I spent this past weekend at the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival, Austin’s queer festival. I was a volunteer and audience member and it was my first time at a queer fest. I saw a lot of incredible films and it was pretty amazing to spend a weekend watching movies with all queer protagonists in queer stories.
I joked when I went into recovery that it was the most straight people I’d ever been around. Being in a liberal part of the country (Maryland) and primarily in arts spaces, I was used to having at least a few queer friends. When I started doing trans work in Baltimore, that became primarily queer friends and collaborators.
It’s not that there weren’t other queer people in the recovery house - there were, but they were few and far between. My status as a bisexual was also very confusing for people. Everyone assumed from my shaved head and more butch clothes that I was a lesbian, and there was an obvious confusion when I said I was interested in men, too, and in fact had primarily dated men. It was clear that people could not quite compute someone who was attracted to men but didn’t dress for them in the way we expect women to.
The particular intersection of Narcotics Anonymous in Baltimore was a very straight crowd that valued gender performance. It took me a few months of sobriety to confide in any of my recovery friends that I was non-binary transgender, but eventually I did start trusting people with that information. In my first 90 days, I was having such a difficult time staying sober and getting through each day that being in the closet barely registered as something I was going through.
In Austin, there’s a much bigger queer recovery scene. There’s even a queer recovery center. The intersection here is primarily gay men recovering from meth, but the recovery center has all kinds of people, and even has a weekly AA meeting for sex workers.
aGLIFF made me think about what makes a queer film. There are tropes and stereotypes for sure - coming out films, struggles with families, desire for acceptance, self-discovery, transition films, etc. But I think a queer film is any with queer people.
Addict Named Hal centers Hal and Amy, a man and woman who enter a romantic relationship. But Amy is bi (known only from one flirty glance, but she is), Tony is a lesbian, and I can work to cast visibly queer and trans people throughout the film. It’s an addiction film first - but our aim is to look at addiction as it intersects with class, race, sexuality, and gender, and that means it can and should be a queer film, too.
