Pariah Postcard

The exercise was to pick a post card / something graphic to represent what the trailer of Pariah had impressed on you before heading to the screening of 'Pariah'.

I chose this card because it reminded me of something my lesbian neighbour from the apartment down the corridor once said. The Melbourne Queer Film Festival was coming up at that point and I suggested that we head to see some shows together. And she was like, 'Nooo, aboslutely not. Purely Lesbian shows are spaces that should be kept for lesbians and women they want to sleep with. It gives us a space to project ourselves and what we want to be, how we want to be seen on ourselves and our community - or at least one person's perspective'. And I thought that was rather fair. I've actually only seen (by my count) 3 lesbian shows: Boys Don't Cry and The Colour Purple.

However, at the end of the show, during the discussion, I was told that The Colour Purple had homoerotic tones but was not really a lesbian show. Oh. Okay, that was a pity. Because I thought it was so empowering in my mind. But I could see how I had been misguided, and in truth, I like seeing it more broadly because it ended up being an incredible story about Black Women.

The second observation was lost on me. Someone mentioned that Boys Don't Cry was not really a lesbian show because the main character identified as male. It was more about transexuals. I was like... erm. I don't really agree (well, I didn't say it out loud because after the previous post, I thought this would open up another hideous can of worms on defining terms). The main character in Pariah undergoes this transformation in her school toilets, in buses - changing the way she looks to please her mother even though she doesn't want to wear the earrings, prefers a look that is more androgynous. She wears a strap on dildo to the club and the show was, in my interpretation, one of boi-culture. So that distinction made between Boys Don't Cry and this was lost on me. Is it because in Boys Don't Cry, Hilary Swank 'passed' for a male and was only discovered to be a girl later on? I dunno. Probably.Or maybe it's a reverse projection that we do on the movie.

What I've always struggled with was the violence in the 3 shows I've now watched. I thought Boys Don't Cry was incredibly violent. And so was the Colour Purple. And the violence in Pariah was very painful to watch.