我的同话故事 1.4

就这样，时间过了三天，也还依然没有人敲我房门。今晚又是上演绎课的时候了。我一如往常的在泳队训练后，提早到达剧院。可能因为太早，连剧院大门也还未打开。我把摩托停放在路边，独自坐上机车座，从书包里掏出课本就读。

大概过了五分钟，一辆摩托从远处驶来。说是驶来，倒不如说是顺着斜坡慢慢滑过来，然后在我身边停下。我一眼就认出他了。当他把头盔脱下时，他对我腼腆的笑了笑。老实说我也有点不知所措，尴尬的轻轻回于一笑。他把头盔及书包放进铁篮，笑脸殷殷的往我的方向走来。

“Hey, my name is Kali.”
我当然知道你是谁啦，我心里想，思绪凌乱。“You can call me GD.”
“You are always so early.”
“Yup, just after my training, don’t feel like going back to hostel, so… ya…”
“I heard you are a swimmer… and a lifeguard too… right?”
“Haha, you can’t tell from my body right? I’m just too thin. Haha, a disgrace to my team really.”
“Your body look great!”
我心里想，你这家伙还真敢！“Thanks anyway!”

沉默……

结果还是他先开口，“Hey, I’m from management school, so I have totally no experience in performing arts. I took this paper out of my interest, but I found it difficult to understand some of the lectures…”
我心里想，来了来了，竟然这么快就要使出KK那一招了吗？“Em hmm…”
“So I’m thinking if it’s possible, can I borrow your notes, well just to compare notes…”
“Well, ok… but I didn’t bring it with me today wor… how?”
我伸手往书包里掏了掏，其实笔记早就好好地放在书包里了，但我还是故意地说了以上那一段话。我当然有我的计谋啦！
“If you don’t mind I can go over to your hostel tomorrow night to collect it, maybe I can also take that time to ask you about some parts of the notes that I’m not clear with… can?”
“Haha, sure can!”
“So, I’ll just knock on your door tomorrow ok!”
“Sure, no problem.”

沉默……

“You don’t know about my room number and the hostel I stay in, how are you going to find me huh?”
他仿佛像做了错事的小孩被揭穿般的模样，腼腆的笑笑说，“Ya hor, where do you stay actually huh?”
看到他的笑容，还有深深的梨窝，我心想，好帅的男生哦！“I’m staying at Desa Aman, room 207.”
“OK… thanks!”
“So, tomorrow is it? About what time you’ll be coming?”
“9 something or 10… depends on whether you are free during that time…”
“I will be in whole night, so you come around 9 should be fine!”
“OK!”

结果那一晚的课我完全听不进去，眼神一直在追踪着Kali的身影。好几次眼神跟他碰上时，我们彼此都会心的一笑。而我的心，早已在彩排着明晚的对白了……

(4…待续)

我的同话故事 1.3

今天的讲堂挤满了人，可能是主修课的关系，而且期中考也靠近了，每个人都想讲师是时候给贴市了吧。大老远我又看到KK刚从大门挤了近来。刚好我旁边还有一个空位，我便挥挥手示意KK过来。

他一走过来便神秘兮兮的问，“怎样？好看吗？合眼缘吗？”
“你傻了啊？才看一次就知道咩？那有酱神！”
“但是他很喜欢你喔！但他太害羞！他还问我要怎样approach你呢！你说呢？”
“我怎么知道...”
“我就知道你会说不知道！所以我就跟他说，不如他假假到你房问你功课或借课本咯。”
我在心里暗咒KK，这家伙好管闲事！
他继续说，“怎样？他说他不敢冒冒然闯进你房间。所以他叫我问过你先！”
“我几时俜你当我的经理人啦？”
“嗨哟，怎样？就一句嘛！何必婆婆妈妈的...”
“但酱的招数很老套吧！”
“管他！最重要受！So，到底怎样？”
“......”
“怎样？你又不用做什么...迟疑些什么？”
“好吧。叫他过来吧！...酱他知道我知道了吼？”
KK又一声淫笑，“我做事你放心！”
“他娘的！”我心里又一阵暗骂...

