For more than two decades, the UW-Milwaukee Union Theatre has played host to one of the longest-running LGBT film festivals in the country. Now four days long instead of the usual 11, the 2011 Milwaukee LGBT Film & Video Festival will run this weekend, starting with a major event: an opening-night screening of South by Southwest smash hit Weekend Thursday night at the Oriental Theatre. The UWM Post recently sat down with Festival Programmer Carl Bogner to discuss the state of the festival, its expanding reach, and its role in a rapidly changing LGBT environment.

UWM Post: To start with, just provide us with some background about the film festival.

Carl Bogner: The festival is in its 24th year. It was started by students, one of whom now runs Outwords Bookstore, Carl Szatmary. It eventually fell into the hands of the film department, which has run it for most of its life. It’s had different shapes. It used to be two weeks, Thursday through Saturday. Currently, we have a packed four-day weekend and then monthly screenings throughout the year.

Post: How have you seen it change over time?

CB: LGBT cinema has changed. Mostly it’s gotten more mainstream. I think that has to do with the rise of independent cinema. When I first started getting involved with it – I was the manager of the Union Theatre, and I would host the festival – the films were more edgy, and the content may have seemed more aggressive. There weren’t as many romantic comedies. The work tended to be more political. A lot of the flowering of gay cinema, which was then called queer cinema, was in the ‘90s, when there was a lot of activism around AIDS. And those conditions were reflected in the cinema of the time.

As more people are making movies now, as independent film has more of a foothold, it’s actually led to an increase in more conventional narratives. That’s a generalization, there’s a lot of great political, edgy, transgressive work, but as a programmer for the film festival, I get to look at more conventional genres. A consistent threat throughout has been a really strong documentary focus.

Post: It’s interesting that the more independent it gets, the more conventional it gets.

CB: Gay and lesbian moviegoers have the same film going fantasies as anyone else. They want to see a couple united at the end of the film, hopefully with at least a kiss. And as there are more gays and lesbians making films, there are more people making engaging narratives that conform to that genre. In a lot of ways, we’re past that definition of “independent” as meaning “alternative.” Independent seems to refer to financing as opposed to content. You could cynically say there are more people who realize that gays and lesbians are a market.

When I first started working on the festival, the most popular genre would always be coming-out stories, stories about teens coming out to the world and being embraced. Usually films with happy endings ended up being the most popular films. Now, romantic comedies tend to be the more popular film. Coming out isn’t the central drama of these kids’ lives. They’re more comfortable with themselves and they’re making more daring declarations – Tomboy, for instance, about this amazing 10-year-old girl who tries to pass as a boy.

Post: A happier ending than Boys Don’t Cry?

CB: When you look at it through the lens of Boys Don’t Cry, there’s an anxiety. Any movie where a character tries to pass as what they’re not, there’s always the drama that they’re going to be caught. With Boys Don’t Cry in our heads, we know that they will be punished severely. Luckily, this movie remains in the realm of 10-year-olds, who can be cruel but have different reactions, and it’s a very sweet film.

Post: It’s interesting that this is the Milwaukee LGBT Film & Video Festival, but its locale is almost exclusively at UWM. Do you feel constrained by this, or do you feel it’s a good niche?

CB: We work on it. We try to get our footprint out. We have our opening night at the Oriental Theatre, but we also have an event coming up at the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center. Our monthly screening is going to be at the Milwaukee Art Museum. We try to hit the road as much as possible. I think the opening night at the Oriental and the rest of the festival being at the Union Theatre reflects the campus community aspect of the festival.

We are the Milwaukee LGBT Film Festival, not the UWM LGBT Film Festival, and I’d say our audience is primarily community more than it is students. But I love the Union Theatre. They’ve been a great host for a really long time, and it’s just my favorite venue in town. And there are a lot of campus groups involved; it’s hosted by the film department. We try to be both a campus and a community festival.

We could stand to appear in the community with screenings more often, but as it is now, the Oriental for opening night is our biggest community gesture.

Post: Those monthly screenings are interesting because they’re still considered part of the festival despite being year-round.

CB: I hope the nomenclature isn’t confusing. In some ways, it was a way for the festival to have a year-round presence. In a lot of people’s minds, they’re different – we have the festival itself then the monthly screenings. In my mind, the monthly screenings might be different, too, because in a lot of ways, they’re more interesting than the program. They don’t have the burden of being a premiere. They have a different weight, and we have more flexibility to meet a film’s release schedule. We have some films that would be on DVD by the time the festival came around, like Gregg Araki’s Kaboom or Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats [last year], which we would have missed and wouldn’t have played in town at all if we hadn’t featured them in a monthly screening.

Next year is going to be our 25th anniversary, so with the monthly screenings, we’re trying to engage with LGBT history, either with documentaries – the screening at the Art Museum on World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 is a documentary called We Were Here, which is about San Francisco in the AIDS years – or with films like Joseph Losey’s Boom! from 1968. Do you know it?

Post: Oh yeah, I know that movie. I’m a huge John Waters fan, so I know all about that movie.

CB: The reason we’re showing that is because for the monthly screenings, we’ve solicited suggestions from the community, and we have a die-hard Boom! fan. We like to ask people, “What’s your personal LGBT film?” And I like that because it might not be representations of gays or lesbians, but for them, as a gay or lesbian or trans person, the film means a lot to them.

Post: That’s kind of the idea of the gay icon, as most gay icons through history, like Judy Garland, haven’t themselves been gay.

CB: That movie is just so queer. Like the décor. It’s helpful to have a John Waters endorsement; he credits that film to having helped inform his sensibilities. But a movie like that would be a harder sell to put in the festival. To have it as a monthly screening, we can play with the definition of what LGBT cinema means by using this person’s suggestion. And the monthly screenings are still trying to find a definition. I’m intrigued by it, as it engages with more voices than the main program.

Post: Is there a particular reason you chose the packed four-day format?

CB: It’s an experiment. We had done 11 days, which is just taxing on the staff – which is just me and a few people from Peck School of the Arts – and ideally we would do the 11-day format and the year-round screenings, but it’s a way of striking a balance. When we did have 11 days, the weekends tended to be packed, and we’re actually showing not that many fewer films in four days, because most weeknights we’d only be showing one thing.

Post: How have you seen local attitudes change toward the festival over time?

CB: It’s always been pretty welcoming. In terms of the local press, people have always been really responsive. There were times, and I still can’t quiet believe this, where people would tell me I couldn’t put a poster up for the festival because “we’re a family restaurant.” I haven’t encountered that in some time, and it used to be common. I can remember the days when the Union would get bomb threats during the festival. There used to be fundamentalist religious literature that would surface on all of the tables outside the festival. That stuff has become unusual.

Post: I want to ask a fairly broad question about the role gay cinema now plays in a more powerful gay rights movement than there has been in the past.

CB: There’s always a lag. It’s not always that you come across what I would call “activist work.” It used to define queer cinema – directors like Todd Haynes or Tom Kalin or works that came out in the early ‘90s were definitely connected to a gay reality that meant you had to be an activist and fight. A good example [of the change] is Weekend, our opening night film, which is one of the best things we’ve ever shown. In the movie, it’s very clear that gay reality is different from straight reality, but the movie doesn’t rest on that difference. The way the movie engages issues of queerness or issues of difference still within a very romantic narrative arc is something new.