Go Fish (Can I Watch, Islet, KPVI, Killer Films, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 30) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for three films in an all-night marathon of movies with more or less Queer themes, none of which I’d seen before and two of which my husband Charles had never seen either. The one Charles had seen was the first one up, Go Fish, shot on black-and-white 16 mm (at a time when it was still cheaper to make a film in black-and-white than in color; now, if anything, it’s just the reverse) in Chicago in the early 1990’s (it was released in 1994 but it had taken three years to make) by director Rose Troche and co-written by her and Guinevere Turner, who’s also in the film as one of the leads. The other lead, V. S. Brodie, is also listed as an executive producer, and typically for a film made by film students on a shoestring budget, Troche is credited not only as director and co-writer but also as editor and optical effects person. Since Go Fish Troche has directed a number of other feature films, including Bedrooms and Hallways (1998), The Safety of Objects (2001), and Chinatown Film Project (2009), but most of her work since has been for series television, including – almost inevitably – episodes of the Lesbian-themed TV series The “L”-Word. From the presentation on imdb.com and the TCM Web site I’d got the impression that Go Fish was essentially a Lesbian rom-com, but while it is that – Troche and Turner used the classic rom-com strategy of presenting two characters who we can see belong together while taking their time about making the characters realize it themselves – it’s also quite a lot more. Go Fish was considered part of the so-called “New Queer Cinema” of the 1990’s, films made by openly Queer filmmakers determined to avoid the wages-of-sin miseries previous movie people had inflicted on their Lesbian or Gay characters.

It’s also a film very much ahead of its time in acknowledging that not all Queer people are white: one of the romantic leads, whose birth name is Camille but goes by “Max West,” is a Latina who’s thrown out of her family’s home when her mom discovers she’s Lesbian. And the woman she seeks solace with when that happens and ultimately moves in with as a platonic roommate is an African-American Lesbian film professor named Kia (T. Wendy McMillan), who has her own rambunctious sex life but also serves as the voice of reason. Max spots a woman named Ely (V. S. Brodie) at a table in a part-diner, part-bar with a largely Lesbian clientele, and because she’s tall, skinny and has long, stringy, hippie-ish hair Max is initially turned off by her. But Kia has become determined to get Max and Ely together even though Ely has a long-distance relationship going with a woman named Kate (whom we never see), who lives in Seattle. The two haven’t seen each other in nearly two years, but Ely is either clinging to the hope that she and Kate can become a real couple again or using Kate as an excuse to avoid any romantic, emotional, or sexual attachments with women in Chicago. One of the things I liked about Go Fish (the title comes from the children’s card game but it also might be an oblique reference to the slang term “fish,” used by woman-hating Gay men to describe either women generally or the alleged smell of their sex organs in particular) is it plays against the stereotype that Lesbians don’t get down ‘n’ dirty about sex. Not only are the characters shown in at least the beginnings of sexual excitement over each other, there’s one remarkable scene in which four of the characters, lying crossways from each other, their heads linked together, in a conversational pose that recurs throughout the movie, discuss the sexiest way to refer to a woman’s main sex organ.

Ironically, the hottest and most explicit sex scene in Go Fish involves one of the women having sex with a man – and it’s a shock when we realize that her sex partner is male. This triggers a fascinating debate that’s at least 20 years ahead of its time as to whether a woman who has sex with men as well as with women can still call herself a “Lesbian” and whether her dalliance with a man threatens her Lesbian identity. The woman in question anticipates the modern-day “Queer theory,” with its rejection of the whole idea that sexual attachments towards one gender or the other define your identity and belief that you should be able to have sex with any willing partner of whichever gender without feeling that characterizes you as “Lesbian,” “Gay,” or even “Bisexual.” There’s also a plot gimmick in that Max’s and Ely’s first date was to a screening of a new film by a Gay male director, which puts them off because even though the director is Gay he’s still stuck in the old-fashioned negative stereotypes of how to depict Queer people on screen. (Remember that this is a movie both made by and about film students.) Later Ely, who in the meantime has had all that long, stringy, hippie-ish hair cut off and ended up looking quite boyish (enough so that once she and Max get together at last, I could readily imagine people seeing them on the street assuming they’re a straight couple, just as I appreciate Rose Troche’s irony in giving both her Lesbian protagonists and a good friend of their, Mel [Brooke Webster], male names), and Max make plans for another date, though in the end they just stay in and there’s a weird scene in which Max notes that Ely’s fingernails are split, she tries to cut them with Max’s toenail clippers, Max takes over and the two ultimately end up in bed together. (One of the other characters even jokes about nail-cutting as foreplay.) Go Fish is a quite charming movie that holds up surprisingly well, and in 1994 it got major distribution (from the Samuel Goldwyn Company), got excellent reviews and did well (at least by independent-cinema standards) at the box office.

