THE GAZE OF LOVE: How Gay Filmmakers Create a New Way of Watching

Lauded art critic John Berger insists that men constitute the "ideal" film audience because cinematic convention requires “men to act and women to appear.” Prolific advertising journalist Jib Fowles claims, “In advertising males gaze, and females are gazed at.” Laura Mulvey, who first proposed a cinematic “gaze theory,” declares cinema “relies on an active male and passive female” formula.

But what if the cinema is gay?

The emergence of Queer Cinema hurls this long-standing notion into question, not because it requires archaically conceived gender roles, but because Queer Cinema often despises passivity and depends on an active-active gaze. This wholly active union results in a new kind of spectatorship, which this writer believes integral to creating the “queer gaze of love.”

However desirable, it remains impossible to account for every example of Queer Cinema here. Nonetheless, this claim needs only one example of active-active gazing to prove it useful in creating a homosexual gaze of love. For this essay, Tom Joslin’s documentary, Silverlake Life, receives that unsolicited distinction.

Silverlake Life: The View from Here chronicles filmmaker Tom Joslin’s life from testing seropositive to his death from AIDS, and beyond as Joslin’s 22-year lover, Mark Massi, mourns. Throughout the film, both Joslin and Massi maintain almost exclusive control of the camera, and this proves the key to the active-active relationship, and to the gaze of love.

The psychoanalytic notion of a heterosexual male gaze mandates an active participant to objectify a passive one. Due to sexist concepts of gender roles and to chauvinist undertones through most of cinematic history, the default gaze travels from straight man to straight woman, from agent to object. This gaze construction has no possibility of resulting in a gaze that mimics true love – entitlement and objectification oppose love. But when one gay lover aims a camera (active gaze) at another gay lover who addresses the camera and its operator (active gaze), a condition of mutual “staring” results – not surreptitious gazing – and both become at once subject and performer.

Go one step further, and consider what nature thinks about staring. What happens when two guerillas stare at each other? Typically, an expression of physical might in which one guerilla must ultimately retreat. In other words, a fight, and this results from the instinctive and unconscious struggle that occurs through ocular contact. Anyone who’s ever experienced the emotion can vouch that struggle sits squarely within love, and in the case of Silverlake Life, a struggle for each man to convey their love adequately before death renders the issue moot. The audience struggles to find safe distance because the immediacy of the activated gaze renders the watching painfully raw.

Take the scene where Mark prepares Tom’s herbal medicine. Tom operates the camera. He asks Mark to say something. Tom pushes close on Mark. Now the active-active relationship blooms. Tom (the camera/viewer) aggresses Mark (the subject), not just verbally, but with a zoom in. Mark steps toward camera and says, “About loving you? I just know I do. I love you. You asked me how much? I said it hurts. I can’t stand seeing you sick. It drives me crazy. Sometimes it hurts because I can’t do anything for you. Sometimes it scares me.” Tom’s camera adjusts frequently during this, and the viewer experiences precisely the same ocular struggle as the two men. Intensity, discomfort, realness all describe how it feels, but so does “good.” No objectification, judgment, or passivity can exist because the viewer sees Mark biologically the same as Tom, and objectification or passivity require the “ocular retreat” of one party.

Mark leans over and kisses Tom on the forehead, then on the lips, on both cheeks. After a few more kisses, they laugh, and Tom turns the camera on himself and says, “Now that’s a good night kiss. I bet you people don’t get those.” At this moment, the triangle of agency between Tom, Mark and the audience breaks, but the active-active relationship continues, as Tom becomes both subject and gazer. This shift, which frees the audience momentarily from its “responsibility” in the story, also allows it to absorb a punctuation of true love. Tom says, “Now that’s a good night kiss. I bet you people don’t get those.” Yet one feels like one just did.

Another “gaze of love” scene occurs on the heels of Tom’s temper-tantrum about Mark needing to stop at the record store on the way home. When they finally get home, Tom, again behind the camera, films Mark dancing to the new album. Again, the camera adjustments appear utterly instinctual, and are certainly nothing less than the consciousness of the lover behind the camera. Again, objectification and passivity cannot survive. Tom (and therefore the viewer) may be staring at Mark – wanting him – Tom loving him and the audience feeling like they do. Although Mark dances, neither Tom nor the viewer watches passively. Though he never says it, Tom forgives Mark for stopping at the record store. Tom understands that Mark needs that album for comfort, to remind him of younger, healthier days. Tom loves Mark. Tom engages in all these actions and more, and though unspoken, somewhere in his operation of the camera, Tom’s gaze of love passes to the viewer and communicates it all

Someone familiar with this film might say, “But one of the finest scenes, where Tom and Mark create a frame around themselves with their arms, that was shot from a tripod. You can’t tell me that scene isn’t true love.” This scene does illustrate true love, but it does not include a “gaze of love.” Most find this scene so touching not because a gaze of love exists, but because no gaze exists at all. Neither Tom nor Mark operates the camera, so no subjective transfer activates the audience. Tom and Mark are also in profile as they stare forward at their own images on an off-screen monitor. These circumstances force all three into voyeur’s roles leaving no one to fill the role of the “watched.” Tom so much as remarks on the absence when he says, “Let’s stare into the void.” A void, a true unknown, can only exist when one loses all ability to control one’s journey. Tom and Mark lost it to the disease, the viewer, to the sundered gaze. In this shared moment of uncertainty, the men’s love becomes clear because unlike the viewer, they are not shaken by the void, only by the idea of not being together in the same “frame,” the same world, the same life. The gaze in this scene is passive -- a gaze of absence, not love -- but the illustration of true love shines through the men’s mutual retreat to one another.

So can a true “gaze of love” exist in film-going experiences that do not include homosexual subjects, camera operators, and audiences? Absolutely. Whenever an unconscious ocular communication exists between the spectator and the observed, so does an active-active gaze, and so can a gaze of true love. But can it exist in the assembly line, commercial productions where armies of artists and technicians – many of whom never meet much less ever love – bear responsibility for the representation? No. A convincing mimesis of it could, which could conjure an active gaze covenant between audience and filmmaker, but only if both challenge the heterosexual and objectifying traditions of a century of cinema, as this essay hopefully does.