LGBTQ+ Filmmakers, Activists Address How Hollywood Can Confront the Current Moment at NewFest36

Queer filmmakers, mediamakers and activists — alongside political commentators, influencers and public servants — addressed how present challenges in politics and the film industry have converged and how independent storytelling and social media can help respond to anti-LGBTQ+ backlash as part of an hourlong panel at NewFest36’s second annual Industry + Filmmaker Day. 

Nick McCarthy, director of programming at NewFest, kicked off the Friday event, held at the LGBT Center in Manhattan, which centered on the convergence of film, media and political activism. Kickstarter, NEON and The Hollywood Reporter served as event partners. 

The candid discussion featured the voices of political and cultural commentary creator Matt Bernstein; drag artist, political activist and former city council candidate Marti Cummings; filmmaker, performer and culture critic Jude Dry; filmmaker and Ponyboi star River Gallo; New York City council member for Brooklyn’s District 35 Crystal Hudson; and Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art. 

With the 2024 election just weeks away, panelists and attendees were asked to examine the ways — traditional or provocative — that queer Hollywood, film and media can confront the chaos of the current political climate; that includes high-stakes elections on the local, state and federal levels and a rapidly growing wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation spanning trans and intersex rights to book bans and wider censorship efforts. They also addressed the potential connection between increases in film and media representation for the LGBTQ+ community, as well as advances or setbacks in both legal rights and public sentiment for the community. 

Hudson, the first out gay Black woman elected in New York City, told the crowd that she “wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for people thinking that I could be here, and that’s been because of popular culture, because of art, because of creatives that have pushed us.” Cummings, who made history in 2021 as the first nonbinary City Council candidate for office in New York City, noted that political representation — including Chi Ossé and Tiffany Cabán on the New York City Council, Mauree Turner in Oklahoma’s state house of representatives and Sarah McBride in Delaware’s state senate — “shows people that they do have a seat at the table and that their voices will be heard.”

Writer, director and intersex activist Gallo also “absolutely” believes there’s a correlation between the work artists do and legislation in the U.S. around LGBTQ+ rights, pointing to The Center of Cultural Power’s co-founder Favianna Rodriguez’s expression that art is “always 15 years ahead of politics.”

“I always cite Pose as a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, wow, we’re here.’ Trans people are now part of popular culture in a way that is empowering and beautiful. And then what happened? The last five years, we’ve seen some of the most horrific backlash towards trans people through legislation,” they said. “It’s just a dance that we’re going to have to keep boogieing. For better or worse, as artists, we need to have the tenacity to keep going and to keep taking bolder and greater steps in our work in order for policy to change for good.”

Dry, a filmmaker who was working at Indiewire during the Transparent era of television, also zoomed in on how the community’s reception by American society at-large can change for the better or worse. “Visibility actually does come with danger — that’s always been the case, but it feels very obvious when you look at the backlash to trans rights and the tipping point of the Laverne Cox Time cover story,” they said. 

In terms of how queer creatives can respond, particularly now, Cummings noted, “I don’t know what a movie can do right now because [the election] is in two weeks,” but they did point to existing work that is diversifying the kinds of stories put into the world as one way to continue pushing back against anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment now and in the future. Narratives that showcase the “joy of being a queer person,” like Heartstopper, are one way “that a young kid who is constantly hearing about how this legislation is impacting their future and their now, see themselves positively and not as what these legislators are trying to tell them they are.”

Dry highlighted efforts by queer creators who are going beyond featuring a single LGBTQ+ character in their narratives, and are instead “using their platform to be political. A new show this season that I really love is English Teacher. … They did a really great episode about a shooting club on campus and because [Brian Jordan Alvarez] is queer and a good comedian, he really threads the needle amazingly in addressing school shooter drills,” they said. “Making queer art is a political act still, but the limits of representation have been shown and we have to move beyond it and use our platforms to speak to other issues that are affecting Americans.”