Without You I'm Nothing (Go Ahead Bore Me … , Management Company Entertainment Group, New Line Cinema, MGM, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched two more Queer-themed films after Go Fish as part of Turner Classic Movies’ June 30 marathon, but the next one was a major disappointment. It was called Without You I’m Nothing and was filmed in 1990 as a screen adaptation of comedienne Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show premiered on Broadway in 1988. The full title of the stage show was Without You, I’m Nothing; With You, I’m Not Much Better, and I got the feeling that Bernhard and her director, John Boskovich (who also co-wrote both the stage version and the movie), might have been better off if they’d just stuck a camera in front of Bernhard doing the Broadway show than in trying to add movie-style “production values.” According to TCM host Dave Karger, the idea behind the movie was that Bernhard had begun cutting up and doing diva antics during the Broadway run of her show, and her fearsome dykey manager Ingrid Horn (Lu Leonard) felt she needed to be taken down a few pegs. So she booked Bernhard into an all-Black nightclub (though it’s played on screen by a solidly white venue, the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, near which Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. got shot and killed in June 1968 and also where I lost my virginity during a conference of student journalists in April 1973; I remember walking across the then-deserted stage of the Cocoanut Grove and recalling that that’s where Bing Crosby became a star with Gus Arnheim’s band in 1931) with a batch of disinterested Black patrons. But that’s not at all apparent in the actual movie. The audience ultimately leaves piecemeal during the show until by the time Bernhard finishes, there’s just one person left.

Bernhard’s show was mostly a stand-up comedy routine, but she periodically broke off to do songs, including her audacious opening number: Bernhard in blackface doing Nina Simone’s classic about racial and gender oppression, “Four Women.” Unfortunately, Bernhard left out one of the women (the second in Simone’s sequence, the mixed-race Sofronia, who was the product of a rich white man raping her mother), and she did the rest of the song surprisingly powerfully but was no match for Simone’s version. Sandra Bernhard became at least an “honorary Queer” by association with Madonna, who became her friend from 1987 to 1992. The two were widely rumored to have been lovers, though both denied it. More recently Bernhard has publicly identified as Bisexual and gave birth to a child, Cicely, in 1998 whom she’s raising with one of her female partners, Sara Switzer. I didn’t care for this film much, despite some genuinely creative and funny moments (including a welcome guest appearance by ex-X punk rocker John Doe, who duets with Bernhard on one of her songs), partly because Sandra Bernhard, or at least her stage persona, is one of those obnoxiously pushy Jewish “broad” types like Joan Rivers, Fran Lebowitz (who made a cameo appearance as herself in TCM’s next Queer-themed film, the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning), and others. She made some interesting song choices, including Hank Williams’s stunning lament “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (misidentified on imdb.com as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die”) and Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” which Bernhard first sings in a U.S. flag-based costume and then strip-teases to with Prince’s own record on the soundtrack. (One wonders how the producers got the notoriously prissy Prince, who was famous for not allowing anyone invited to his home to use swear words, to agree to let his record be used.) Ultimately Without You I’m Nothing was a real disappointment, especially after the quality and complexity of Go Fish, and though it’s nice that Sandra Bernhard is not only still alive but still active, her act remains at best an acquired taste for me.

Paris Is Burning (Art Matters Inc., BBC Television, Edelman Family Fund, Miramax, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Off White Productions Inc., Prestige, The Jerome Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Paul Robeson Fund, WNYC-TV, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the third film on TCM’s Queer agenda on June 30 was both a much better movie and a more interesting showcase for its participants. It was called Paris Is Burning and was about the low-budget drag “ball” scene in New York City in the late 1980’s. It began with a long credits sequence acknowledging UCLA’s help with restoring it, which led me to comment that it seemed decidedly odd that a film made in 1990 should need restoration. My husband Charles noted how grainy the initial images were and said, “If this is what it looks like restored, I’m afraid to think of what it looked like before.” Although at least Paris Is Burning is in color – it had to be to do justice to the stunning drag outfits many of the cast members wore – it was a pretty low-budget production. It was produced and directed by Jennie Livingston, a white Jewish woman graduate of Yale University, and since virtually all the film’s participants were people of color she was almost inevitably accused of “cultural appropriation” for having made a film about marginalized Black and Brown people. Paris Is Burning dealt with a well-defined “ball” culture in New York City’s Harlem in the late 1980’s, and my first surprise was that though the film centered around a series of contests in which the winners got elaborate trophies, they weren’t all drag shows. A number of the pageants were for the most convincing contestants dressed as men, particularly as business executives in the nation’s capital of high finance, which the participants interviewed for the film admit is because they couldn’t really hope to score such jobs because they weren’t well-to-do enough to get the education needed for jobs like that. So they did the best they could and posed as high-class business executives, just as their drag-queen brethren posed as movie stars or fashion models.

