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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE MAY 6, 1994

ENTERTAINMENT

Film director Kermit Cole on Living Proof

by Greg Varner

Living Proof is a book of portraits of HIV positive people by Carolyn Jones, from Abbeville Press. Kermit Cole's film, Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness, shown in Cleveland as part of this year's film festival, records the project from studio photo sessions to the presentation of an advance copy of the book to President Clinton, allowing us to meet some of Jones' subjects outside her New York City studio. They are a diverse and inspiring group of gay and straight men and women, determined to live well despite their seropositive status.

The story of how Cole managed to make this his first feature film is itself inspiring. Though he was ultimately awarded a grant to help with the expense of the project, the movie was made largely out of his own pocket and with donated goods and services ranging from film stock to catered meals for the crew.

He was scheduled to appear at a Cleveland Film Festival showing ofhis work, but missed his plane and arrived too late to meet his audience. His only official area appearance on that trip turned out to be at a showing of

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Kermit Cole

Living Proof on the Oberlin College campus, where Cole spent some time as a student over ten years ago, and where the following interview took place.

Since his student days at Oberlin, Cole has worked as a mime in Europe and attended film school. His first film, Before Comedy, is a short about the discovery of comedy by prehistoric clowns. His next project, he hopes, will be a feature narrative film.

Greg Varner: What audience did you have in mind for Living Proof?

Kermit Cole: I was thinking about somebody who was uninitiated and who assumed that they knew pretty much everything that they needed to know about the subject. I was also aware while I was making it, since this is a film about people who have dealt with their own situation of living with HIV, that it would be informative as well for people who were just discovering or just coming to terms with the fact that they were HIV positive.

The film shows both straight and gay people who are HIV positive, and so presents a model of integration. It was largely a straight crew that made the film, right?

Yeah. A lot of people on the crew had wanted to do something and were happy for the opportunity to do something. A lot of these people really don't have the kind of money to give these are freelancers, people, just getting by.

Did you worry that people would make assumptions about you as a result of your doing this film?

I knew when I started making the film that people would make all sorts of assumptions about me being positive, being gay, and that's fine. I can deal with people making those assumptions on their own. It's when the media irresponsibly says things that imply that I'm either of those, that I just don't think it's right. I work in a business where being labeled as either one of those things could end my career. I make my money as a grip. It's not artistic work. It's blue collar work. And the people that hire me and that I

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work with would not work with me.

How, then, did you become such an advocate for people with HIV and for gay people?

One of the things that brought me into this film was the fact that one of my friends learned and came to terms with the fact that he is gay, and in the process of doing so became somebody I grew to admire. Prior to this he was a relatively superficial person because he was hiding so much from himself. I actually got to a point in our friendship where I was about finished with him, because he was such a compromised person. Then all of a sudden he started disappearing on weekends. He'd come back and we'd say, where were you? And he wouldn't answer, but at the same time he got really pleasant to be around. Not only pleasant, but ten times more understanding of other people, very wise, very brave. This was one of the most dramatic things I've personally witnessed— somebody having to muster an extraordinary amount of courage to do something very simple, that most people take for grantednamely, asking somebody out on a date, being himself, and being happy. That took a kind of courage that most people in America are never called upon to muster...

And while I was at Oberlin, I became aware that someone I hung out with was gay. And I suspected that he had a crush on me, and I was amused, because I knew it would never happen. Anyway, I ended up at his house one night, and he was feeding me daiquiris and showing me gay porn and saying, this isn't nearly as uncomfortable as it looks-

You mean it looks uncomfortable?

(Laughs.) He ended up giving me a blow job. It didn't really work for me, I just decided to go with it. I don't know, maybe he wasn't the right guy, but it didn't work for me. I found that I had to think of women. But the basic lesson out of all this for me was that I became ashamed of myself for how dismissive I had been of his feelings and suddenly, stupidly, it hit me how I felt when I expressed my affection for certain women and had been laughed at, as if my sexuality was not relevant or of any validity, and how completely worthless that made me feel. And I remember thinking, it's okay not to be attracted to me, but to deny my validity as a sexual being is not necessary. I knew what that felt like, and I realized that I had done that to him in a way I never thought I would do to a person. It's very funny how you can realize somebody is attracted to you and you can think, Don't they realize there's just no way? Well, of course, there's just no reason they should realize that. There's no reason they should have to. The fact that you're not attracted to somebody doesn't give you the right to neuter them.

