BY JOHN FRAME
An acclaimed documentary film-maker, Arthur Dong has released his first DVD project. The three-disc collection is titled Stories from the War on Homo Sexuality, and contains three of Dong's feature-length films: Coming Out Under Fire (1994), about gays and lesbians who served in World War II; Licensed to Kill (1997), about convicted killers of gay men; and Family Fundamentals (2002), which deals with families of openly gay and lesbian who campaign against homosexuality.
The films have been digitally remastered and include added features, extended scenes, music selections and detailed liner notes.
Arthur Dong is the recipient of more than 100 film awards, including three Sundance Festival awards, the Berlin Film Festival's Teddy Award, the Peabody Award, two Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards, as well as an Oscar nomination and five Emmy nominations. Dong is on the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, representing the documentary branch.
I spoke to Dong in Los Angeles by telephone on November 21.
"It took a while to come up with [the collection's] title. One of my first ideas was America's War on Homosexuality. A few of my friends were surprisingly upset, saying America's not at war with homosexuals, that i's too big a word. Because I knew the word 'war' really produced an emotional response, I wanted to keep that — but I knew that for some people I needed to temper it. So I thought, what are my films about? They are personal stories."
"I really wanted people, regardless of their sexuality, to look at these films, and the extra materials on the DVDs, and to appreciate them as a commentary on our society. And that's something that we all share — that we need to deal with these issues and that they not only affect the gay community, they affect all of us — because we're talking about human rights and civil rights, and any time any of these rights are violated, that's a violation on all of us.
"That's how I approached the whole set — the choice of the title, the way the graphics were designed. I wanted the word 'war' big and I wanted the word "homo" big. I thought, if this were on a shelf at your local DVD shop and you were a non-gay person, what would you possibly be attracted to, to make you pick this up?'
"'War' is something people see instantly and the logo has the word 'homo' quite bold, deliberately, because homo is a word that many anti-gay people use as a derogatory term. I want non-gay people to pick this up and wonder what this is about."
Dong described how the DVD set, which contains more than four hours of extra material, freed him from the constraints that television timeslots have imposed on documentaries.
"Oh, it's so exciting — it was like making a new film, because I wasn't under those traditionally accepted narrative restraints, in which you have a given amount of time to tell a story. There's a certain amount of dramatic tension you want to build and get released by the end of the film. With a DVD, it's a more interactive process of watching or experiencing an issue or a story.
"With all my documentaries, there's all this research that was conducted to get to the point of putting a finished product on the screen. So much of that research, and the many stories and people I've met during the research, ended up not being a part of the finished product. So with the DVDs, I was able to dig through my hundreds of boxes of material and look through things that I really liked — and lamented leaving out in the original films — and say, 'Ah! Here's my chance. I can put it back in, in this new format.'"
Considering recent US Supreme Court legal victories striking down sodomy laws and potential marriage reform in the US, does Dong see any likely quick resolution to the "war on homosexuality"?
"Sometimes, I paint a very pessimistic point of view, and I know better than to do that constantly — because I see the progress that is being made. But I think some of us need to be ever vigilant against those forces that oppose us. It seems as though, if we let up and celebrate too much, then we forget that this war is happening and that it's all around us.
"Despite the successes we see and the steps forward that are being made, we can't forget that if we relax a little bit, the opposition's going to step right in and do their job. For me as a media artist, I really see these products as part of the range of tools that we can have for social change."
Arthur Dong's Stories from the War on Homo Sexuality DVDs can be ordered at <http://www.deepfocusproductions.com>.
From Green Left Weekly, December 10, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.