Movies

Sarah Schulman reimagines queer history in “Jason and Shirley”

Sarah Schulman is known for her novels (fiction and non-fiction), plays and activism (she was a member of both ACT Up and the Lesbian Avengers), but she’s also been active in film for several years. She co-founded the Mix experimental queer film festival with Jim Hubbard in 1987 and has been championing LGBTQ filmmakers since, and eventually writing her own screenplays for The Owls and Mommy is Coming and producing the documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP .

Now in Jason and Shirley, playing Outfest this weekend, Sarah goes in front of the camera, playing Academy Award-winning filmmaker Shirley Clarke in a fictional re-imagining of Shirley’s 1967 movie Portrait of Jason, the first time a gay black man was ever the focus of a film. The man in question, Jason Holliday (portrayed by Jack Waters in Jason and Shirley), was a hustler whom Shirley invited to the Chelsea Hotel to star in his own movie. In the original (which was restored in 2013 and now available on Fandor), Shirley is never seen, but her voice is heard as she prompts her subject to share his life story with the cameras, providing him with alcohol and drugs in hopes he will loosen up and become honest instead of using humor or anger in defense.

Jason and Shirley (directed by Stephen Winter) is based on the true events of the 12-hour-shoot, and Sarah plays Shirley as a driven creator who will do anything she can to get Jason to open up about his family, his life as a male prostitute and his desires to create his own stage show. We spoke with Sarah about playing the role of a white woman director who was putting the focus on a gay black man for the first time in cinema, and how it was ultimately both revolutionary and problematic.

AfterEllen.com: How much of the dialogue was taken from the original?

Sarah Schulman: Nothing is from the film because in the film-okay, so she shot for 12 hours, but in her 90 minutes that is her final, you only see Jason. You never see her. So only she and [husband] Carl [Lee]-their voices are heard, but they’re completely absent. Stephen-I think one of the things he’s responding to, takes the control away from her and to look at the big picture. Therefore everything you see is different from what you see in his.

AE: So it’s an imagining of what she would say.

SS: Yeah, but it’s not realism, right-so it’s not really what she would say at that time, but it’s more like influenced by what we’ve come to collectively learn since then. You know, Shirley Clarke is amazing in so many ways. But one of the really incredible things is she was the very first person in cinema to realize that being a black gay man was a position of great meaning. And she was the first person to represent that experience. Even the black gay community had not spoken out, to white people at least, about what that meant. There was very little open gay black-there were blues singers, Bruce Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance, that was in the ’20s, but it was pretty much unknown to her. So she saw that this content had meaning. But you know, she was looking at it completely out of context, so not only did she not know what black gay people thought of themselves-that hadn’t been articulated-but I think what we have now, the whole discourse for white artists and what to think about when representing people of color, hadn’t started. It didn’t exist.

AE: She never thought “I’m not the person to tell this story.” She thought she was the person that should capture this.

SS: Right because the kind of way we’ve articulated our understanding of power dynamics now, that discussion was not being had among white people at the time. So what’s interesting about her is that she’s incredibly ahead of her time, but she’s way behind reality. She sees that a black gay man’s voice has meaning, but she doesn’t see her own racism. She thinks that she’s more advanced than she is. I’m sure that’s true for me as well. It’s sort of a condition of being a white artist, working with people of color as a subject.

AE: How do you prepare to play someone like that?

SS: Well I did a lot of research. I read things that she said, I watched her other films, I watched video of her, I spoke to one of her students. She had this philosophy of what she called revolutionary cinema, which was the idea that cinema should be part of a larger ongoing political movement. It shouldn’t necessarily be disconnected, and I certainly understand that. I founded Mix, right, so it’s something I’ve clearly been practicing for 30 years.