For Roy, recent censorship attempts by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are a form of “creep” that people should work toward stopping before attacks on certain communities and their rights escalate and grow. “[Ron DeSantis] tried to say you’re not allowed to play an ad on television in support of abortion rights. That’s creep, right? Each little step like that, we have to fight against and remain vigilant, because it will creep not only into the political sphere and your corporeal sphere, but also into the cultural sphere, and certain images will then become forboden.”

Bernstein reinforced that in light of potential or real retaliation and censorship, being willing to stand by your positions and find new avenues to do your work is also important in this moment. 

“I had a really transformative past year where I had representation because now all of these big agencies in Hollywood have internet creator sectors, but my desire to talk about the Middle East — the relationship did not survive that,” he said. “It’s always challenging to work in an industry where there’s not a generational precedent for what we’re doing online today, but I did reorient my career around things like Patreon. Basically it’s like, OK, we’re going to find each other’s communities, we’re going to find each other’s projects. We’re not going to get these huge conglomerates. We’re going to support each other.”

Gallo acknowledged that queer creators and queer people are currently trying to navigate a multitude of challenges in the current political and creative landscape, but expressed that one way to address it is by creating personally transformative art. 

“We’re creating in an industry that’s falling apart and in a country that’s also falling apart, so I just want to make bizarre, weird art and go there to do the things that are personally really terrifying for me to do,” they said. “In my sphere as an artist, whose job it is to express what’s lying beneath the culture — what’s in the crevasses, what the people don’t want to see; I think it’s our duty to be as investigative as possible and have the intention, not necessarily that your work is going to change culture in a way that will change legislation, but that is in some way, be spiritually, metaphysically transformative for you as a person, and that will ripple out to other layers of the culture.”

They also suggested going beyond legacy studios and traditional funding and focusing on grassroots and crowdfunding to help support the kind of art that can respond, and not just in political moments. “I think there’s something connected to the fact that in the United States, artists are not funded like they are in other countries,” Gallo noted. 

“We need to remember that we’re creating films in a system that access to resources is kept under lock and key, unless you make a movie that’s going to make a lot of money,” they continued. “As filmmakers, we need to start thinking more horizontally, as opposed to vertically. Instead of ‘there’s a man up there that’s going to give me the money’ or ‘there’s an agent up there that’s going to give me the opportunities,’ it’s, ‘I have a friend, I have a homie, I have my neighbor, who we can help each other be in our things, produce our things, help fundraise our things.’”

They and several other panelists also encouraged more serious consideration of social platforms and their potential impact and reach to engage voters and entertainment consumers. “A lot of TikTok creators are actually doing really radical work,” Dry said. “I loved I Saw the TV Glow, and it did pretty well. It had a nice run for a little art house movie, but in terms of eyeballs, maybe we do need to get off our high horses a little bit and be less precious about the ways we’re making work and how it’s getting seen. On TikTok, that is a moving image that lots of people are consuming.”

“You saw it with the strikes last year, where you couldn’t get an agreement because you had the legacy studios and the streamers negotiating with unions, but what you really had was legacy studios, a grocery delivery company, a computer maker and an algorithm negotiating with artists, and they don’t care about culture. The legacy studios made the culture. Louis B. Mayer and company invented cinema culture and all the apparatus around it, so they were never going to let it burn to the ground,” Roy later added. “I’m not trying to sugarcoat how difficult it is to get things made, but honestly, an influencer, you have so much power in this climate. If an influencer can combine with a creator, I think there is a new way forward that we’re on the cusp of.”

Hudson agreed, telling the event crowd that “we shouldn’t be looking towards just elected officials and politicians and public servants to tell us what we should be doing and who we should be following and believing. I think it is up to the content creators. We need to rely on less on politicians and more so on people who are creating authentic, genuine, honest, real content, who are telling it like it is and speaking truth to power, as opposed to people who are literally in positions where they will say whatever it is they think you need to hear in order to further their own self.”