Out in the World: An Interview with Barbara Hammer

By Victoria A. Brownworth

Metroline, January 5, 1995, pgs. 18-19 & 21

Before there was the New Queer Cinema, there was Barbara Hammer. At fiftysomething, the award-winning director of Nitrate Kisses and some 40 other films, Hammer has the energy of a teenager and the enthusiasm of a kid at Christmas. Her most recent endeavor, Out in South Africa, is a reflection of her oeuvre, her lesbian identity and her eternal excitement about all things new.

Last year South Africa became the first country in the world to include lesbians and gay men in its constitution. The move by Nelson Mandela and the new Pretoria government was thrilling for lesbians and gay men across the globe, but in South Africa itself, as Hammer discovered, the legacy of apartheid- sexual as well as racial- has been slow to dissipate.

Hammer was invited to South Africa for a retrospective of her films last fall. She agreed to go, but said she wanted to "give something back" to South African queers- she wanted to give film workshops to lesbians and gays in the South African townships.

Her new film, Out in South Africa, is a raw and riveting documentary look at what happened during that three-week trip through the new South Africa. Hammer pushed aside her work on a feature-length film to complete Out in South Africa in record time.

"I decided that what I wanted to do," says Hammer in her sensual and deceptively soft voice, "was chart gay life and desire after the new constitution was in place. But what I found really were shocking and heart-filling stories of apartheid. Things really haven't changed much yet. Especially in the townships. This is emergency filmmaking," she explains. "The situation for many of the lesbians and gay man I met is a real emergency. Things are happening now, and I wanted people to know about them right away."

This kind of intensity is typical Hammer. A small, wiry, muscular woman with spiky gray hair, she has a quick smile and an almost electric energy that creates a kind of static field around her. Her personal and intellectual intensity is magnetic, and her willingness to listen, her obvious interest in her surroundings and the people around her, elicits a corresponding intensity from the subjects in her filmmaking.

Such in the case in Out in South Africa, where interviews with lesbians and gay men both disturb and engage the viewer while depicting the emerging world of lesbian and gay South Africa.

I'm not used to living like I did there," admits Hammer, who has been living with her partner of the last five years in San Francisco and Oakland. "It wasn't just the place," she explains, although she traveled hundreds of miles by car and van from the cities into the countryside and the black townships. "It was what I was doing and how I was doing it. Living on the edge, everything pretty unplanned, pretty much minute by minute. It was very electric. It was very exciting. I want to do more of it."

The words come out in a rush of soft intensity as Hammer explains how different life is for lesbians and gay men in South Africa. Filming with a small hand-held camera, Hammer shot hours and hours of film for what has been edited into an hour long documentary feature that will show at a number of film festivals around the world, including next month's Berlin Film Festival, before Hammer begins distribution of the tape. Many of the women and men she met were in the townships- poor, primarily black areas surrounding the large cities.

The townships, Hammer explains, are part of the legacy of apartheid. Desolate, often incredibly grim areas, they are divided from the cities by long barren stretches, and she notes, often border hazardous waste sites.

"I'd never been to South Africa before," Hammer says, "and I had no idea what to expect." What she got was an education in struggle and survival.

"I don't know which stories to focus on," she says. "There are so many powerful stories."

One that touched her most was that of 16-year-old Zandile, a black lesbian from Soweto. "She told me how the boys and men in her area and at her school threaten to rape her every day," Hammer explains. Because Zandile sleeps with another woman, the men say she is a virgin, she isn't a lesbian, and so she is fair game for sexual predation. "She wanted me to adopt her, she wanted me to give her money to leave and move elsewhere," says Hammer with obvious sadness. "I gave her as much money as I could and tried to get other women to give her money to leave. She was so desperate, she thinks about suicide because her situation is so terrible."

In the film, Zandile looks incredibly young and fragile with very short hair and her thin body dressed entirely in men's clothes. But her strength comes through much more powerfully than her fear as she explained about her daily threats of rape.

