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| The language of LGBT love | The language of LGBT love |
| (6 months later) | |
| 'Are you a heterosexual?" the filmmaker asks. "Ooh no!" comes the reply, "I've got three kids and a husband!" The scene is a market in London's East End in the early 80s, the film Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. | 'Are you a heterosexual?" the filmmaker asks. "Ooh no!" comes the reply, "I've got three kids and a husband!" The scene is a market in London's East End in the early 80s, the film Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. |
| The Greater London Council-funded documentary, a snapshot of young gay life, was screened again at this year's Lesbian and Gay film festival in London. It captures a very different era. The lo-fi VHS production, a soundtrack of Eurythmics and Soft Cell, the flimsy grasp of sexuality in, of all places, Dalston. Jimmy Somerville and Richard Coles make before-they-were-famous appearances. True, the unchanging signposts of the gay experience are there too: the gradual realisation that you are different, the coming out, and the finally finding people with whom you can be yourself. | The Greater London Council-funded documentary, a snapshot of young gay life, was screened again at this year's Lesbian and Gay film festival in London. It captures a very different era. The lo-fi VHS production, a soundtrack of Eurythmics and Soft Cell, the flimsy grasp of sexuality in, of all places, Dalston. Jimmy Somerville and Richard Coles make before-they-were-famous appearances. True, the unchanging signposts of the gay experience are there too: the gradual realisation that you are different, the coming out, and the finally finding people with whom you can be yourself. |
| More strikingly, it has the innocent quality of documentaries made before we all knew how to behave in front of cameras. This carries through into the language used: answers seem to come unmediated, sometimes straight from the heart. With so much of our lives now filtered through lens and text, have we lost some of that talent for simplicity? | More strikingly, it has the innocent quality of documentaries made before we all knew how to behave in front of cameras. This carries through into the language used: answers seem to come unmediated, sometimes straight from the heart. With so much of our lives now filtered through lens and text, have we lost some of that talent for simplicity? |
| To mark the anniversary, the BFI commissioned a modern version, Re/Framed Youth, which was shown alongside the original at the weekend. Given that it was made over three days rather than a year (another mark of changed times – the money simply isn't there, say the organisers), it was never going to be quite the same. Nevertheless, the 15 young people who took part were just as exuberant, vulnerable, spiky and strong as their predecessors. They had coming out stories. They faced bullying and ostracism too. But arguably what stood out was the way they talked. | To mark the anniversary, the BFI commissioned a modern version, Re/Framed Youth, which was shown alongside the original at the weekend. Given that it was made over three days rather than a year (another mark of changed times – the money simply isn't there, say the organisers), it was never going to be quite the same. Nevertheless, the 15 young people who took part were just as exuberant, vulnerable, spiky and strong as their predecessors. They had coming out stories. They faced bullying and ostracism too. But arguably what stood out was the way they talked. |
| Translated into 2013ese, the blunt vox-popping of shoppers ("D'you know any lesbians?") morphs into something more postmodern ("Do you know anyone who self-identifies as LGBT?"). This generation namechecks "genderfluidity" and appears to embrace "questioning" (the last word in the variant LGBTQ) as an identity, as opposed to a phase, or a state of mind. In spite of claiming they want to get away from definitions and labels, to avoid "putting people in boxes", they reflect an online culture that finds room for the asexual, the pansexual, the heteroflexible and the demisexual. The boxes haven't gone away, they've just got smaller. Personal definitions are listed, menu-like, in that vast banqueting hall of the self that is social media. | Translated into 2013ese, the blunt vox-popping of shoppers ("D'you know any lesbians?") morphs into something more postmodern ("Do you know anyone who self-identifies as LGBT?"). This generation namechecks "genderfluidity" and appears to embrace "questioning" (the last word in the variant LGBTQ) as an identity, as opposed to a phase, or a state of mind. In spite of claiming they want to get away from definitions and labels, to avoid "putting people in boxes", they reflect an online culture that finds room for the asexual, the pansexual, the heteroflexible and the demisexual. The boxes haven't gone away, they've just got smaller. Personal definitions are listed, menu-like, in that vast banqueting hall of the self that is social media. |
| But, despite the array of theoretical vocabulary at their disposal, the kids of 2013 don't seem to be any better at expressing themselves. You'd be lucky to find anything as touchingly straightforward as a comment by Sarah from 1983: "I've always regarded lesbianism as love. I've always regarded the two as being synonymous. I've only ever been to bed with women I love." So have "advances" in language made us any freer? Are we more cared for or safe now that our identities can be fixed so precisely? Does language change politics, or is it the other way round? Or perhaps language is more like fashion, in having something to do with prevailing attitudes, but not, ultimately, being all that important. | But, despite the array of theoretical vocabulary at their disposal, the kids of 2013 don't seem to be any better at expressing themselves. You'd be lucky to find anything as touchingly straightforward as a comment by Sarah from 1983: "I've always regarded lesbianism as love. I've always regarded the two as being synonymous. I've only ever been to bed with women I love." So have "advances" in language made us any freer? Are we more cared for or safe now that our identities can be fixed so precisely? Does language change politics, or is it the other way round? Or perhaps language is more like fashion, in having something to do with prevailing attitudes, but not, ultimately, being all that important. |
| There don't seem to be any easy answers. Language certainly feels important if you've just been shouted at by a racist or a homophobe. But it's worth asking whether zero tolerance of the N-word, for instance, might be a precursor to, or an after-effect of, more enlightened thinking. Or whether in the US, where it is perhaps the biggest linguistic taboo of all, racism has, in fact, ceased to be a problem. | There don't seem to be any easy answers. Language certainly feels important if you've just been shouted at by a racist or a homophobe. But it's worth asking whether zero tolerance of the N-word, for instance, might be a precursor to, or an after-effect of, more enlightened thinking. Or whether in the US, where it is perhaps the biggest linguistic taboo of all, racism has, in fact, ceased to be a problem. |
| The words we choose can, of course, send a political message. The Lesbian and Gay film festival is itself thinking about changing its name, with trailers inviting audience members to suggest alternatives. Here, the effort is towards real inclusion, rather than atomisation. The organisers don't seem to want an "alphabet soup decipherable only to the few". But each year some of the films also tell the stories of transsexual men and women. Isn't it fair that this be reflected in the title? Or perhaps it should be more of a catch-all – does queer do it? Or pride? | The words we choose can, of course, send a political message. The Lesbian and Gay film festival is itself thinking about changing its name, with trailers inviting audience members to suggest alternatives. Here, the effort is towards real inclusion, rather than atomisation. The organisers don't seem to want an "alphabet soup decipherable only to the few". But each year some of the films also tell the stories of transsexual men and women. Isn't it fair that this be reflected in the title? Or perhaps it should be more of a catch-all – does queer do it? Or pride? |
| Language is the imprint of our culture. It encodes – though it does not determine – the character of the age. The kids in Re/Framed Youth project the values of a time in which, because of the internet, no community is too small and personality can be a performance hosted on blogs, on YouTube and on Facebook. Who knows where this might lead? It's enough to turn anyone questioning. | Language is the imprint of our culture. It encodes – though it does not determine – the character of the age. The kids in Re/Framed Youth project the values of a time in which, because of the internet, no community is too small and personality can be a performance hosted on blogs, on YouTube and on Facebook. Who knows where this might lead? It's enough to turn anyone questioning. |
| Twitter: D_Shariatmadari | Twitter: D_Shariatmadari |
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