On April 21, 1980, John Ford Noonan’s play A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking opened at the Off-Broadway Astor Place Theater, providing Susan Sarandon her first major theater role and running with much acclaim for a little over a year. Though mostly forgotten now, the show was so ubiquitous during its lengthy run that it was the subject of not one, but two shot-on-video parodies that were shot in New York, scripted by and starring gay writers, and directed by video diarists. While Nelson Sullivan and Michael Musto’s A Coupla White Ninja Vixens Sitting Around Talking, made at some point in the mid-to-late 80s, is very off-the-cuff and has an “I’m bored and have a dumb idea, let’s make a movie” energy to it, Michel Auder and Gary Indiana’s A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking (1981) is much more substantial.
Sharing almost nothing in common with its ostensible source material beyond the title, White Faggots follows the adventures of the gay son (Gary Indiana) of a politician as he gets to know his new neighbors: a thinly-veiled parody of an aging Truman Capote (Taylor Mead) and a dominatrix (Cookie Mueller) with a foulmouthed daughter (Alex Auder), plus the man he eventually starts seeing (Jackie Curtis, back in James Dean mode). The script is as biting and wickedly funny in its skewering of the ascendant gay yuppie class as you’d expect from Indiana, but the real value of the tape is in the generous roles that it gives to personalities who had almost always been relegated to bit parts in other films and videos. This is especially true for Mueller, whose filmography outside of her work with John Waters largely consisted of unnamed characters like “Victim,” “Barmaid,” “Wife,” and “Guest.” Right around the same time that White Chicks opened at the Astor Place, Mueller, Mead, and Curtis all made minor appearances in Eric Mitchell’s breakthrough no wave film Underground U.S.A. (1980). Their appearances in that film were meant to represent a passing of the torch from the underground scene of the past to the downtown scene of the present. But White Faggots proves all three still had it, refuting their status as has-beens.
Though perhaps unintentionally, White Faggots also taps into an idea that was just beginning to circulate in gay film and theater scenes in other cities. Three years before Auder and Indiana’s tape had its premiere, a frustrated, aspiring gay filmmaker named John Dorr used a borrowed black-and-white bank security camera and Betamax VCR to produce a taped version of his screenplay SudZall Does It All! (1979), leading to the creation of his Los Angeles video collective and microcinema EZTV. The collective is now best known for producing novelist James Robert Baker’s masterpiece Blonde Death (1984), but also worked with a handful of notable gay playwrights like Michael Kearns. In the ‘80s, video provided queer filmmakers and playwrights with the sudden opportunity to both produce their own features and recordings of their work on the cheap, as well as make them more widely available to audiences outside of major cities. Though White Faggots, which premiered at the Kitchen and has only ever had limited distribution since, sits outside of this, it is undoubtedly an underheralded major work of early queer narrative video. Watching it now, one just wishes that Michel Auder and Gary Indiana made dozens more just like it.
A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking screens tomorrow, January 28, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Gary Indiana (1950 - 2024).” It will be preceded by Alex Auder and Nick Nehez’s 1/20/01.