Patrik, a 19-year-old black gay male, echoes the same fragility in Hammer's film as Zandile and explains that young gay men are subject as the women are. Patrik has been threatened with rape in his township where being gay is not accepted.

"But there are a lot of other problems," says Hammer. One is AIDS and misperceptions about transmission. The filmmaker spent her time in the townships doing safe sex education.

"The perception about AIDS in rural areas and in the townships is that the disease is transmitted by vaginas," says Hammer, a slight anger rising in her voice. "Nobody thinks that gay men get it. So the use of condoms becomes really controversial, really misunderstood. One gay man talked about how he uses condoms with his male lovers but not with his wife- many of the gay men are married. And this man is a health care provider and so is his wife." He is also, as the film shows us, the lover of 19-year-old Patrik. Hammer said she "got down on my knees with some of these guys to beg them to use condoms with their boyfriends and wives."

Hammer says she wanted to show the range of stories of lesbians and gay men and tried very hard to balance the tales between the positive and negative.

"One young man, Bebe, told me about how he had had a woman teacher who was very supportive of his sexual preference and that made things much different for him than it was for others I talked to." Hammer says.

"One young man, Bebe, told me about how he had had a woman teacher who was very supportive of his sexual preference and that made things much different for him than it was for others I talked to." Hammer says.

Bebe's experience was the antithesis of Vera's a young black lesbian from a rural area, Utata, between Durban and Capetown. Hammer says Vera was ostracized by her family and village for her lesbianism. As a teenager Vera became involved with another young woman. But when the elders in her village found out, Vera was taken to the village chief where she was forced to undress so he could determine whether or not she had both male and female genitals.

"In many areas," explains Hammer, "it is believed that gays and lesbians are hermaphrodites, that they have male and female genitalia." When Vera was found to be wholly female, she was lashed and sent to live with her grandparents outside her village.

"Many of the women are butch," says Hammer, "or what we might call cross-dressers- they dress in men's clothes. It is difficult for them to meet other lesbians and gay men, often because there is so much actual physical isolation in the townships- transportation is a terrible problem." In the film these women discuss how they met first lovers, how some of them spent time having sex in the toilets of bars in cities, or were initiated into sex by older women.

Labels are often ignored in South Africa. The married men, for example, don't consider themselves bisexuals (which often has the connotation of hermaphrodite), but gay. And many of the women, Hammer explains, although they have been in long-term relationships with other women, don't consider themselves lesbians.

Hammer's work in South Africa, changed her, she says, "I guess it was the electricity, that energy of living on the edge, nothing planned, things just happening all around you. I want to go back. I'm applying for grants so that I can go there for three to six months. I'd like to set up some video collectives, do some work with groups. That would be more revealing than just people telling their stories," she says.

Hammer was disappointed when Out in South Africa was considered for but didn't make the final cut at this year's Sundance Festival, where Hammer was a juror last year.

"I realize it's not the smoothest film," she explains, "and that I did it on a really small budget and it's competing with films with really large budgets. But this is guerilla-style filmmaking, it's shot from the hip. And it's a real departure for me [from her experimental style]. I completed this film in only five months. I funded it out of my own pocket. I had an honorarium from the film festival but I gave it away to the women and men I met."

Despite the sacrifices, Hammer isn't sure how it will be received in South Africa. But she knows she would do it again in a nanosecond.

"Everything was new, everything was the unknown. When you're living on the edge like that, your senses are very open, you see things, hear things you otherwise wouldn't. I love that intense learning."

That is one of the reasons she wants to go back. Another is more simple: "I want to see if things have changed. Apartheid history is being whitewashed in South Africa. There's a real denial, like Germany after World War II. I want to see if equality is really being achieved. And I want to see these women and men again, because their lives are so powerful, their lives are so incredible, their struggles are so real. That's something we all can learn from. And should."

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