Me, Myself, They

by Joshua M. Ferguson

  But how realistic was this dream to change people’s lives through the media, through this magical screen that had deeply affected my own life and taken me away from so much pain? I knew that it was a long shot. I mean, how would someone from the small town of Napanee break into that enormous and intimidating industry? My goal seemed unattainable at the time, but that didn’t stop me. I completed a one-year introductory Arts, Culture, and Media program at Algonquin College, where I learned some of the skills needed to create my own forms of representation, and, more importantly, reactivated my academic focus. For the first time, the picture of my dreams took shape. The fire for learning about myself, and how to effect change, was just beginning.

  My dream of making a difference with my life and art entered a new phase the following year at Western University. I moved to the London, Ontario, campus and enrolled in an Introduction to Film Studies course. My professor, Dr. Barbara Bruce, became a brilliant force in my life that year. By a sort of magical coincidence, she is the sister of acclaimed queer Canadian artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, whose films break ground for queer representation. Dr. Bruce stood tall in her own intellectual capacity beyond any teacher I’d had before her. Her love for film was conveyed to a class of over a hundred students — some eager, some tired, and some sincerely curious, like me and Florian, who was also enrolled in the class. She was a beacon for those of us who were truly passionate about film.

  Dr. Bruce’s comparative analysis of The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars, within the context of parallels and post­modern pastiche, was a special awakening for me. She peeled off the illusionary layers of both films to reveal the methods, the artistic elements, and the intertextual influences that inspired their creators and their stories. I had been watching films completely blind to the mechanisms that make these giant stories so affective for human beings. Dr. Bruce revealed to me cinema’s machinations: complex and carefully constructed illusions, sometimes crafted with a care in mind to change people’s lives.

  Dr. Chika Kinoshita was another film studies professor at Western University who expanded my worldview with her courses on Japanese cinema. Her brilliantly woven lectures on samurai films, in particular Oshima Nagisa’s Gohatto (about queer love in the samurai class), presented with important historical and cultural context, made me realize the importance of acknowledging the specificity of sex, gender, and sexuality, and how these terms differ greatly from one culture to the next. Dr. Kinoshita taught me that our understanding should shift with cultural frameworks and cultural history — the importance of time and place.

  In Dr. Kinoshita’s course I began to analyze cinematic representations of gender and sexuality within the context of Japan’s rich and diverse cultural history. Her lessons compelled me to study further under her guidance in my undergraduate work, and then in my research at UBC under Dr. Sharalyn Orbaugh towards my M.A., resulting in a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council–­sponsored trip to Japan and my thesis “Queer Japanese Cinema.”

  The next step of my artistic awakening combined this critical analysis of film with my own growing awareness of my identity, in terms of both my sexuality and my gender. My second year at Western, when I was twenty-five, will remain one of the most important times of my life, because this was the moment when I started to reconnect with the part of myself from childhood that I had lost during my adolescence, and it was thanks to two remarkable people in particular: Dr. Susan Knabe and Dr. Wendy Gay Pearson. Susan and Wendy are now dear friends. They have been together as partners for decades. They attended my wedding to Florian. They hold their hearts close in their teaching. Their guidance vanquished many illusory subjective components of myself that I had been holding on to. They believed in me and they invested in me. They helped me get back to myself.

  I first met Susan in her Women’s Studies office on a chilly and rainy fall day with a page of notes on my clipboard, eagerly seeking direction for the evolution of my undergraduate studies. Susan spent more than an hour with me. She saw something in me, and she helped to shift my focus to what she obviously gleaned was a personal exploration yet to come through my academic work. Her guidance connected me to her partner, Wendy, who thankfully had a position in the Department of Film Studies. Wendy saw the light hiding deep within me, my spirit that was lost to me and twisted. She took my inner light in her hands, breathed brilliance into me, and aided the end of the slumber of my suffering. My experience at Western, with Wendy mentoring me, was truly that powerful.

