h) Culture, history and literature
Review of Priscilla Queen of the Desert
It seems everyone liked it but me
(published in the Sunday Tasmanian, January 1995)
If the background music they play in Department Stores has some hidden power of suggestion over what we buy, Hobart's 1994 Christmas stockings would have been choka with stilettos, rouge and still more stockings.
So popular is Priscilla Queen of the Desert that almost every shop I scoured for Christmas presents was bopping to I Love the Night Life, Go West or some other Priscilla hit.
Women's magazines, daily newspapers and TV chat shows share the Priscilla mania. Months after the film was released we're still being told about its latest accolade, its director's new venture or its star's sexual politics.
So why has a film about tired and dusty drag queens become a national institution?
One answer is that Australians strongly believe in the kind of tolerance that the film promotes.
During debate on the Government's sexual privacy law Queensland National, Bob Catter, said he'd rather walk down the street with Crocodile Dundee than the characters in Priscilla. But when it came to the vote only 4 out of 147 of our elected representatives were on his side of the street.
The vote on the Sexual Privacy Act confirmed what Priscilla's success suggests: as a nation we hold that what people do with their own lives is their own business.
But if Priscilla is an expression of Australian tolerance it is also an expression of the strict conditions under which this tolerance is granted.
One such condition is conformity to a well worn set of notions about being Australian.
The film tells us that it is important to stick by your mates through thick and thin, that Asians and women (in this case represented by a bored Philippino bride) are not be trusted, and that life's meaning waits to be discovered in the outback amongst simple living Aborigines, away from the distractions and corruption of the city. Swap our three lip synchers for three itinerant shearers and Priscilla could have been written by Henry Lawson or Banjo Paterson.
We find in Priscilla that Australian tolerance is also geographically defined.
"Sometimes I don't know if the ghetto was built to keep us in or to keep them out", was perhaps the most substantial observation offered to us by our witty drag queens.
It encapsulates the mutual and sometimes violent antagonism between urban gays and rural straights.
It also sounds slightly old fashioned to gay men and lesbians in Tasmania.
For several years we have striven to break down old antagonisms by engaging the entire community in an educative dialogue about our lives and our aspirations.
As more gay men and lesbians in provincial Australia learn the value of fighting for their rights in those smaller communities which have shaped their sexual identity Priscilla's urban ghettos will cease to be of interest to anyone but historians.
Most important of all, the kind of tolerance of which Priscilla speaks is bounded by narrow concepts of what it means to be a gay man.
Some gay men I know loved the film because it brought an aspect of gay life into "the mainstream". Others disliked it because it gave the wholly wrong impression that most gay men like dressing up in women's clothes.
But a craving for recognition and a contempt for stereotypes weren't the only gay responses to Priscilla.
Amongst many gay men there is a sense that Priscilla is yet another euphemistic handling of gay life.
Their argument is that the movie is really all about how gay men deal with issues like love, desire, relationships, masculinity, fatherhood and homophobia. But to make these issues more palatable to a mainstream audience they are dressed up and then lost in a sea of sequins and glitter.
The obvious comparison is with The Sum of Us.
This film did not camouflage the verities of gay existence. Its focus was simply the relationship between a young gay man in search of love, and his straight father in search of the same.
But despite being released at almost the same time as Priscilla, and although its calibre and cast were superior, the Sum of Us was mostly ignored by mainstream audiences.
I have some sympathy for those who criticise Priscilla as euphemistic because I strike the same problem in my work as a gay activist.
In Australia AIDS is often used as a euphemism for gay issues, particularly gay rights.
It is safer for policy makers to treat us like potential virus sites than living, breathing, loving people. It is easier for the mainstream community to deal with gay men who are seen as weak or dying victims than it is to handle us when we are alive, in control and actively questioning prejudice. It is more convenient for politicians to argue that gay men should have equal rights because it will protect our health than it is to say we deserve equality because we are human beings.
But ultimately this approach to male homosexuality is a mistake.
Be it the distracting glitter of drag or the sympathy and urgency associated with AIDS, the use of a euphemism to obscure the wonder and ordinariness of being gay makes it harder for gay men to be true to themselves.
Not portraying gay experience in its own terms also means we miss an opportunity to directly challenge all the prejudices and myths which stand in the way of an acceptance of this experience as legitimate and valuable.
Set against the hatred which has accompanied the debate on gay law reform in Tasmania the kind of conditional tolerance fostered by Priscilla Queen of the Desert is a valuable commodity.
But there is something which has an even greater value and from which Priscilla shies - a generous acceptance of the diversity that makes us human, and a celebration of all that, as humans, we share.
Rodney Croome
This review first appeared in the Sunday Tasmanian in January 1995.
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