Nobody's Perfect

Ray Murray on 15 years of gay film festing.

by Molly Eichel

Jessica Kourkounis Ray Murray

In the '70s, it was nearly impossible to find a positive portrayal of homosexuality in mainstream media. When Ray Murray wanted to see people like him up on the screen, he'd have to venture down South Street to the TLA theater, then a rep film house, to watch movies like The Boys in the Band and Satyricon.

"I wanted to see images of myself," says Murray. "I didn't have any self loathing ... I was looking for reinforcement."

It was in the comforting darkness of the TLA that the seeds for QFest were sewn. QFest — an 11-day, 100-plus-film festival, the third largest in the country behind San Francisco and L.A. — is Murray's baby and he serves as artistic director. This year, baby turns 15.

Like any 15-year-old, QFest is in transition. Formerly known by the mouthful moniker Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, the name has changed to the much-cooler QFest. Murray assures us it's not because of the ballyhooed split with its nonprofit umbrella organization, the Philadelphia Film Society (now both QFest and Cinefest, which takes place in April, are under the Philadelphia Cinema Alliance). He could have kept the name, he says, but opted instead for a face-lift because, essentially, it's catchier, and in hopes that people will stop referring to it by its unfortunate acronym, PIGLFF.

In addition, the money the festival usually receives from the city, about $22,500, was taken away in one of Mayor Michael Nutter's rounds of budget cuts. "We've streamlined a bit, tightened our belts, cut our programming," says QFest's director of operations, Claire Brown Kohler, a woman who ends her phone messages with "ciao" and met (and briefly dated) Murray in 1977. "But we weren't ever that reliant on the city, so it's not an oh-my-God kind of situation."

When Murray took over programming for the TLA in the '80s after working his way up from projectionist (he now serves as president of TLA Entertainment Group), he scheduled what he calls mini film fests of gay cinema. They attracted a mixed queer and straight crowd who were searching for arthouse fare. He screened movies like Taxi zum Klo, a German film about a gay public school teacher.

"The biggest change between back then and now is that the audience was really hungry for a fest like this. They felt they could go in and there was a gay and lesbian crowd and they felt solidarity," says Murray.

"Try to recall the first time you saw a romance on screen, like Casablanca," says Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News. "LGBT people can't quite relate to that, but seeing LGBT romance doesfor us what Casablanca does."

"The younger crowd doesn't care," laments Murray. "They're gay, they're out and seeing stuff in tons of different ways. They're watching everything from little clips to [video on demand] films. Our challenge is getting young people into the theater, and I can't say we've been successful."

But Thom Cardwell, development director of both QFest and Cinefest, says there is still not enough LGBTQ content in mainstream films, and those audiences still want to seek out their own images on screen. "Even though there's a Brokeback Mountain and there's a Brüno coming out, even in the last 10 years, there's only a very short list of films [that feature gay characters and storylines]," he says. "Maybe we should be more outraged."

While researching his 1994 book Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video, Murray found that there were queer-themed festivals all over the country, but nothing in Philadelphia. He brought the idea back to his TLA staff. "They were into it because I spun it into a way to get people back into the movie theater," he says.

But Murray is a hands-on type of guy and took it upon himself to watch and select every movie playing at the festival. He refers to it as a dictatorship. Now he can sit in his Old City office and watch movies on a flat screen affixed to his wall,but he doesn't choose all of the films anymore because he has his hands full with his "new love," Cinefest, and because he found that one opinion doesn't make for a diverse film festival. So he's taken steps to change that, by empowering his programmers and hiring the likes of Carol Coombes, a programmer who has done time at LGBTQ film festivals in London and Miami, as well as the British Film Institute. "She picks films we wouldn't have picked," says Murray.

Even with Coombes, 10-year fest vet Scott Cranin and Kelly Burkhardt as programmers, Murray has sought out a weirder slate of films than other LGBTQ film festivals because, as Murray asks, "What is a gay film?" On their opening night back in 1995, they screened Todd Haynes' Safe, a film that can only be classified as gay because of the director's sexuality. "People thought we were crazy to open with a serious American art film and that proved right," says Murray, who estimates 40 people showed up at the first screening and only a handful at the subsequent party, even with the director in attendance. "It was a complete disaster," says Murray. "We thought it wasn't going to work, but the next day when we started showing gay and lesbian films, the crowd started showing."

That first year, the festival drew an impressive 7,900 at time when Murray says Philadelphia was so empty in the summers you could sleep on Broad Street. The second year didn't go as smoothly. Not because of protests, of which there have been few to speak of in QFest's 15 years. They expanded too fast, with too many films and were burned in the process. It wasn't until the third year that Murray was sure the festival could keep going.

Despite the opening-year catastrophe and rough early going, Murray still makes it a point to look at gay film in the broadest sense. In 1997, the fest honored Clive Barker, the horror director behind films like Hellraiser who is not known for having any gay content in his films. In 2000, they honored Joel Schumacher, director and super producer, after the release of Batman & Robin. He had never publicly come out before.

Last year, about 24,000 people attended the festival, but this year, Murray expects fewer. Not only is the program smaller but the name change has left some longtime attendees confused by the switch. Murray admits they probably should have waited a couple of years after the Film Society split to decrease confusion.

But even with a smaller finished product, the heart of the festival remains the same: The films, Murray insists, have to be entertaining.

"I have a kind of strange thing that way," he says.

Or maybe it's just because he wants to be the kid in the theater again, looking for himself onscreen.

(molly.eichel@citypaper.net)