Paris Is Burning is an almost anthropological look at an intriguing subculture, in which the participants in the ball contests are generally members of “houses.” Some of them analogize these to street gangs, but they generally aren’t violent (though there’s a thin edge of angry rivalry among contestants who believe they’ve been unfairly cheated out of a prize that was rightfully theirs). They do give their members a sense of belonging, a sense of “family” that they didn’t get from their real ones, many of whom threw them out once they realized they were Gay. One young queen actually tells how his mother discovered his mink coat and, as revenge and punishment, actually took it into the back yard and literally burned it. The houses generally took their names either from the world of fashion (one is called “Saint Laurent”) or of overall hype (“Xtravaganza,” “Ninja,” “LaBeija,” “Duprée”), and most of the members use the names of their houses as their drag names. Needless to say, as with every subculture the New York “ball” scene developed its own slang, including “voguing” (a set of staccato dance moves styled, as the voguers in the movie acknowledged, after the designs on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs), “mopping” (shoplifting garments from high-end fashion stores that they couldn’t afford to pay for), “reading” and “shining.” The latter two denote the same kinds of insult games earlier young Black men in the 1920’s and 1930’s called “dozening” – challenges to each other to see who could come up with the most creative and stinging insults – which were also at least part of the origins of rap music.

And as usual in these sorts of movies about subcultures, there’s an éminence grise in the person of Dorian Corey, who recalls the days during which he was starting out on the scene. He reminisced about the days when the great drag queens actually made their own clothes instead of buying (or stealing) them ready-made from major designers (it’s fascinating to hear the sneer in his voice when he says the word “designers”). He also said that during his early days, when all the other drag queens wanted to play Marilyn Monroe, he wanted to be Lena Horne – the first clue we have that this remarkably light-skinned person is actually Black. Paris Is Burning may have raised issues of cultural appropriation due to the white skin and relative privilege of its director, but they got even worse when Madonna, also in 1990, released a song called “Vogue” that at once hailed and exploited the Black drag subculture depicted in the film. People who’d never heard of “voguing” before Madonna’s song (including me) assumed it meant striking the “pose” of a famous movie star, past or current, because that’s how Madonna’s lyric described it. The reality as shown in Paris Is Burning is quite different; while certainly many of the “queens” in the shows were riffing off celebrities (there’s one fascinating scene in which a heavy-set Black drag queen mimes to Patti LaBelle’s hit record of “Over the Rainbow,” wearing a headdress that was intended to simulate the really weird wigs LaBelle was wearing then that made her look like an upturned lawnmower), “voguing” as depicted here is a dance form with its own integrity, at least a cousin of break dancing.

There are also some fascinating scenes showing the “queens” wrestling with their own gender identities, including one woman at a beach who boasts that she’s just had gender reassignment and therefore is truly a woman in every sense except the genetic. Two more said they haven’t had the operation yet but are contemplating it, while a more down-to-earth type named Pepper LaBeija insists that they aren’t going to go through Transgender surgery because once they take it off, they can’t put it back on again if they decide they miss it after all. It reminded me of the high rate of suicide among Trans people both pre- and post-op, as if Trans people have an inflated idea of the worth of surgical gender change – “If only they make me a real woman, I’ll be truly happy at last” – and are disappointed when surgical reassignment doesn’t magically solve all their problems. Also one of the most moving aspects of this film is the distance between the dreams these people have and the reality of who, what, and where they are. One notes the irony of the fact that one of the main balls is called “Paris Is Burning” (hence the film’s title) and says he’s always wanted to go to the real Paris. Another, a member of the Ninja house, says they want to go to Tokyo because Japan is the home of the real ninjas.

The most tragic story in the film is that of a young, petite, blonde, stunningly attractive performer who boasts that for a while he was kept by a straight sugar daddy – until the man found out that he wasn’t biologically female and immediately threw him out. His dreams were to get a sex change and find another sugar daddy who would love him as a real woman. He also shame-facedly admits that he survives largely by hustling, though at first he says that only 1 percent of his clients actually want to have sex with him. Later he revises that estimate to only 5 percent (which my husband Charles noted was still a 500 percent increase!). At the end of the film we learn that he was found dead under a bed in a cheap hotel; though we’re not told what happened to him, we’re guessing that one of those tricks went horribly wrong. Paris Is Burning is a fascinating glimpse into a group of (mostly; there are certainly some who qualify as Trans) Gay men who have built a world for themselves in which they can be celebrities and even stars even though most of the rest of the world hasn’t heard of them. It offers some fascinating glimpses into the whole nature of celebrity and institutionalized ideas of “glamour” (one queen sniffs that “voguing” is called that after Vogue magazine and it certainly would never have done to name it after Mademoiselle because that name had no cachet), and how certain people who are well aware that most of the world will remain blissfully aware of their own existence can still find stardom within their own world in which they and their kind have all the power. The final contest attracts three celebrity judges: Black actor and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, comedienne and author Fran Lebowitz, and Broadway legend Gwen Verdon – and at last the real world of stardom meets the world of the ball scene!