hara jumps back and forth in time and places a young gay Ivy League student at the center of the uprising. [music] I think he's a little on the edge. And he's having to deal with some things about his sexuality and about himself as a man, and what it means to be a man. ["Ron":] Look, Gramps. I know you ain't been all here these past 100 years. I know you been busy waiting on me and everything, but only faggots are allowed to call each other faggots. Nobody else. [de Haas:] Ellen Cleghorne, a former member of "Saturday Night Live" plays a number of characters, including Ron's Aunt Gertha and Mistress Motel, a Southern belle. [Cleghorne:] Who is a white antebellum mistress of a plantation. Ain't there enough cotton out here for y'all to be concentrating on? [Cleghorne:] You know, on "Saturday Night Live", what you had to do is learn to research your characters. With this project, I just watched "Gone with the Wind" about 27 times and I just can't get it out of my mind! [with Southern accent:] "Rhett! Rhett!" And I can see her eyes and everything, and I've just become her and [without accent:] and it's just like, okay, enough already. ["Mistress Motel":] I am not your everyday, just slightly above average Southern ding dong belle. ["Aunt Gertha":] Ronny, why you ain't put him in the bed yet? ["Ron":] We was just going. He wanted to have a man-to-man talk. [Woman:] With who? ["Ron":] Funny... [Cleghorne:] The fact that it includes homosexuality is very important. When you go to church and you see, you know, the brothers who are gay up in the choir, that you know, now I know as an adult are gay, and then to hear the preach- you know, the pastor talking about "and homosexuality, we have to get all of that out the Black community," and then, here's this brother getting ready to sing this solo. And what you're saying is, you got to get this man, this person out of your church. You know, or he's not good enough for God and we're teaching forgiv- you know, so it's like a little confusing. We need to, you know, just... deal with it in some kind of way. As a... as a Black people and not just dismiss it. And I think Robert has done that quite well in his play. I - I had never heard gay and, uh, and, and slave at the same time, you know. And so, I wanted to see what happen if I did that. The African-Americans communities response to gay people oftentimes is one of silence. [music and stomps] As a writer, I try and ask questions. I don't try to have answers to anything when I'm writing. I try to just put balls up in the air and see what comes down. [de Haas:] With "Insurrection", Robert O'Hara grabbed the public's attention with his unconventional look at a controversial topic. Audiences can expect more innovative work from this fresh new voice in American theater. This is Darius de Haas for "In the Life". The Public Theater is not the only place where gay African-American writers, like Robert O'Hara are being produced and appreciated. Just walk into most bookstores and you'll discover that publishers have been very busy producing or publishing books, lots of books. And appreciating a newly discovered audience for gay and lesbian fiction by African-American authors. [Linton:] One of those authors is Shawn Stewart Ruff, editor of a new anthology, called "Go the Way Your Blood Beats". There's a very viable market for gay and lesbian authors of color now, and that we've seen over the last three years, starting with, I think, the E. Lynn Harris phenomenon. Recently, James Earl Hardy's books have been very successful. The first one was "B-Boy Blues". It sold something like 50,000 copies and everyone took notice of that. Randall Kenan was nominated for a National Book Award for his collection of stories, "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead". And I think that that is most definitely a sign of the seriousness with which African-American, gay and lesbian literature that is, is being taken seriously. "Afrekete" was actually published two years ago. That's been an enormously successful anthology of women's writing. Obviously's Sapphire's "Push", that's been a very successful book. So it's marvelous. I mean, there's a vitality there that we haven't seen before, and I think this book, "Go the Way Your Blood Beats" sort of fits in, rather perfectly, I think, in this tradition, this flowering. [Linton:] One of the writers represented in "Go the Way Your Blood Beats" is Samuel R. Delaney. [Linton:] An award-winning novelist and critic, who's also considered by many to be the first openly gay science fiction writer. I've always had a fondness for the literary myself because I think it's got the largest margin for critique. It's got the largest margin for destabilizing, as well as stabilizing. You know, that which can stabilize can also destabilize. [Delaney:] Since the Berlin War tumbled last November, millions are poised for the leap into cyberspace where everything glitters and soars but nothing dribbles or squishes. The summer is getting into Spandex and Rollerblades. The number of AIDS cases is now within a stone's throw one way or another of 100,000. [Delaney:] But what does all this mean to a homeless white guy, not to mention all the other Black ones, down by law, and out on the street in one torn sneaker who may never have had occasion to call anything marvelous, excellent, or awesome in their lives? The French poet, Paul Valery, used to say that one never finishes a work of art. One abandons it. And that's kind of the way I feel about my own work. I tend to - at a certain point, I abandon it. And very frequently, I think, "No, no, no, no, I shouldn't have abandoned it then." And I run back and it gets re-printed again and I make three little changes. I change a comma here, and a word there. And I've been doing this for, you know, for years. [Delaney:] I'm a Black, male, gay writer. It just seems like a survival tactic to go off and say, "Well, you know, I'm not really a gay writer, I'm just a writer who happens to be gay." This doesn't stop anyone from calling you a faggot. You know, not for a minute. It just means they do it behind your back. You know, so you might as well be aware that this is the group you are being lumped with, and better you all work for each - to help one another. From all of us at "In the Life", thank you for watching, and we'll see you next time. [music] [to the music:] Ah yeah! Go on girl. Work Octavia, work. Work those braids! Hey! Work Octavia, work! Work those braids! Hey, side to side, up and down. Side to side, up and down. Work Gertha work! Work Gertha work! [piano music] [saxophone music] "In the Life" is funded in part by The H. van Ameringen Foundation. Additional support provided by: Jeffrey B. Soref; The Michael Palm Foundation; The New York Community Trust; The Advocate, the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, since 1967; and In the Life members nationwide. [logo music]