  Wendy taught a Film Studies course on representations of gender and sexuality in cinema. It remains the most important and formative educational experience of my life. I started to see my own world, what felt honest to me, reflected in film. It was a time when my self, past and present, began to align and make sense. We studied early examples of queer and trans representation from different cinematic periods and world cinemas. Wendy’s lectures elegantly delivered rich analysis bolstered by a range of theoretical lines of inquiry. My personal favourite was critical theory, in which we learned about the censorship of queer and trans lives in cinema; biological and cultural constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality; and the emergence of new queer cinema through the works of John Greyson, Tom Kalin, Todd Haynes, and producer Christine Vachon. I realized that dominant voices and creators — typically white, heterosexual, cis men — had held the reins of mainstream cinema for too long, and how marginalized voices disrupt forms of representation by intervening with new stories, which are then silenced by an industry that refuses to address the shifting reality of society.

  At the heart of Wendy’s teaching was the acknowledgement of cultural specificity for gender and sexuality. Being taught how sex, gender, and even sexuality shifts with time and place excited me. I gave a presentation in the class on two films that represented gender-fluidity in childhood, the Filipino film The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros and the French film Ma Vie en Rose. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was drawn towards these two films because the fictional stories of the two assigned-male-at-birth protagonists shared a special connection to my own truth. My presentation, entitled “Gender Identity Transcendence: A Rainbow of Possibilities,” was the spark behind the central academic query later explored in my doctoral dissertation: Why do we think about gender as only two, and why is the media a form of constructed reality that we endow with truth in spite of its oversimplification of a complex reality?

  I became fascinated with the possibility of the illusory media-scapes created by the artists’ positionality and identity. I wanted to know more about storytelling in this cin­ematic realm — how do artists intervene and make change through this powerful artistic medium? And how could I enact change in cinema through my own forms of creation?

  I also learned about the burden of representation for queer and trans filmmakers, producers, and actors who defy conventional forms of representation to tell new stories. Representation becomes the main vehicle for delivery and, unfortunately, it is often elevated to the platform of singularity, where one representation becomes the example for all. The person who creates, or who is represented, is thus responsible for representing the entire group. This is a real problem, considering that even within a group of people under one identity there exists a multiplicity of difference. People want figures of popular culture to tell a story that can be easily understood and categorized, so that these stories make sense to all of us, but the real picture of humanity isn’t so simple. So, we understand one story to be the one and only story for all trans people, or all queer people, or all people of colour. This is called burden of representation, and it places an enormous amount of pressure on the individual: one person should never hold responsibility for an entire group of people. But it does show the enormous impact that a single artist can make.

  We let our guard down to be entertained by media; we become comfortable with the manufactured screens that deliver these stories in the visual realm. When the viewer is vulnerable,
media can make interventions and impact lives that otherwise seem closed or intolerant towards difference. Fear can be transformed into acceptance and understanding as we are entertained, experiencing the habitual enjoyment we receive from watching and listening. We let go in a leisurely manner and open up through the act of media consumption. It is pleasurable and it provokes.

  In the later stages of my undergraduate work at Western, I started to think seriously about how to bring marginalized and otherwise invisible stories to light through my future work as a filmmaker. I thought about the risks that I could take with film to tell new stories that may or may not incite an intervention, that could make a significant impact on society. With several of my friends I formed Standing Against Queer Discrimination (SAQD), a student activist organization initially conceived to advocate against the Canadian Blood Services ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men (MSM). This led to the creation of Western University’s first queer film festival, Emergence, dedicated to uplifting queer and trans stories from the point of view of academics and artists. Emergence received extensive funding from several faculties, departments, and organizations at Western. We successfully invited prominent queer filmmakers John Greyson and Tom Kalin to give keynote presentations, and we screened a wide range of domestic and foreign queer and trans cinema. Emergence was, in large part, inspired and supported by Wendy’s and Susan’s unique approach to teaching, and the supportive space they offered their students. Emergence has taken place annually at Western for the past ten years. It stands as a legacy for our group of friends — Florian, Laura, Gregory, Anjeet, Mel, Emily, Wendy, and Susan — and is something we can all be proud of.