(3...待续)

我的同话故事 1.2

那天我非常早就到剧院等待上课，空空的剧院安静得可以。我坐在第一行的阶梯发呆。刚刚从泳队的训练回来，累得我连四肢都不想动一动。突然剧院的门被推开，一个印度男子走了进来，我吓得整个人坐直了身躯。

会不会是他呢？我的心脏差点要跳出嘴巴。

他对我笑了笑，坐上了后几排的阶梯。不是这个人啦！干嘛神经兮兮的！哈哈！

15分钟后，同学们陆陆续续的走进了剧院，KK还是一贯的姗姗来迟。班上有好几个印度男子，到底是哪一个呢？我的心根本不能安定下来好好听课。讲师顶着肥肥的肚腩，说了一些什么老实说我一点都听不进去。我的脑在人群中扫射，希望可以寻到一些蛛丝马迹。

“好吧同学们，大家下来围个圆圈准备热身！”当大概三十个人慢慢的走到台上围好了圆圈，大门打开了，KK大踏步的走了进来。他走到人群中一站，我立刻就注意到他身旁的印度男子很亲切的跟他打了招呼，两人聊了起来。热身的过程中，KK向我使了眼色，“就是他了！”然后他又淫淫的笑。我开始打量对面的这个男子，跟我一样的身高及身材，有着阳光的笑容，笑起来还有深深地酒窝。我们的眼神交互时，两人都腼腆的避开。就这样，我们连招呼都没打，课就结束了。

（2...明天再继续写。。。）

我的同话故事 1.1

从小到大老实说并没有太多机会接触情情爱爱，毕竟家教蛮严的，所以当你通过朋友告诉我你对我有意思时，我的心里小鹿乱撞得不行！

那年我大学二年级，正愁于该拿那一张选修课，结果我选择了演艺班。土土的我在人群中根本不突出，心想也还好啦，可以安心课业，虽然颇具阿Q精神。但我不晓得竟然有一双眼睛在注视着我。我的朋友KK是个公开的同志，寻找男友并不是问题。而我这些柜里的人，要嘛不敢想，要不然就扮清高，而我是后者。

有一天KK不经意的跟我透露了你喜欢我的消息，我着实吓了一跳，心里除了WTF及窃喜外，还有许多不可思议的成份在。那时我不知道你是谁，只知道你是演艺班里的同学，而且是个印度人(OMG!)。KK说go ahead啊，没有什么损失，而且你也蛮好看的，重要的是你真的蛮喜欢我的。我说我害怕啊，老哥，如果成的话这可是我第一次恋爱啊。你是印度人，文化上也应该有很大的差异吧？更何况我英文不好，沟通会是一个难题吧！KK暧昧的笑了笑，把谜底揭晓了。原来他早把我宿舍的房间号码告诉了你，很大可能那一天你壮起了胆会无声无息的杀到我房间去！

空气突然凝着，是我的自信心在作祟！他在阵阵淫笑声中逃离现场，留下我一人凝重的呆着，想着那随时逼近的爱情，即等待又怕受伤害...

(1...待续)

Queer cinema

Queer cinema. Queer cinema has been in existence for decades although it lacked a label. Films of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet in France in the 1930s and 1950s (such as Le Sang d'un poète, Jean Cocteau, 1934, and Le Chant d’amour, Jean Genet, 1950) are cited as the forefathers (sic). It is a cinema that is identified with avant-garde or underground movements (for example Kenneth Anger’s and Andy Warhol’s 1960s films in the USA). In the avant-garde world of cinema, lesbian film-makers' presence is quite strong too (for example Ulrike Ottinger, Chantal Akerman, Pratibha Parmar). Although we could go on listing names for this heritage of Queer cinema, another of the greats has to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder (working in the 1970s and early 1980s) - even in his seemingly mainstream (European art) films he was taking genres to task and re-interpreting them through a gay and queer sensibility (see: Fear eats the Soul, 1974; The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979). And it is fitting perhaps that his last film, Querelle (1982) - based on Genet's 1947 novel - is fully about gay and queer desire. And, finally on this list, what could be queerer and braver than the Brazilian film-maker Hector Babenco's 1985 film The Kiss of the Spiderwoman in which the macho arch-revolutionary succumbs to the charms of the flamboyant queen in his prison cell?

