John Cameron Mitchell’s favorite memory of his time at Northwestern was “having sex with that guy in dance class. Michael Lindsey. I was a terrible dancer, but I took the class because he was in it, and it worked out.”
This was one of many revelations in Mitchell’s speech on sexuality, gay rights and the film-making process to a 60-plus person crowd at the McCormick Auditorium in Norris on Wednesday, in which he self-admittedly rambled from anecdote to deep thought and back for an hour and a half.
Mitchell is an actor, writer, director and producer of films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus. The Rainbow Alliance brought him here because of “the unique way his films approach gender and sexuality,” according to co-president Jessica Kaiser, a Weinberg senior.
Mitchell originally intended to speak on behalf of the School of Communication, but he asked the Rainbow Alliance to help sponsor the event, said Weinberg junior Patrick Dawson, Rainbow Alliance Co-President. “We immediately said ‘yes.’”
Mitchell began on a political note, having just seen Milk, a film about gay rights activist Harvey Milk. “The idea of actually marching for something” the way Milk did in the 1970s, “the idea of actually doing more then blogging about it,” has gone out the window in the past eight years, Mitchell said.
Mitchell briefly switched topics to modern technology, explaining that it “makes it impossible to say anything or do anything.”
He followed with a story about chickens being tied together on-stage during a production of Oklahoma!, during which the chickens one by one fell into the orchestra pit. Mitchell paused, then acknowledged that he “wasn’t sure what that analogy had to do with anything.”
Getting back to gay rights, Mitchell said that he didn’t think “Bush actually gives a shit whether gay people get married,” but that the movement for gay rights is a negotiation.
“When everyone knows someone who’s gay and the old people die off,” equal rights can be achieved, he said. In a post-speech interview, while smoking a cigarette, Mitchell added: “All of marriage will come eventually, but coming out is very important.” He explained that if more gay individuals come out of the closet, it is more likely to become a social norm.
An audience member interrupted this theme with a question about the making of Shortbus, a film that Mitchell said “uses sex in a way that’s not pornographic in the way I and a dictionary define it as something someone jerks off to.”
Mitchell explained that American films seem to show sex in a fake way, implying that all sex is exactly the same and it’s all good. “It’s so complicated,” he said. “Sometimes you cry, sometimes you think about life in a big way.” He was critical of other films that don’t use “the complexity of sex, because eroticism is just one part… sex is also quite a metaphor.”
He went on, explaining that “Sex does all kinds of things that talking doesn’t… sometimes sex is just sex. But often it’s about something else, it’s about our fear of being alone, it’s about not feeling like you were ever liked as a kid, it’s about getting something, about care-giving, about recreating abuse, sometimes it’s about addiction because other things aren’t happening in your life.”
Phil Curtis, a Weinberg senior, felt that this discussion of meaningful sex was refreshing to hear in an otherwise “repressed, Puritan society.”
Another audience question led to a discussion of the “queer state of mind,” which Mitchell said he tried to explain in his film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in which the male character is played by an actress.
“It’s a way of thinking about the world…that has nothing do with what sexuality you are,” he said, adding: “There are other energies at play.”
Being queer allows you “to understand metaphor earlier,” he said.
“When you’re an outsider…you understand what it means to put on a front, that there’s a surface and a true nature.”
The soft-spoken Mitchell finished his speech by telling an oft-repeated anecdote of his worst sexual experience, in a ditch at a fair in Kenosha, Wis. “I think he threw up in the middle of it… I got out of the way.” He then repeated his story of his dance class sexual escapade.
Mitchell will be DJing the Rainbow Alliance and NU Choices dance Friday night at 10 p.m. in Sargent dining hall, for no entrance fee. Mitchell “has monthly parties in New York” and hopes that people will show up, saying he “likes to do slow dances” so those in attendance should be prepared.