London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival: a programmer's view

The London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is 21 this year. Programmer Brian Robinson gives a personal view of how things have changed

So the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival celebrates its twenty-first year at the newly renamed BFI Southbank. At the LLGFF public launch last month some people expressed the view that the festival should also change its name to LLGBTFF. Four years ago, market research revealed that the overwhelming majority (more than 80 per cent) of those surveyed wanted us to keep the original name. A show of hands at the launch showed this proportion was probably an underestimate. Feedback from older audience members expressed alarm at the possibility we might change our name to anything with ‘queer’ in the title.

However, sexual politics and fashions in political correctness are rapidly changing things. America, with its hugely influential queer communities, has usually been the source for new trends in language around sexuality and identity.

I was at a conference in San Francisco last year where there was much heated discussion about the need to extend the definitions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to include queer, questioning, intersex and curious.

The first real engagement with gay cinema in Britain was at Richard Dyer’s 1977 NFT programme, ‘Images of Homosexuality’. By 1986, the first incarnation of the festival bore the title ‘Gay’s Own Pictures’, a title that stuck for the second year. But by 1988, it had become the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Back in those early days, films with lesbian or gay themes were harder to find. We were excited by a film with any gay character without worrying too much about the quality of that representation. Filmmakers and audiences seemed to have an insatiable appetite for coming-out stories with happy endings. Then came a vogue for romantic comedies where hopelessly good-looking actors seemed to have trouble finding a partner but got one in the end. A naive faith in the gay scene as a panacea for all life’s problems has given way to a more measured and realistic view.

What’s exciting about the festival now is that there are much more complex stories being told. Lesbian and gay themes are played out in something resembling the real world, where heterosexuals play a part, sexuality is sometimes fluid and the narrative is driven by universal issues of love, loss, living, dying and how to lead your life.

The festival’s history has included the entire spectrum of sexualities but few films that would qualify as genuinely supportive of bisexual lifestyles. Coming out as bisexual has rarely been popular within lesbian and gay communities. Somehow the festival has managed joyfully to find a way of negotiating the complexities of a world where, for some, even the word bisexual represents an outmoded binary approach to notions of sexual plurality.

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