Queer cinema itself was introduced as a concept in 1991 at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, to refer to a spate of films (beginning in the late 1980s) that re-examined and reviewed histories of the image of gays. These films proposed renegotiated subjectivities, men looking at men, gazes exchanged, and so on. They also took over genres previously considered mainstream, subverting them by bringing the question of pleasure on to the screen and the celebration of excess. In certain cases these films reinscribed the homosexual text where previously it had been elided. See, for example, Derek Jarman’s historical film Edward II, (1991), or Tom Kalin’s murder/crime thriller Swoon (1992) (the latter is a ‘remake or retake’, setting the record straight (!) of two earlier versions of the true story of a murder committed by two young men of a 14-year-old boy in Chicago in 1924. The first version was the Alfred Hitchcock film, Rope (1948), and the second a Richard Fleischer film, Compulsion (1959). Both films completely elide the homosexual dimension to the two killers’ relationship.

Always a cinema of the margins, only now in the 1990s, in the light of the tragedy of AIDS, has queer cinema become a more visible cinema. Indeed, the New Queer Cinema, as this cinema is also labelled, has presently become a marketable commodity if not an identifiable movement. One of the leaders of the Amercian queer cinema is Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, 1991; Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1993). New Queer Cinema was a term coined in a 1992 Village Voice article by B. Ruby Rich to describe the renaissance in gay and lesbian film-making represented by the Americans Todd Haynes, Jennie Livingstone, Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki, Laurie Lynd, Tom Kalin and the British film-makers Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien. Queer cinema is not a single aesthetic but a collection of different aesthetics – what Rich delightfully refers to as ‘Homo-Pomo’. It is a cinema that takes pride in difference. Queer cinema is above all a male homosexual cinema and focuses on the construction of male desire. Some lesbian film-makers have made films that come under this label and it is instructive that they have made films that address not just their sexuality (as in Go Fish!, Rose Troche, 1994) but that of their male counterparts (Paris is Burning, Jennie Livingstone, 1991).

Queer as a politics has not resolved lesbian invisibility. There exists still (as within the heterosexual world of the film industry) an inequality of funding for lesbian film-makers as opposed to gay film-makers. Gay is perhaps more cool than lesbian at present, and one does wonder - cynically perhaps - if Philadelphia (Demme, 1993) would ever have been financed by Hollywood if the New Queer Cinema had not come along at the beginning of the 1990s and enjoyed the success it did with mainstream as well as gay audiences. Having said that , there are some lesbian feature films, although for the most part, they pre-date New Queer Cinema - an exception being Patricia Rozema's beguiling When Night is Falling (1995). Of the 1980s' films we can count Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden, 1983, Desert Hearts, Donna Deitch, 1985, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Patricia Rozema, 1987. Due to lack of financing, most lesbian film-makers have opted for video to develop their counter-cinema in an unfettered way much as other marginal cinemas before them have done - such as women's cinema, and cinema nôvo as it developed into garbage cinema (see Sadie Benning, Jollies, 1990, Pratibha Parmar, Khush, 1991, Shu Lea Cheang, Fresh Kill, 1994).

It is quite probable that Queer cinema as a term came about by identification with trends in critical theory begun in the mid-1980s, namely, Queer theory. Queer theory can be seen as a desire to challenge and push further debates on gender and sexuality put in place by feminist theory (amongst others) and also a critical response to the numerous discourses surrounding AIDS and homosexuality. Queer theory is, arguably one of the first truly postmodern theories to be born in the age of postmodernism. In its practice it is extremely broad. It is a concept that embraces all 'non-straight' approaches to living practice - including, within our context, film and popular culture. As a politics, it seeks to confuse binary essentialisms around gender and sexual identity, expose their limitations and suggest that things are far more blurred (for example, think of the spectator pleasure derived from watching Robbie Williams wearing a dress and singing one of his many hit songs - as he did in one of his video promos). It is more than a subversion of straightness, it is also more than an exposing of the fact of hegemonic homosociality and the hypocrisy of denial. It is in fact far more celebrative than that. In a sense it challenges everyone's assumptions about gender and sexuality. It shows how you can queer-read ('queried') virtually everything as just one other, equal not subordinate, way of reading the texts. Queer readings go 'against the groin' (Verhoeven, 1997, 25). Queer theory examines queer at work, that is, the making or writing about gayness by authors and film-makers. Doing queer work can be done by all sexualities. Thus, straights, bisexuals, transexuals, transgenders, gays and lesbians who are writing or making texts about gayness are performing, enacting Queer[ly]. Queer theory can open up texts and lead us to read texts that seem straight, differently - or view them from a new and different angle. Thus a queer reading can reveal that you are watching (reading) something far more complex than you originally thought you were (think of buddy films for example). The actor or film-maker does not have to be queer, but the text or performance may offer itself up for a queer reading (Joan Crawford as the cross-dressing gun-toting but butchly feminine Vienna in Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray, 1954).

