| But
despite her sudden thrust into the limelight, Guin Turner
still has her feet firmly planted on the ground. She's philosophical
about her future career, insisting that she's still just
as much a writer as she is an aspiring actress. "I'm
a writer more than anything else. My ideal gig is when I
write the script and then write a part for myself".
Happily Turner's 'ideal gig' is actually already bubbling
up: she is co-writing a script with the director Mary Harron.
It'll be about the life of 50's pin-up girl Bettie Page,
and Guin will play the leggy, dark haired vixen, whose notorious
bondage and spanking photos and films catapulted the Nashville
native into instant fame and sudden controversy. Page was
discovered in Coney Island and soon became photographers
Irving and Paula Klaw's top model and everyone's favourite
'naughty girl'. In January 1955, Hugh Hefner recruited her
for the Playboy centrefold. In 1958 she had mysteriously
disappeared without trace, some say due to obsenity charges
brought against the Klaws in the US Senate.
Turner is relishing the chance to extend her acting abilities
as well as challenge the public's perception of her as an
actress. "I'll be an out lesbian playing a heterosexual
women, a celebrity, an icon..it will be interesting to see
how people react to that". She can't wait, she says,
to be asked by purient journalists "what it was like
to kiss a man on screen", reversing all the usual assumptions
about how brave straight actresses are to play upfront lesbian
roles.
Turner's most recent screen performance however was as a
wealthy white woman with a fetish for black women in Cheryl
Dunye's debut feature, The Watermlon Woman. Guin described
the role as fun and simple. "It was a really easy character
for me to play because it wasn't terribly deep. I play a
type, a symbol, like a snake in the grass". Screened
at this years Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in London the
movie follows the story of filmmaker Cheryl (played by Dunye)
who is making a documentary of a long lost African_American
star of the 40's known only as the Watermelon Woman. Turner
plays Cheryl's love interest, Diana, and their relationship
mirrors that of the Watermelon Womans own affairs d'amour
with her white director. As a fiction within a fiction exploring
the silencing of African_American lesbian history, the premise
is great. Unfortunately the film lacks the cohesive structure
to make it entirely successful, and many of the characters
(including Guins) are rendered superfluous by Dunye's constant
into-the camera plot explanations. Nevertheless, as one
of the few lesbian films to emerge this year - and the only
African-American lesbian feature to date - The Watermelon
Woman is receiving much critical attention. The film looks
set to get even more media attention as it was at the center
of a controversy in the US Congress when it was revealed
that the movie was given a $31,500 grant from the US National
Endowment for the Arts Fund.
Guin, however, is no stranger to controversy. Last year
she found out theres 'no such thing as bad publicity'. A
year after Go Fish was released, she appeared in Taxicab
Stories, a television show designed to capture gays and
other 'freaks' in "real life vignettes" by filming
them unawares in the backs of cabs. In what amounted to
nothing more than flagrant flame-baiting the show ensured,
says Guin, that queers were portrayed as "the scum
of the earth". "But" she adds with a laugh,
"With me they got a real live one".
"It's a great compliment that people think I'm acting",
she says when asked whether or not the show was set up.
"I'm so flattered that they think I'm such a good actress
that I can act that drunk! It happened when Go Fish came
out, and that summer me in a dyke bar equalled a lot of
free drinks". After sampling plenty of those free drinks
one night at the West Village dyke bar, Crazy Nannies, she
stumbled into a waiting cab - the woman cab driver standing
out as a rare sight in New York.
Turner laughs ironically as she settles in to recount the
story. "She's asking me all these questions, like,
'why don't you go out with men?', 'did some break your heart?',
'was that your girlfriend you just said goodbye to?', blah
blah blah, so I'm like well, whats up with you? And she
says 'I'm married, I live in New Jersey..' And I'm thinking,
this woman, she's parked outside a dyke bar at four in the
morning, shes married, shes driving a cab and looking really
butchy....she's looking for a fling" After circling
her house, but never quite arriving and trying hard to get
the cabbie to go home with her, Guin stil didn't realise
what was really taking place. Well, who would? "I was
thinking she's really considering it, not knowing of course
that she's trying to get me on tape saying as much bullshit
as possible".
Guin eventually arrived home solo and dismissed the previous
night as a hilarious anecdote for her friends. "Then
six months later my friends come up to me in a bar and say
Guin, remember that story you told us about the cab driver
you tried to pick up, well its on TV. And i'm like what?
How? What the fuck? And there I am on TV, wasted and working
hard to get this woman to come home with me".
Turner doesn't remeber being tole they were filming or signing
a release form. Lawyers told Turner that she had no defamation
case because she wasn't famous enough and that pursuing
a lawsuit would be too messy. "I thought forget it",
she says. "The unfair thing is we've all had moments
at four in the morning - drunk or not - when you're trying
to get someone to come home with you and they won't. But
you're in your own little world and no one gets to see it.
But now all my really good friends, and my father, and lots
of people I don't really know have seen me in that moment
and that was really embarrassing".
She says that the most ironic thing about the whole incident
is that people recognised her in the streets for Taxicab
a lot more than they did for Go Fish. "I spent three
years of my life busting my butt to make this positive representation
of lesbians and in half an hour in the back of a cab I prove
that homosexuals are actually predatory drunken types living
on the underbelly of life!".
After such public voyeurism into a very intimate moment,
it's perhaps no wonder that Turner is coy about discussing
her private life. She doesn't like to talk about her childhood
but admits that she was a commune kid and very much a child
of the flower children. After college, where she studied
writing, she moved to Chicago. Afraid that her "long-haired
straight girl look would make it hard to find dykes",
she went along to an Act-Up meeting where she met Rose Troche.
As partners (at first personally but later on a professional
basis), they made the film Go Fish and the rest as they
say is history. After living in New York for two years,
she now considers it hoome. "This is the first apartment
I've lived in by myself", she says, waving a hand at
the dried flowers and stacks of books. "And I realy
love it". So is Guin a single girl these days? "I'm
never single", she says cautiously, "but nobody
is moving in anytime soon". The phone may never stop
ringing but this young woman's shrewd about which offers
to refuse and accept. And these days she can afford to be
choosy. |
