On Saturday, March 22, artist and documentary filmmaker Sharon Hayes came to Swarthmore’s campus for a screening and discussion of her most recent work, “Ricerche: four.” The fourth of a series of documentaries centering on questions of gender and sexuality, the film’s essential questions surround the identity and relationships of queer elders in American society. With three focus groups — one from Dowelltown, TN, one from Philadelphia, and one from Los Angeles — immaculately edited to feel like one, the film discussed the varying temporal and geographic constraints of queerness for these elders.
The talk itself was the culmination of the efforts of many different organizations and individuals on campus. Officially, it was organized by the Gender and Sexuality Studies department in conjunction with the class GSST 001: Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Life Across Generations. Program Coordinator Patty White and Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor Dahlia Li organized the event alongside the Aydelotte Foundation’s Just Art initiative, which was co-sponsored by the Cooper Serendipity Fund, the Sager Fund, the Clark Fund for Gender Discourse, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.
The documentary itself was presented through a split screen, an experience that allows the audience to see the actions of the speaker and the reactions of the interlocutors. Hayes described this practice as connected to cinéma vérité’s notion of film producing truth. The camera provides a unique function in the project, as it allows for seemingly mundane moments of response and attention to inform the audience’s response. It also makes the audience an unspeaking participant in the conversation: as the audience watches, they feel as if they are not simply a viewer but a collaborator, and the lens forces the film’s gaze not only onto the subject but towards the audience as well.
The film itself centers the ideas of elders’ relationships to gender and sexuality, and challenges the disembodiment of queer elders and ageist notions of LGBTQ+ identity. The elders introduce the idea that queer youth hold the belief that Stonewall began the queer rights movement, all its participants passed away from AIDS, and now only the youth are queer. They challenge this notion on multiple fronts, most poignantly and simply within their continued existence as queer elders. They further deny their disembodiment by stating that even though their identity has forced them to be political, they also feel desire and have sex, and their fights are not over yet.
Following the film, there was a discussion with a selection of queer elders from the documentary: Andrea Lamour-Harrington, Gary Hines, Maryanne Poposky, SPREE, Verónica Flores, and Bamby Salcedo. Facilitated by Dahlia Li and Cal Hernandez ’28, this panel placed elders into conversation, many of whom, even though edited to seem to be in the same place, had never met before. They discussed feelings of joy at seeing their parallel experiences being met and received and the ongoing fights that they are all involved in.
In the subsequent section opened to the audience, members of GSST 001 and previous students of Hayes’s asked about various aspects of filmography, lived queer experience, and the label itself. One of Hayes’s former students, in praise of the film, asked the speakers what their reaction would have been to the film had they had the opportunity to view it in their childhood. This question brought up many complex feelings among the participants: the illegibility of their current identity to their past selves, the relief of knowing that they would find their queer identity, and the fear that lay in accepting the violently different version of themselves they would have seen. But most felt a general sense that they would have come to love their future selves. The question brought the elders to examine their self-perceptions through both a different societal and individual lens – how would they have felt about being a queer elder when they were pre-queer adolescents?
In a similar vein, another question of the night led to a stark shift in tone in the room. One student asked the participants to grapple with the notion that current societal imagination leaves little room for queer joy, particularly queer elders. While some of the elders struggled to respond – for them, their queerness had not been liberatory, but dangerous – answers did arrive. Many of them stated that there was joy in the struggle itself, and that in fighting for their rights and respectability, they met other queer and trans individuals with whom they spent some of the most formative moments of their lives.
Andrea Lamour-Harrington shared a vulnerable anecdote about the degradation that she faced after discovering that she had HIV, as her doctor shamed her for her perceived sexual indiscretion. She shared that her moment of radical queer joy came from the fact that while that doctor is now dead she is still alive and thriving. Finally, SPREE shared that not only has she found joy in her queer identity, but she continues to find joy in her puppy, whose birthday was the day just after the screening.
Hayes’s film came in honor of Trans Week of Visibility, questioning society’s current imagination that queerness is essentially youthful and that older people are foremost not sexual and likewise not gay. The film participants embodied the contradiction to such falsehoods by continuing to live and represent themselves as queer elders. Conversations among queer elders and between queer elders and queer youth offer a genealogy of queerness, broadcasting the message that queer is not young, and queer is not old, but queer is forever.
