Film Fest

After all the tension of last week and Sunday night, this week seems to be going remarkably well. Work is busy but interesting; I’ve even caught myself whistling some of the latest Chorus tunes while at my desk.

Tonight I am just back from seeing a selection of films at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, to which John M had invited me (despite my having inadvertently stood him up for lunch on Monday!) While not 'entertaining' in the Hollywood sense, they were all of them interesting in their own way. The first three were presented under the collective title ‘Fuck Gender’, two of which examined the concepts of butch and femme in lesbianism and what causes people to view you as one or the other. The third in the triplet took you in totally the opposite direction by looking at life as a transgender person who blurs the distinction between male and female identification. After a break for some drinks we went into a second showing of a very short film where a woman interviewed her parents who, although married for many years, both came out as gay in later life. The last film of the evening was an hour-long documentary partly about life in San Francisco and partly about the Golden Gate Bridge’s role as a suicide landmark.

The film contained some interesting statistics – apparently only six percent of people who are prevented from committing suicide go on to try again. John mentioned an Economist article he’d read recently which reported that when selling aspirin in bottles was banned, so you could only get them in blister packs, the suicide rate from aspirin overdose dropped noticeably – presumably because it was more effort to pop fifty pills from their packaging than it was to just chug a bottleful. I had never realised that suicide was quite such an impulsive decision; quite frightening really.

We’re going to watch one more film, this time on Friday night, which is a behind-the-scenes exposé of the Los Angeles Mr Leather competition. I’m meeting my sister to hear her choir sing in Westminster Abbey before the film though, so on the whole Friday will be quite an eclectic night. Best of all, Brett will be home from Stockholm for the weekend. Yeay!