  After graduating in 2009, Florian and I moved to Vancouver to be close to a thriving film industry and to turn our passion into practice. For him, this meant starting as a production assistant in the locations department on a big Hollywood feature film while I started my Master of Arts Film Studies program at UBC. A few years later in Vancouver, we formed our production company, Turbid Lake Pictures. Our specific goal with TLP was to tell cinematic stories that make a positive difference in people’s lives and contribute to a shift in the culture for LGBTQ representation. After taking our first few years in the city to put down roots in the film industry, we made three short films together and a feature-length documentary; our most recent film, Henry’s Heart, was shot in June 2018.

  Our first film, a short entitled Whispers of Life (2013), told the fictional story of a gay teen who faces bullying and considers suicide. The narrative elevates the vital story of suicide prevention by imagining the impact of a single open and honest conversation. The original screenplay, written by Florian, was partly inspired by my own experiences with bullying and with losing someone close to suicide — someone I had shared intimacy with during my early twenties, before I met Florian. The inclusion of these personal elements wasn’t entirely intentional. I’ve had people tell me that our lead character, played by Travis Nelson, resembles me, especially in the contributions made by our costume designer, makeup artist, and hairstylist. Personally, I don’t see the resemblance when I watch the film, but I understand why some people might feel this way. What we experience in our own lives as artists always seems to inform artistic creation. It is all subjective, after all.

  Part of the inspiration for Tom’s character was Gabriel (not his real name, but I’ll use this angelic name to protect his family’s privacy), who came from across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Quebec. Gabriel and I dated for a couple of months in my early twenties — this was shortly after I almost lost my life to the hate crime in Kingston. Gabriel was a loving and caring soul who found success at a young age in his career with a major car manufacturer. Our relationship ended prematurely because we weren’t on the same page romantically. I wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship, and I wasn’t ready to reciprocate his expression of love for me.

  We didn’t communicate for months after our relationship ended. Then one day, Gabriel reached out to me in an email. He missed me, and wanted to connect with me again. I stared at the computer screen, reading his email over and over again, his words punctuated by bat and heart emojis, and a mix of upper- and lowercase letters. I just couldn’t bring myself to send him a response. It was clear from his email that he still cared for me, but I couldn’t let him think that I still cared for him that way. I didn’t want to lead him on. I decided not to respond to his email. Perhaps I should have, if only out of friendship. But I didn’t. And that decision will always haunt me.

  A few weeks later, I received a call from a mutual friend, who had dated Gabriel a couple of years before me. The call came at night, and I could tell right away that something was seriously wrong. He told me that Gabriel had died by suicide. He had been found in his garage. A nightmare of emotions hit me. I fell to my knees and began to sob. How could I have been so heartless as to ignore his email? Was I partly to blame? I stumbled downstairs in a fit of emotions and woke up my dad. He held me while I just cried uncontrollably in his arms.

  I had never lost someone to suicide before. There were so many unanswered questions, and so much pain. Poor, sweet Gabriel, with his soft lips and warm heart. I would never hear his kind voice with his thick French accent ever again. I couldn’t believe that his death was real. I didn’t want to accept it. It all felt like some sort of sick joke.

  Gabriel’s funeral was open casket. I will never forget the cold, empty feeling that pulsed through my body and my spirit when I saw him lying in the funeral home. An overwhelming energy of sorrow soaked the entire space. The room was cold, and dimly lit with a few candles and soft lights. The depth of grief that poured out, energetically and verbally, from Gabriel’s parents and siblings made me disassociate from the service. I walked up to his casket and was stunned by the sudden reality. What remained there in front of me was only a physical shell. It wasn’t a joke; Gabriel was gone.