So from her point of view, like I said, I do identify with that place. I consider myself to be an anti-racist white artist and therefore I know that there’s a lot of things that I’m not getting and a lot of mistakes that I’m making. So I do understand where she was at. The other thing is that, in the 1960s, she had four feature films about black men. She was not working with white men. She had been really disrespected by white Hollywood. She had been part of a movie that won an Oscar in 1963. It was a documentary on Robert Frost and then she tried to see what it would be like to have a Hollywood career and she was treated horribly. So it’s interesting because she has legitimacy. These black men are willing to collaborate with her, but she was not, she did not have respect from white men. She’s also occupying this other kind of space. It’s interesting how she’s not interested in women at all.

One of the things when we were figuring out what we were gonna do, Stephen suggested that maybe we should get a character who was like a female assistant to Shirley and I said absolutely not. She would be the only woman in the room. So we made that decision because it’s 1966—it’s before feminism, before gay liberation, before black power. It was before these movements and identity movements could really articulate themselves and people are sort of these individuals floating around and trying to see what they thought was a revolutionary period. But it wasn’t ideologically as articulated as we now have.

AE: What was her fascination with Jason’s being queer?

SS: I can’t speak exactly for what she thought, but I think that, again, she was in between. On one hand, the race question was the most important revolutionary question. She thought how black people were treated and reactions to that was the most important dynamic in her time, the early ’60s. But she had almost no articulation or understanding of what would be come gay liberation. In fact, in one interview she thought Jason was gay because of racism. She thought it was an expression of oppression, and that was a view that a lot of black straight people held at the time, too, not just the white people. That was a common view, that homosexuality was an expression of oppression. So she was reflecting that, but that was also a commonly held black position. So she’s in between. On the other hand, she was in the experimental film world, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel so she was surrounded by queerness and she was exposed to it. But she didn’t have a political sense of it.

AE: From what I can tell, the film was well-received when it came out and a lot of tastemakers at the time saw it and thought it was well-done. But then it kind of disappeared—why?

SS: I think it happened for a number of reasons. First, as a woman, she was not able to achieve the kind of fame that her male peers achieved. There’s a famous thing in experimental film called “essential cinema,” and it was created by men and it was saying what were the most important experimental films and there were no women on the list. It’s just a very sexist—the historiography of cinema is a very sexist historiography. She was under-recognized, but also she had Alzheimers. When you’re a driving force like she is, and then you become incapacitated, there’s also not an apparatus or a place to maintain your work and to let people know about it. So this is all before having films be widely and easily accessible, so film was literally a film, sitting in a can, and she was not that well-known at the end of her life, she died of Alzheimers so there was a kind of chaos around her work.

Interestingly, when Jim Hubbard and I founded the Mix festival in 1986, in 1989, we showed Portrait of Jason, and at that time, that was the year that Marlon Riggs‘ film Tongues Untied came out, and that was the first feature by a black gay man with a black gay male protagonist. So between 1966, Portrait of Jason, and 1989, Tongues Untied, nothing had come out that could possibly feed back to Portrait of Jason. When we showed the film, we got it from the Museum of Modern Art. It was really hard to get the print. Even now you can’t see Portrait of Jason on Netflix; you can only see it streaming on Fandor. So it’s not that accessible.

AE: What was Jason’s reaction to the finished product? Did he get to see it?

SS: He did see it and all we know, other people know more than me—it’s not that it’s unknown, it’s unknown to me. They did have a disagreement about money and signed some sort of a secret agreement and made a settlement and I don’t know the terms of it. He went on and did his cabaret act for one night, but he was a well-known figure. Did you ever see a movie called Next Stop Greenwich Village? It’s a very well-known movie that was made in the late ’70s, early ’80s about the 1950s. And Antonio Fargas, he was one of the first out gay black actors. He was in Carwash and a lot of black films. Anyway, in that film, Next Stop Greenwich Village, he played a black gay man and he said that his performance was based on Jason, who he knew. So he was well-known in that world. When you see Portrait of Jason, he was Carmen McRae‘s maid, he knew Miles Davis. He was really on the scene and knew a lot of people.

AE: Why do you think there’s been much more interest now in these queer histories that are not just about white cisgender gay men?

