More on REAL Women's campaign to cancel funding to the Vancouver Queer Film Festival

In my Movie Note this week about the Department of Canadian Heritage’s decision to continue funding Out On Screen’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival, there was some additional information from my interviews that I wasn’t able to include in print due to space restrictions.

As mentioned in the Movie Note, REAL Women’s national vice-president Gwen Landolt's main beef with the Department of Canadian Heritage funding the festival is that she feels that it is a gross misuse of precious funds. “Why they’re funding it is incredible,” she said on the line from Ontario. “All these fringe questionable homosexual so-called art—what they’re doing is trying to defy the norms of society and saying 'we don’t have to conform to anything, we’re different uh-huh.' But there’s no reason the taxpayers have to pay for it. If they want to go ahead and make these perverse films, fine, but why should we have to pay for it?”

Instead, Landolt feels the money could be put to better use elsewhere. “The Heritage Department has got a lot of responsibilities. Why don’t they fund a few museums, which is beneficial? Art galleries fall under their jurisdiction. My goodness, fund those and everybody enjoys those. Everyone finds it particularly useful and uplifting. But to fund this very, very extreme fringe material that even the homosexuals themselves don’t often like, or approve of, it seems like a very, very egregious waste of taxpayers’ money.”

Out on Screen executive director Drew Dennis was very pleased and impressed by the Department’s response. “It’s one of the beauties of arts funding in Canada is that it is intended to be arm’s length from the government. I think we sometimes know that that’s not always the case, or there’s a fear that may not be the real picture. So it’s very comforting to know that in this case, it’s reassuring to know that Canadian Heritage did stick by their mandate and clearly we fit within their mandate, and we clearly meet their funding criteria.”

Dennis, however, did sound very weary of queer content being challenged and questioned. “It can be tiring when you feel that you have to continuously justify your right to exist or that you have to continue to justify why the queer community is worthy of rights or why queer art is worthy and interesting and exciting and challenging.”

Dennis points out that in the article that ran on the LifeSiteNews.com Web site about REAL Women’s concern over the funding, they chose to use “really obscure titles” from the festival’s 150 films in their program to use as examples. Dennis added that they didn’t make any mention of the films from their human rights series.

Interesting to note is that REAL Women’s motto is “Women’s rights, but not at the expense of human rights.”

Nonetheless, Dennis was impressed by the response that arose in defense of the festival: “At the same time there was a letter writing campaign against the festival, our own members really spoke out and we were just thrilled with the response of so many of our members who in turn wrote letters articulating why they felt the Queer Film Festival was indeed important and a very worthwhile project for the government to be supporting.”

Although in Pieta Woolley’s article last fall when REAL Women's campaign began, Dennis mentioned that the festival might invite Landolt’s group to conduct a workshop at their festival to build dialogue, nothing concrete has been worked out thus far or even begun as this year’s festival is still in the early stages.

When I asked Landolt if she would be receptive of the idea, she informed me that the only response she had was negative. “I find their dialogue is to send obscene letters to us. It never seems too useful”¦. We just throw them [the letters] in the garbage. Or what we’re doing is saving them for future reference as well. They’re always very useful to have. We could care less but we are compiling a lot of them to show the obscenity, and the vindictiveness. It’s very useful. We’re keeping track of them.”