We love having our friends on the podcast and when our friend is author, photographer, editor and general polymath Pat Green https://patgreenauthor.com/ , it's like a cold beer in the outback. Pat joined us with his pick for Pride Month, and it was a fantastic pick that I likely would have inadvertently passed over.
The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994) was something I think all of us has seen as different people. For me it was strife with memories of awkward denial and outward disgust. I was living under the pretense, in 2000 when I watched the movie, that I was a cishet man and I could make myself believe it if I only tried harder. But I was denying the best parts of me, those pieces of me that this movie prodded and poked.
I didn't come out because of this film, but because of another newer film (https://cozyquiltcinema.com/blog/boy-meets-girl-and-the-boiled-egg) but it lingered in my mind for years, tormenting me with courage unsought, bravery unclaimed. I felt like a fraud as a cishet man, I felt like a fraud as a person and this movie called me out with every dirty, sunbeaten and dry frame. I was angry at it, angry at the actors, angry at the director. How dare they show me the thing that so repulsed me. A man in a dress, a man in long hair. A man's voice reflecting what I have said to myself in a mirror. That anger carried me for years, my phobia a shield against the truth of things.
Bernadette's quiet dignity I mistook for resigned sorrow. Tick's reluctance to see his wife and son, I mistook for righteous embarrassment. Adam's bold gayness I took as a slap in the face of men being manly and straight. But of course, I was ignorantly grasping for anything to keep the closet door closed. I threw away the dresses, the clothes I had amassed. I threw away the cosmetics I had claimed were for my wife to the cashiers. I disposed of the wig, the single wig I had mail ordered at a time when the internet was new. I tossed them in the dumpster and I walked away sobbing. Because I knew that the next day I would be scrambling through that dumpster trying to reclaim some part of me.
We have all three of us, changed during those days when we saw this film. It's not a story of hope, it's a story of real fears and a story of doing it anyway. That is the definition of bravery. It took years for each of us to change, to evolve into the kind of people who could accept ourselves for who we are and no longer let others define us for their comforts. And now, we can see this wonderful, beautiful film through a lens that is undistorted by fear.