SS: I don’t know. I guess everyone else is sick of it and they’re looking for more truthful representation. And it’s also that it takes people longer—it takes people with less power longer to get access to the camera and to have the power and the class and the money to actually make the film. That’s what’s really interesting about our film, Jason and Shirley, is that two black gay artists—Stephen Winter and Jack Waters—are talking back to Shirley Clarke. And in that way, they’re sort of completing the conversation, even though it’s 50 years later.

AE: How do you think Portrait of Jason would have been different if it had been from a male director?

SS: I don’t know because white men were not looking at black men the way Shirley Clarke was looking at them. You know, in the early ’60s, the pre-feminist bohemian arena, there was this white woman/black man thing. I mean there were people like Diane di Prima or Marilyn Hacker or Hettie Jones who were married to black men. And some of these women became gay later, but it was an rejection of white womenhood in a pre-feminist period, and Shirley Clarke was part of that. She was a wealthy Jewish woman. She came from Park Avenue, and she divorced her husband, she moved to the Chelsea Hotel and she spent the rest of her life making experimental film. After those four films about black men in the ’60s, she was a pioneer in video. She began working in video and then she became a teacher. She was constantly in this experimental realm whether it was formal or in terms of content. But I think there’s something—you know, I watched footage of her being interviewed in France, and she’s in a room with all men and Yoko Ono, and she’s like presiding. She’s not in dialogue, she’s dominating. Because either you were this superior female who could preside or you would be crushed, squashed. And you can see that gender is really really important in terms of her own battle. I’m sure there’s some identification of black people, but not with black women.

AE: How did it feel to play Shirley in the moments where she’s been domineering toward Jason to get what she wants from him? Was it a strange dynamic?

SS: Well you know, Jack and I are like family. We have been intimate, intimate friends for 30 years. Because when Jim and I started Mix, Jack and his partner, Peter Cramer, who plays the matron, they sort of partnered with us in the very first year in 1987. So we’ve been together in this very intense emotional way for three decades, and so there’s a lot of trust, familiarity—we share aesthetics. And then Stephen was the director of the Mix festival at one point, and Bizzy, who was the art director of the movie, is also one of the key designers of the Mix festival. So all four of us come from this shared history of queer aesthetics and experimental film and we share a lot of values. That gave us a lot of freedom to go into difficult and, I think, dangerous emotional territory. But in terms of what I was thinking as an actor, my idea was that Jason had told me he wanted to have this movie and I went to the trouble to set this up, he showed up and he’s sabotaging himself. And I want to make a work of art, so that means I have to do everything I can to get past the schtick and the jokes and the mask and the pretenses and the attacks and the campiness to get something real, which is what my view on art is. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m doing everything I can to help him be real. But sometimes it seems brutal, but that’s what he says he wanted, so that’s how I understand it

AE: Do you think anyone will come away Jason and Shirley feeling that Shirley is a villain?

SS: Well, you know, it depends on how you look at it. The film is from a black gay male perspective, and a lot of us are not used to seeing films that are not from a white perspective. Most films are from a white perspective. This from a black gay male perspective. They’re talking back; they’re completing the conversation. So there’s anger and there’s insight and there’s a wish for power and an expression of actual power because the film is controlled by black gay men. And so the woman do-gooder is gonna be viewed in a different way than we’re used to seeing her depicted and that’s healthy.

AE: Have you heard any reactions to the film that surprised you?

SS: Someone told me they thought it was antisemitic, but that just seems absurd to me. It’s interesting because you have two black male characters in the film who have a lot of jokes about Jews and Jewish content and stuff because that was New York Culture, and blacks and Jews were closer at the time then they are now. So I think that relationship was quite accurate, historically. Shirley Clarke, in a sense, was an anti-racist pioneer, but she’s also a racist and homophobic at the same time. It’s for us to understand that you can be both.

Jason and Shirley plays Outfest this Saturday, July 11 at the Redcat at 9:30 pm.

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