Speaker 4: No, I mean I’m really intrigued by your statement about you being an artist and that what you’ve just done with this program is not curating. Akram Zaatari: It is a curatorial gesture but done by an artist, exactly like when I teach. I’m not a professor so I don’t take teaching as a career but I would like to do, sometimes, interventions in educational context. Stuart Comer: One of the things I was very curious about, not knowing the situation here very well … but Bill occupies an exceptional network in Los Angeles of gay male intellectuals who are not necessarily working around pornography or sexual identity, but a broad range of ideas and agendas… They constitute an important intellectual community, and I’m very curious about Beirut. Ali Cherri’s film last night was a notable exception. There were very few Lebanese artists in your programs. I often speak with an artist I know in Warsaw who is doing a lot of research trying to find gay male artists working in Eastern Europe willing to present works with graphic images and there are almost none. When he does find them, they’re very scared to show their work still, which is why I take exception to the comment earlier about everyone being liberated, because in many parts of the world, we definitely are not. Hannah asked: Does Beirut really need this? I think it’s a really important question. Who is your audience here? Speaker 5: Can I do a small observation going totally with what you said? I want to say to Ali, who is not here today: Perfect, we needed this from a Lebanese artist, thank you, Akram, for this program. On the other hand, I don’t know if we needed only gay male sex? Where are the lesbians, the hermaphrodites and the transgendered? The queer community is big; maybe we need to know who they are, and to introduce them. That was first. Second; I’m really shocked at the absence of the gay community; but where is the gay community so that we can ask you questions and you can answer us and have a debate that will do us some good. Where is the gay community in the public? There are a lot of curators, a big international gathering, but the people that are concerned directly with the situation of gays and sex in this country are not present so that we can have a constructive debate. This is my observation, and please, next time, not only gay sex. Akram Zaatari: There won’t be a next time [laughing]. I think that is why it’s not a gay or queer film festival, because these are very subjective choices. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of work, for example V Tape has great work, documentary work about hermaphrodites or transgender, but first, they are too long, it would eat most of one session. Second, they were very didactic and presented very direct ways of looking at the
42 Queer Geographies
politics of sexual identities, which is for me really great but not for this program, maybe for other programs. Speaker 6: I just wanted to jump on Alex’s question and say that I totally appreciate the challenge to look at sex as narrative, but I do at the same time feel that I could have seen the program we saw last night at MIX, which is the experimental gay and lesbian film festival in New York City. I would see that program, exactly that program, on a Saturday night, late, and I would be told that it would be a “boy program,” that I’d be seeing lots and lots and lots of dick and I would know that that’s what I’d be in for. I’d be with my friends, there would be lots of folks there and we would have a good time, and it would be pleasurable, which is something to talk about in terms of audience, like the question of why it is not a queer film festival but this is an intervention that you’re making. Another thing I would say about a festival like MIX is that one of the things about your programming is that it made me realise why I do appreciate queer film festivals. When a festival like MIX started, it was for artists working with sexually explicit material. No one else would show their work and we were determined to keep making it. So we had to be faggots and queers and show the work there at MIX and this was the only place where we would show it. Sometimes it sucked and sometimes it was great but that was a venue and there was no other venue and no other place for artists working with sexually explicit material. This discussion for me is deadening in some way, because it’s trying to make it normalized or something. I do think that there should be a real discussion on what is sexual material. When is it in a piece of art? When is it not? When does it get labelled as queer or in MIX? When does it get to be in Home Works? William Jones: I can speak about these things from personal experience, since v. o. (2006) was shown in the last edition of MIX. I very much appreciate MIX, because there are very few venues that can make a claim on being underground or subversive or doing something alternative in New York these days, and MIX, I think, really does that. The MIX audience is fairly diverse, something I welcome, because, unfortunately, in most queer film festivals, my work addresses an audience that is about 99 percent gay men, and I find this stultifying. Speaker 6: This is why I’m sort of pushing Akram on this because I do feel that by making this kind of lengthened statement that he is doing with this program instead of doing a gay and lesbian film festival, there is something that is like erasing some of what is productive about these spaces, and I do agree with Alex. I mean, where is everybody? Just because the material is sexually explicit and is, in fact, predominately gay male, doesn’t mean that it has to be an only gay audience, but why isn’t it a diverse