Co-directors of Doc "Bi the Way" on the Changing State of Sexuality
Posted at 10:01 PM Jun 04, 2008
Feature-length documentary Bi the Way debuted at South by Southwest in March, and is now playing around the country on the LGBT Film Festival Circuit. This Friday it will be screening here in NYC as part of the NewFest: 5.45 pm at the AMC Loews 34th St, Theater 13. Afterwards, join the directors and other assorted characters at the Wild Side after party, a night of bi-curiosities, gender contortion, and sexual illusion to celebrate its NYC premiere. 8:00-11:00pm, Friday June 6th At Vlada Lounge (331 W. 51st St. between 8th and 9th Aves.)
Naked City editor Audacia Ray had some questions about the changing face of sexuality in America and the logistics of making the documentary for the film's co-directors, Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker.
Audacia Ray: The tagline on your website says about bisexuality: "it's a both /and world." Though the prefix "bi" suggests that bisexuals have two options, do you think that bisexuality is increasingly becoming representative of sexual fluidity? If so, do you think bisexuality will increasingly become the norm, at least in practice if not in name?
Brittany Blockman: For many of the bisexuals we interviewed, claiming a bisexual identity meant they would allow themselves to love a person regardless of the sex of that person—that their love was sex/gender-blind. They didn't seem focused on what category their desires fit into but rather on the electricity that could be sparked in any number of circumstances between themselves and another. In other words, their sexualities weren't predicated on having only two options but on having as many options as there are people in the world. As one of our interviewees put it, "People who are bisexual are more alert to the great dance that is human eroticism. People who are more narrowly defined hear the the major chords and miss the minor chords altogether."
However, many of the young people we interviewed in Bi the Way preferred not to use a label in describing their romantic proclivities but rather to exist in the realm of possibility with regards to their sexuality. They appeared to be less interested in 'coming out' and taking on a sexual identity than in carving out their own sexual paths and doing what made them happy. This openness to experience seems to be what is increasingly the norm and revolutionary, rather than claiming bisexuality as an identity. And as young people embrace sexual fluidity, they become more in step with recent advances in neuroscience which have demonstrated that the brain has the capacity for many types of love—both simultaneously and in tandem.
Three more questions and their answers after the jump!
AR: One of the contentious things about bisexual identity is that in addition to being shunned by heterosexuals, many gays and lesbians don't like or don't trust bisexuals. How did the bisexuals you talked to relate to queer culture at large? Do they feel that they're a part of it, or do they that they are welcome in gay and lesbian cultural spaces?
Josephine Decker: We focused "Bi The Way" on youth culture, and with the young people of today, we really found that their approach to sexuality was so revolutionary precisely because it didn't divide down these standard lines of gay, straight, bi. Many chose other terms -- queer, heteroflexible, bi-curious, whatever -- to define their sexuality. And even the ones who identified as gay or lesbian didn't appear to have the same issues with bisexuals that older gays and lesbians tend to express. What I find so positive about that is that it allows kids not to have to make a decision about their sexuality so early on. The more the young people we talked to were able to embrace fluidity and uncertainty, the more likely they were to really be happy with the choices they made in the present and in the future.
That said, I do think that there comes an age in life when it makes more sense for people to define more rigidly. We found that starting with college seniors, you started to get that, "Aren't you really just gay and afraid?" question concerning bisexuals. I would say that most of the bisexuals in our film had very supportive friends who weren't so concerned with labels. Tahj, who is a young African-American living in New York, is the exception. From both his gay and his straight associates, he was feeling a lot of pressure to 'pick a camp.' And that is one of the reasons I believe he found the process of learning about his own sexuality more painful than our other subjects did. He was facing a lot of discrimination from both sides, and instead of having the chance to experiment and learn about himself, he found that he was mostly having to hide who he truly was.
AR: In our email correspondence you mentioned that you did a movie called Naked Princeton, about a secret nudist society at Princeton. How did making this film push you towards making Bi the Way?
Josephine Decker: When Brittany and I were seniors in college, we sat around the dinner table with a good friend of ours and asked ourselves, "What are we doing after we graduate!?" We all wanted to start a production company. "How do we do that?" we asked each other. "I guess we just make a movie..." Brittany was into secret societies, and I was into nudism. That's really how our filmmaking got started. Naked Princeton followed a secret underground nudist society at Princeton that emerged after the banning of the Nude Olympics (Princeton's naked snow run!). Our characters were based on Princeton exaggerations: the hippie activist, the 'joiner' who's part of every club including East Asian Bible Study and Ultimate Frisbee, the hairy intellectual, the evolutionist, the starry-eyed social climber... The crazy fun from those shoots -- from hiding in the copy room to creating dialogue from improvisation (our actors were geniuses!) to sneaking 40 naked people down the hallways of elite universities -- had us both anxious to do another project together. We were out in LA pitching a Naked Princeton feature when we actually got the funding for Bi The Way!
AR: How did you select the people whose stories you feature in the film? How much time did you spend with the subjects before and during filming?
Brittany Blockman: Some of our subjects were found via internet social-networking sites such as Myspace and Friendster, whereas others were found through word-of-mouth associations. We insisted on having a geographically and socio-economically diverse group of young people to assure that we represented youth experience as broadly as possible. We followed each of our subjects for roughly one year and a half, visiting most of them two or three times each in increments of a couple of weeks to one month, in order to give us time to see their sexualities evolve and change. Unfortunately, we had to turn the cameras off in the middle of unfinished stories of sexual evolution (as all of our stories are)—in order to complete the film!
