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Film buff gives The View From Here 

By Barbara Black

Matthew Hays has written a book that fills a gap. Despite the spate of films by and about gays and lesbians, he feels that The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers is the first study of its kind.

“I can’t believe this hasn’t been done before,” he said. “A lot has been written about films made by gays and lesbians, but a collection of interviews in which they could discuss their art in their own words hadn’t been created.”

Hays, a Concordia alumnus and award-winning communications teacher, created the book out of his 2000 master’s thesis, which was supervised by Dennis Murphy. The question he set out to answer was whether there is a queer film aesthetic. The answer seems to be a tentative yes.

“I can tell when a film is by a gay director,” Hays told the Journal confidently, only to admit that he has guessed wrong a number of times. He thought some films were by gay directors that weren’t, and vice versa. His 37 interview subjects for the book are equally ambivalent.

According to Quill & Quire, “The answers Hays secures from his subjects are as varied as the interviewees themselves. . . . Hays answers the question in the introduction by pointing out that the expectation itself is absurd. While no one would expect artists from religious or racial minorities to agree on everything, for example, their perspective still informs their culture.”

Hays is a reviewer and interviewer who has been around and then some. He worked for The Mirror for 12 years, nine of them as associate editor, and has been on the CBC many times. The people he talked to for his book ranged from the granddaddy of gay cinema Kenneth Anger and porn artist Annie Sprinkle to relatively mainstream directors like Don Roos (Bounce, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck).

“Roos was surprisingly pessimistic,” Hays said. “It was kind of sad.” He attributed Roos’s pessimism to a malaise in gay and lesbian artistic circles during the Bush years.

The reception for the Hollywood drama Brokeback Mountain was gay-positive, Hays said, but the film about two loving cowboys had a straight director, Ang Lee. “The actors made a point of saying they were straight, too. The fact that they still have to distance themselves from being gay off-screen says something about how far we still have to go.”

Another surprise is the dearth of women, let alone lesbian, film directors. “Women are producers and editors now, but not directors. Fifty-two per cent of medical doctors are women, but we still don’t have many women directors.”

The launch of The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers (Arsenal Pulp Press) will be held at the Suco Lounge in Hotel Opus (10 Sherbrooke St. W., corner St. Laurent) on Wednesday, Oct. 17, from 5 to 9 p.m.