Tag Archives: featured

Avery Willard

In Search Of Avery Willard: A Message From The Co-Director by

Avery Willard with Flowers, date, photographer unknown

This week in our quest to understand the life and work of Avery Willard, Cary Kehayan, the co-director of the documentary In Search Of Avery Willard explains how the project came to pass, how it relates to Keep The Lights On, and what intruiges him about this unusual but exciting endeavor. 

It’s a great privilege to share with you the work of the late Avery Willard. Avery wore many hats – photographer, filmmaker, writer, editor, leatherman, pornographer. He was a creator in the truest sense. Ambitious, elusive and prolific, he was an unsung trailblazer of the queer art world. The work of innovators like Avery is what drove me to become a documentarian. I’ve always felt that a good doc filmmaker is, first and foremost, a disciplined and acute observer – one who isn’t afraid to take the side streets and embrace each tangent along the way. The process requires a tremendous amount of movement and obsession and perseverance. There’s a lot of joy but even more frustration and heartbreak. And yet, every once in a while, there is a discovery filled with such promise, it gives you the shivers. This was the case with Avery. More…

Production Diary

Day 74, Part 2: Shooting Sex by

Actor Chris Lenk on Set

Shooting sex. A difficult thing to write about. There’s a good long essay to write about it, if one had the skills, because there are so many moving parts to the story. The thing I’ve begun to notice with this film, on this set is that as we’ve shot more of it—and there’s been a lot—there is a familiarity about it that I’m guessing is not unlike what begins to happen on porno sets. My deeper hope is that the set of the movie is not unlike the movie itself, meaning that the openness of our approach to shooting these scenes makes these types of moments less foreign to the grips, to the gaffers, to myself as a director. That we are making a movie about openness and bringing sex into the picture (into the light), and so it becomes visible, familiar, easy to talk about. That we are making a movie that keeps the lights on. More…

Art & Autobiography

The Diaries of Kevin Bentley by

Kevin Bentley circa 1978

In mid-July, 1977, after a violent confrontation with his father, young Kevin Bentley lit out for San Francisco, that famous territory that beckoned thousands of gay men seeking a place where they could be accepted and meet each other. Unlike many of his fellow travelers, he kept a detailed diary of his day-to-day experiences, which usually consisted of plenty of good, hot, dirty sex. In 2002, Green Candy Press released Wild Animals I Have Known, which contains Bentley’s journals from 1977 to 1996. The book is a sharp, incisive, fascinating, and very sexy chronicle of real life in San Francisco. Though his sexual experiences are at the forefront of the narrative, the book takes a dramatic turn in the early 1980′s when Bentley contracts HIV, along with many of his friends. Since he was an asymptomatic case, Bentley survived the decade, but eventually witnessed the deaths of many friends and two of his longtime partners. Today, Bentley lives in San Francisco with Paul, his partner of 15 years. He still enjoys his sex life, and is still writing about it. I called Bentley at home to talk about the construction of his diaries, his influences, and the unique pleasure of reading real stories of our gay lives.

Adam Baran: You started writing the diaries that became Wild Animals I Have Known in 1977, right?
Kevin Bentley: The book starts in ’77. I was keeping diaries full-time beginning in college. They’re good for going back and reminding myself of what I’d forgotten. There was a lot of sex in those. But I wasn’t a good enough writer then. More…

Gay New York

Leaving Our Keys at the Pink Teacup by

in a photo booth

We used to leave our keys with the Pink Teacup, just under the Coconut Cream Pie, in case friends needed to get in. You could also call from a payphone and we would lower the keys down on a string. This was 42 Grove Street and we had all moved there in 1992—fags and dykes and in-betweeners—and there were four of us in a two-level apartment with a spiral staircase and mice. We came with our ACT-UP t-shirts and Doc Martens and we sneered at Gay Pride, though we marched in it. We wanted to be part of gay history. More…

Avery Willard

In Search of a Backstory by

Charles Wassum, Jr.

One of the things non-narrative films often do that traditional narrative films don’t is pose questions without simple answers. Things get a little tougher in our case since Avery Willard, the filmmaker we are researching, is one who received precious little attention during his lifetime and is virtually unknown today. Charles Wassum Jr. (excerpted above), one of the earliest films by Willard still in existence, offers a first-hand illustration of the challenges posed by this project.

A nine-minute experimental portrait of a young man from Willard’s hometown of Marion, Virginia, the film demonstrates Willard’s keen eye at a young age and brings to mind elements of the later structural film movement of the 1970s, especially the repetition of shot composition and motion. There is a hypnotic and compelling rhythm to the cuts and mirrored frames. With little visual context, Willard is able to create a sense of intrigue around his subject, which makes for a deceptively simple and elegantly textured work. More…

Art & Autobiography

Chinese Take Out by

Dominique and her brother

In the Art and Autobiography section, we’ll be regularly featuring interviews with artists from across the creative spectrum who create, or are attempting to create personal or autobiographical work. We’ll also be featuring examples of personal storytelling from many of these artists. For our first post, Obie award-winning playwright and one of the legendary Five Lesbian Brothers Dominique Dibbell has graciously agreed to share an excerpt from “Adam and Jane”, a memoir she is currently writing about her parents.  

After an hour or so, maybe more, my father stopped into one of those Chinese food shops in New York that are very bare bones. Thick, scratched, and dirty plate glass front, approach the counter, order from the menu on the wall above, order taker scurries back through a door to the kitchen and delivers order. Wait 5 to 10 minutes, order taker retrieves your meal from the back and gives it to you. It is in plastic containers, in a plastic bag, and included is a plastic fork, maybe a napkin, and soy sauce and hot mustard packets. If you’re lucky, it comes with a free egg roll.

So we go into this little Chinese food place with my father, and it smells bad. It smells more sad than bad. Like death, sickness, and loneliness are their fare more than lo mein and spare ribs. I am having a moment of disgust for this food and the people who eat it. On the other hand, it is around lunchtime on a cold winter day and I have probably eaten a bagel about four hours ago so I am hungry. I would like to eat some of this Chinese food. Because sometimes, of course, very good food can come out of very sad looking places. Not usually, but sometimes. Also, I am new to New York, so I don’t know that most likely the food from here will be terrible. Also, it might not taste terrible to me because my tastes are not fully matured. More…