New Queer Cinema is unconcerned with positive images of queerness, gayness or lesbianism, but is very clearly assertive about its politics - starting with the expression of sexuality as multiplicity and not as fixed or essentialized. Thus stereotypes of queerness get reappropriated and played with. True camp (not the appropriated camp of straight cinema) priviliges form over content but with a purpose. Queer camp is about trashing stereotypes with flash and flounce anddress in excess. It is about ridiculing consumer passitivity through delibrate vulgarity. It is about (as in the original French sense of the word camper: to play one's role) assuming fully and properly one's performative role. In terms of stereotypes, camp itself and narcissism get some royal send-ups in The Adventure of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Stephan Elliott (1994) and in Go Fish! Queer Cinema challenges the view that homosexuality and lesbianism must have value ascribed to it (as good or bad) - it just is. There are political implications about homosexuality and lesbianism, but so too are there about race - as indeed black gay and lesbian film-makers make clear (Looking for Langston, Isaac Julien, 1988). In Queer cinema and theory, the gaze as well as questions of visual pleasure come under scrutiny. Since the relays of looking are different within the screen, so too must they be outside the xcreen and in the spectator's eyes. More pleasures can be experienced by the spectator as he or she adopts different positionalities within the narrative. In some ways this is not so new if we think of pornography and the pleasure in viewing for the spectator (male of female) of the typical tried aset-up which includes a lesbian scene or two to get things warmed/hotted up. But it may be that Queer theory makes us feel more comfortable speaking about it. Interestingly pornography as a critical debate within film studies has only truly emerged in the 1990s - perhaps coming on the heels of the effects of Queer theory.

Queer Cinema has crossed over into mainstream and not all of it is made by gay or lesbian film-makers. And this in a way is the point. It is not that it has been co-opted, although some critics' responses to Wachowski's lesbian neo-noir Bound (1996) warn us how difficult it is to be clear on this. However, I would argue that this crossover is more a case of queerness being a recognized state-of-being amongst others. In 1998-9 alone, there were six very ostensibly queer films (at the very least), two of which were made by women and all of which were box-office successes: Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999), Boys Don't Cry (Pierce, 1999), Gods and Monsters (Condon, 1999), High Art (Cholodenko, 1998), Love is the Devil (Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon) (Maybury, 1998), The Talented Mr Ripley (Minghella, 1999). None of these films gloss over on what it means to have a queer identity, nor indeed the difficulties this can represent in terms of social acceptability. Only the first film has a light outcome with a lesbian relationship asserting itself after a series of fun-filled adventures entering into the mind and eye's view of John Malkovich. Gods and Monsters' study of the career of the gay film-maker James Whale (he directed the 1930s Frankenstein movies) gives us a sense of what it was like to be queer in Hollywood at a time when hetero-normativity was very big. The other four films, it has to be said, however, are quite dark, either because death is the outcome of the intolerance of others (Boys Don't Cry; The Talented Mr Ripley), or because they unflinchingly show the harder side of lesbian and gay society (High Art; Love is the Devil).

Queer Cinema advocates multiplicity: of voices and of sexualities. Multiplicity in a generic sense also: vampire films and comedy. thrillers and musicals. Unstick the queer from the moribund representation to which much of mainstream cinema has confined 'it'. Queers are neither the depressed anomics nor the serial killers some film-makers would have us believe (see Winterbottom's offensive Butterfly Kiss, 1994). To rewrite Foucault: 'Queer is everywhere'. The signs of queer globalization are there to see. Almodovar's work is an obvious first citation in terms of Europe. But Asian queer is also on the scene (Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, 1993, Zhang Yuan's East Palace/West Palace, 1996, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, 1997). It is no longer a case of having to find it, but 'to connect'.

For further reading see Bad Object-Choices, 1991; Bristow, 1997; Burston and Richardson, 1995; Creekmur and Dory, 1995; Dorenkamp and Henke, 1995; Dyer, 1977b, 1990; Fuss, 1992; Gever et al., 1993; Gill, 1995; Grossman (2000); Hanson (1999); Horne and Lewis, 1996; Jackson and Tapp, 1997; Kuzniar (2000). Mell-Metereau, 1993; Russo, 1981 and 1987; Weiss, 1990; Whisman, 1995; For a documentary film of Queer, see The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995.

from Susan Hayward (2006). Key concepts in Cinema Studies (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.