  For years, I felt a tremendous guilt for ignoring his attempt to reach out to me. Now I know that it wasn’t my fault. Suicide is no one’s fault. It also isn’t about us, the survivors. It is about the person who died. We need to focus on the people who need us. We need to communicate more and talk openly about suicide.

  Whispers of Life was intended as an intervention on behalf of suicide prevention, particularly the epidemic of suicide among queer and trans youth. Queer and trans youth face increased rates of suicidal ideation due to bullying, alienation from family and friends, and the realities of homophobia and transphobia that are present in our society. The film was my contribution to the important discussions we need to have within our communities on this subject. Whispers of Life screened at film festivals all over the world, and won multiple awards.

  Anyone who works in film can appreciate how difficult it is raise funds when you don’t have a demo reel and can’t apply for private or public grants (most of these grants require a filmmaker to have screened at least one film at a festival). In making Whispers of Life, we found our angel-champion Rosemarie A. Delgado, an incredible human being from the Philippines who supported the project financially. Additionally, we relied on the generosity of strangers, crowdfunding from hundreds of people online who believed in the project and wanted to see it made. The film was then distributed across Canada to elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities, with over two hundred copies sold to the institutional market. Whispers of Life also took Florian and me on a screening tour to the Philippines, supported by Rose and one of my kind faculty advisers at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Leonora A. Angeles. We screened the film to thousands of students at several institutions in the Philippines. It was pure magic to see the reaction on the faces of kids and teens who watched our little film. I know that we have contributed, in a small part, to the conversation about suicide prevention, particularly as it relates to anti-queer bullying and LGBTQ youth.

  Limina (2016), our next short film, reflected my life experience as a gender-nonconformi
ng person more accurately than Whispers of Life. The film’s fictional story, again written by Florian, is about a young gender-creative child who touches the lives of their fellow townspeople with the kindness of their heart. The central character, Alessandra (played by Ameko Eks Mass Carroll), focuses their kindness on a young woman named Maria (played by Chelsey Reist) who is mourning the loss of her small child. Limina expresses important themes of respect, appreciation, and love for gender-creative and trans youth, rather than focusing on hatred and intolerance. We wanted to inject a positive and lighthearted representation of a trans kid into a cinematic landscape otherwise dominated by tragic and dark representation.

  We turned again to crowdfunding, and our angel-champion Rose, to raise the film’s budget. With a slightly higher budget in hand than we had for Whispers of Life, we started to discuss where we could shoot Limina, away from the familiar locations in Vancouver, to make it a more unique visual experience and to tap into Florian’s cultural background. Florian’s Swiss heritage infused the original script of Limina with fresh and exciting possibilities for new settings, so we decided to explore shooting the film in Switzerland, in Ticino, the country’s Italian-influenced region.

  We travelled to Switzerland in the summer of 2015 and began working with Ticino’s Film Commission to explore potential locations and interview possible crew members. We even met with some cinematographers and casting directors in Zurich, and with public officials to determine if there would be interest in funding for the film, considering its unique subject matter and the combination of our cultural backgrounds and experience. Our dream of shooting this beautiful story of a gender-creative child in the magical landscapes of Ticino seemed within reach.

  Around this time, the Swiss media began reporting on the story of us travelling from Vancouver to Switzerland to shoot the film. The Obwaldner Zeitung, the main newspaper in the canton where Florian grew up, featured him as their “person of the month” with a big headline and a picture of us in front of Eugenisee, the lake named after Florian’s great-great grandfather, Eugen Hess, in Engelberg. Of course, we knew that their feature would also focus on the fact that Florian was a Swiss cis man in a queer relationship with a Canadian trans person. However, what we didn’t foresee was that the limitations of the Swiss-German language meant that I was described as a “transsexual” in the article, not non-binary, and Limina’s story was said to be about a “transsexual” rather than a gender-creative child.