Gay Tape: Butch and Femme,1985

Gay Tape: Butch and Femme is my first video. I was immersed in two things at the time: making artwork and being a part of the Oakland, California lesbian bar scene. The tape is the child of those two activities. asked friends, Ann and Joanne, and my current girlfriend, Rosa, to speak on camera about dating and the emergence of butch-femme relationships, which alluded to not so much a regression to old time lesbian subculture as to a quotation of those times and an appreciation of that kind of lesbian eroticism. I provided the general topic and the women, including myself in one or two sequences, speak extemporaneously. The piece turned out to be a bit controversial when it first screened at the San Francisco gay film festival in 1985. I believe some viewers thought we were going back in time to the bad old days of mimicking heterosexual role-playing, but they may have completely missed the irony and humor that my imaginative subjects offered in their monologues.