How did you arrange for the donation of so many goods and services while making this film?

I found it's something that people really desperately did want to do. I made it a principle not to beg; if somebody didn't seem inclined, then I didn't waste my time trying to incline them. I would just move on, because I knew that there was somebody else out there who also had what I was after. I would talk to people about what I needed and why. Sometimes people would say, No interest. If somebody said, Well, we'd like to help, but... then I would figure out what the "but" was, and I would try to eliminate it. I wouldn't try to convince them to change their minds, I would accept their benevolent inclinations and address whatever concerns they had.

People always seem to want to believe there's not a lot of benevolence out there and then, in each instance of great benevolence, be surprised and heartened by it. But the interesting thing is that these things continue to happen, and I think the reason is because, by and large, people do want to do good things. It's very difficult to give money because of the guarantees that a person requires that their money will be spent in the way they're being told it will be spent.

Inevitably, someone who's giving money feels, Really only a fraction of the money I

give is going to end up being used for the purpose I'm being told it's going to be used for. But when you're asking somebody for film stock, well, it can't be used for anything else.

In a Village Voice interview, you talked about the music in the film being meant to recall the big band era, when Americans were asked to rally around the war effort. How did you come up with that idea?

For one thing, it was all about surprising people. When I went and talked to composers, some of them said, Well, I think this is inappropriate, it's not respectful of the people, you should have dramatic, elegiac music. And I just said, Well, I think that's the obvious choice, and although the film appears to be kind of easy and soft in certain ways—it's definitely not an attack piece-it is meant to be sort of subversively provocative. In a sense, the subversiveness of the music relates as well to the subversiveness of the subtitle of the film. The subtitle is meant to invoke our nation's founding documents. Our nation is founded on the principle that everybody has the right to pursue happiness. A lot of the coverage of AIDS has been all about wailing and gnashing of teeth, which ultimately deprives the people who are living with it, apparently, from the right to be happy, because they don't fit that image.

Somebody in the film says as much. Yeah. She says, People treat me all concerned and it makes me feel like I have some terrible disease. In talking with the composer, I did ask him to bring out the bluesy undercurrent of big band music. I think there definitely is one. There is meant to be a layer of exuberance sitting on top of a base of melancholy.

And the melancholy comes in the film, for example, when somebody says he would trade everything for negative status in a minute.

That was carefully placed, let me tell you. I would have, perhaps, liked to have a little bit more of that. The fact was, this was the situation I had, and the people in it wanted to be seen this way, and they refused to appear to be melancholy. They wanted to put their best foot forward. They wanted to say, All this stuff that you've heard about us for the past dozen years does not accurately reflect our lives at this moment.

AIDS coverage has been preoccupied, in a sense, with past and future. It was preoccupied with how people had gotten AIDS and what was going to happen to them. This film tries as much as possible to concentrate on the present, and what people want in the present, generally, is to be happy. Nobody aspires to be pathetic, or most people don't. They aspire to be happy, and if you take away somebody's right to do that, then you might as well just go ahead and take away their life.

The goal of directing, for me, is to bring an audience to an understanding so profound that they discover connections between themselves and characters on film that they never suspected-and, if you're really doing good work, that they don't want to find. I think that when the average Joe sees a film like this, at best what they're expecting to feel is pity. Pity is not a very life-affirming thing. It's not a very respectful thing. But due to the way AIDS has been predominantly covered, that's the emotion people expect to feel, and they think that's the right emotion to feel. And what this film tries to do is to take away from the feeling that this is appropriate, and to get them to realize that respect, if not admiration, is probably more in order.

People go to a film about AIDS, like this one, expecting to give their pity, and instead they find that they're being given something. It's not about shaming or scaring people into feeling like they should do something. It's simply about showing them that there are rewards to dealing with people who have AIDS, or with the people who they perceive have AIDS. Not that they should get over it because they should, but because they might want to, in order to not miss out. People might say, Well, that's a little mercenarybut being mercenary is not inappropriate in a time of war.