by Will Batts, President of OUTMemphis
What motivated you to create this festival?
Memphis didn’t have the kind of festival I wanted to see, and I wanted to get more involved in things, so I started talking with the Center, which was located on Madison in a storefront at the time, near where Dru’s Place is now. I was also putting out a newspaper called Ultraviolet, doing all the layout, the content, the distribution. Who knows where that kind of energy comes from. I’d been doing that kind of stuff in New York City and had just moved here from there, so it was me just doing more of the same really.
What barriers did you encounter if any?
Usually the hesitation and resistance came from within the community. I hadn’t grown up in the south, and I was young, and in NYC people had been pretty fearless and irreverent. I’d also never really had much of a coming out process. So I wasn’t particularly sensitive to various issues I might be more aware of now. I recognize that kind of recklessness in others I meet now who are the age I was then. It’s got good and bad sides. You start a festival on that kind of energy and drive. And you’re headstrong enough to get it going. But you don’t listen to advice or input as much as you hopefully eventually learn to, or at least you don’t recognize the difference between valuable input and input generated by fear and discomfort, so you just kind of reject it all wholesale. Even the fear is something to pay attention to; you don’t have to heed that input, but you don’t have to find opposition in it either, if you’re really trying to understand it and empathize.
I think I’d experience a lot less resistance now; not because my own attitude has changed but because the world has. I also think a lot of the time your strongest critics are those who wouldn’t exert a fraction of the energy you do, which is helpful to keep in mind. That hasn’t changed.
How did you determine the films to show?
I drew from my contacts in New York and from work the curator and filmmaker Jenni Olson had done compiling queer experimental filmmakers. I don’t think I put out a call for submissions. I think I hand picked, reaching out to people I thought were doing interesting things. I can’t remember his name now but a NYC videographer I knew at the time had filmed virtually every drag performance at a famous East Village club called the Pyramid. It was all riveting stuff, the level of creativity and self expression there. One of the filmed performances we screened was an early Rupaul appearance, for instance, so it was a glimpse into Rupaul before Mathu beat her face. Rupaul was a lot rougher around the edges, but radiated ambition. I liked the idea of basically injecting the bar atmosphere into the so-called respectability of a theater, because to me it was all theater to begin with, and better than most at that, and it seemed as worth watching then as Drag Race is now.
There was a lot of pressure on me, from within the board I set up, and from within the sort of old guard at the Center, to screen perennial favorites, like maybe Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Desert Hearts. I understood the value, especially before Amazon Prime and Netflix, of congregating in general to watch films generally everyone has seen, but it just wasn’t something I was interested in putting that much work into organizing. I wanted to bring things here that people didn’t otherwise have access to. I’d seen Priscilla maybe fifteen times by that point. Grab any two queers at a bar and at least one had a copy on VHS at home, and the other knew where to find one if needed.
There was also a lot of pressure to screen the films at the Center, but it seemed important to me back then to claim territory outside of that, to assert a presence in theaters, at universities, at public spaces in general. I understood why a brick and mortar location was important to the Center, but at the time no one was coming to the location they had, and I think the two major events were a potluck and an annual boat ride. I wasn’t a realtor nor a fundraiser, so I was intent on using my strengths, which had to do with aggregating interesting content.
It was explained to me that many people who would come to the center to watch a film wouldn’t go somewhere publicly where they might be outed by association. I think I might have been persuaded by that logic had more than five or six people been showing up for the potlucks.
Tell us about the origin of the name “Twinkle Museum: First Annual Queer Experimental Video Festival”
I liked Twinkie Museum because like a lot of queer lingo it had refracted meanings, a sort of code logic, and because it was flippant but had hidden depths. I knew the name was provocative, but hoped that would create the possibility for conversation. The association with twinks was a real block for a lot of people. To me the more important thing was the title’s reference to Harvey Milk. Even now when somehow Harvey Milk’s name comes up, I’m always surprised how many people don’t know about the Twinkie Defense; how the attorneys for Dan White, Harvey Milk’s assassin, argued in court that White had experienced a temporary derangement brought on by a depression resulting from the consumption of too many Twinkies. I mean, that says an awful lot about culture, queer and otherwise.
How long were you involved with the festival?
I really don’t remember. Doing any kind of organizational work can be an exhausting, thankless endeavor, and I think at some point I realized I’d rather put that time, or really better put that time, into forging paths for myself.
It was an education doing that kind of work, and helped me see what I was capable of, not just in terms of effort but withstanding criticism. It was valuable to learn that early that basically there will always be supporters and detractors. Everyone won’t love what you do. Maybe no one will. I decided to try to stop expressing myself in a way that depended on or even asked for approval. I could basically accept myself and do what I was driven to do or continually fail because I couldn’t find support for it. It’s taken me a long time to get to that point. I think it takes a lot of us a very long time, given all the crap we internalize and try to change about ourselves to eek out some kind of acceptance or respect.
Do you have any interesting stories to tell about the early years of the festival?
I just remember being really fascinated by how enthusiastic so many of the audience from outside the community were that showed up. That surprised me. I mean, they weren’t shocked. They were into it. They got the humor. And I realized that a big, unanticipated part of the festival was about finding allies and making new friends and contacts, and a renovation of the ideas around community.
I also remember a screening at the University of Memphis on a very large screen where a penis that looked discreet on the video monitor I’d initially seen it on looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and being nervous to walk out of the theater afterwards because I thought I’d really get some heat, like it was my own penis I’d exposed.
