mg, provided the title for this film and it
is perfect. Paris is our image of ultra so-
lphistication, European culture, and Il'llS
1 film burns it, mocks it, by showing sin-
' cere emulation. As fellow filmmaker,
' Todd Haynes, in a joint interview with
» Jennie Livingston last April in Outweek
. said, “[Those viewers, i.e. the British
Broadcasting ‘cultured’ charmel as well
as the New York Times] who want to see
the disenfranchised as victims . . becomes
a genuine, liberal, kind of sick instinct
that tries to have sympathy . . . for people.
. . . The attempt to be “real” is_ a mirror
image of everyone who is white trying
desperately to be a ‘real white person.’ It
still takes play-acting . . . We play those
games just as passionately.”

Yes, I acknowledge, there is a tragic hue
to the lives we see. We come to know and
appreciate a bright, petite drag queen, Ve-
nus Xtravaganza, her dreams and her re-
alism: her measure of success in drag is
being able to get on the subway and to get
home without blood and with all her
clothes intact. Venus was murdered short-
ly after this film was made.

Yet Venus is alive for me, testimony to
life without the particular social fortifica-
tions we are all so prone to claim and con-
struct, fortifications of education, money,
the “safety” of Vermont - all the social
constructions separating “us” from
“them.” As Jennie Livingston said in Out-
week, “when AIDS is cured and gone,
there will still be anti-gay violence, drag
queens will still be despised.” This film,
by making “r ” the zestful spirits of
drag queens in New York even for us be-
hind Vcrtnont’s barriers to urban danger,
throws shade on our false images of se-
curity, on our Paris of sophistication. This
will be out on video soon, so if you have
not had a chance to see it, it is zesty fun
for a future evening - an outing for VGSA
this spring? V

A Conversation with
Jennie Livingston

Sage Russell

Jennie Livingston grew up in Los Angeles, and
moved East when she was 17 to attend Yale
University. She graduated from Yale in 1983
with a degree in painting and photography. At
that time she considered herself primarily a
photographer. Soon after moving to New York
City in 1985, she learned about vogueing and
the ball world, and headed up to Harlem with
her camera. Five years later, her depiction of
this world, in the movie Paris is Burning, be-
came a sensation. The film received rave re-
views, was shown at festivals all over the
world, and was released in theatres. Very few
documentary film-makers ever achieve this
kind of success. This is remarkable for a film
whose subject is the world of poor, black, gay
male drag queens in New York City. And even
more remarkable for a first-time film-maker
who had taken one course in film-making, but
had never been to film school.

The success of Paris is Burning has enabled
Jennie Livingston to quit all her word pro-
cessing jobs to devote herself full-time to film-
making and her other creative projects. She re-
cently spent four months in Vermont, where
her partner, Vanessa Haney, spent a semester
as a visiting artist at Middlebury College. At
the end of December they headed back to New
York. Before leaving, Jennie Livingston took
some time off from packing to talk to OIT M "s
Sage Russell.

0ITM: Are you completely out? Do you
mind being identified as a lesbian?

Jennie: No, it’s fine. I made the decision
when I made the film. I made the film be-
cause I wanted to, and I think in the pro-
cess of making the film, either because I
was getting older or because the actual
process of filrn-making politicized me, I
became more comfortable about just be-
ing a gay person personally. And then
when it came time to publicize the film, I
realized there was going to be a lot of
publicity. All of a sudden I was talking to
Time and Newsweek. I made a conscious
decision that here I was, I was political, I
was reading Outweek, I believed that peo-
ple should be out, that there was nothing

100 Main Street
P.O. Box 247
Burlington, VT 05402-0247

David W. Curtis
ATTORNEY AT LAW

HOFF, AGEL, CURTIS, PACHT & CASSIDY, P.C.

802-864-4531

February 1992

to be ashamed of, etcetera. So I might as
well just do it I think in a way it’s a very
risky thing, in terms of the film industry
being a rather homophobic and a sexist
business. But on the other hand, the ra-
tionale I made is that the kinds of things I
want to make are so weird anyway —
they’re not all gay, but tliey’re definitely
not the mainstream view — that I don’t
think that one extra fact about me is really
going to affect people’s willingness to
fund my weird films. They’1l either like
my weird films or they won’t. The fact
that I’m a lesbian isn’t going to weight it
either way.

OITM: How does being a lesbian inform
your work?

Jennie: Well, I think in terms of maldng
Paris is Burning it simply means that as a
female member of a larger gay world —I
don’t even want to say community be-
cause I think that’s such a confusing term;
there are so many communities — I’m
more open to a gay male culture. But I
think queer people traditionally have a
heightened sense of humor and a height-
ened sense of performance and a height-
ened sense of otherness. I think how
much you feel like an other is really de-
termined by who you are. Some people
are gay or lesbian, and they feel like,
“Well, I’m just folks, I’m normal.” I hap-
pen to think one of the things I like about
being queer is that I’m not normal. I don’t
want to be normal. I think I’ve always
had a sense of how women are treated dif-
ferently, and that also contributes to my
feelings of otherness. I'm also Jewish, of
German descent, so although I’m sixth
generation American, I think I have a
consciousness of otherness and of oppres-
sion, of what happened to the descendants
of my ancestors, that also contributes to
that. But I don’t really think of myself as
a lesbian film-maker. I think of myself as
afilmdirectorandawriterwhoisa

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