Lesbian invisibility at the 25th annual Teddy Awards

By Contributing Writer on Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 20:22

By Daniela Zysk and Eva Essers

The 25th Teddy Awards were held in Berlin last Friday, February 18. According to the organizers they are the most important queer film awards in the world. As dedicated LGBT activists and lesbian film fans for many years we both could not miss this event.

The movie poster should have warned us as to what we were getting into. The designers of the poster, the artists Pierre et Gilles, could not explain their motivation to the poster when asked, except that the youth pictured would have been their artistic creativity. 1:0 for gender inequality!

We often notice that lesbians are underrepresented in queer contexts, but this event certainly topped all of the many LGBT events that we have visited worldwide.

To recap: there was no unique lesbian act and the only female contingent of the framework program was reduced to the coarse presenter Annette Gerlach. All other artists were fine-tuned to the mostly gay target audience. Our opinion of these artists was that the quality of them was in no way worthy of such a large and important prize giving as this. Only the committed speech from the wonderful Rosa von Praunheim brought the audience to their feet for a short while.

Correspondingly, the opinion of many other lesbian visitors concerning the lack of lesbian visibility turned out to be just as scathing. From shaking of heads to calls for the creation of a unique female award.

Which raises the question, to what extent is an event credible and auspicious while extolling itself as queer-lesbian-gay-transgender, when it completely excludes one of its groups. From our own experience we know how difficult it is to engage lesbians in supporting functions at LGBT events. Is it nevertheless the role for the organizers of one of the media’s most important prizes to ensure the visibility of every group, if not in equal parts, then at least a few percent thereof? It is therefore not surprising that for the third time the distinguished film maker Barbara Hammer did not personally collect her award! Coincidence or standard procedure?

Not to be topped was the annoyance over the non-existence of lesbian identity at the event, although one of the most important female personalities of the Teddy Award Committee, Margaret von Schiller, was seen fervently distributing flyers at the after-show party for the first European feminist porno award, the PorYes-Award. Is this her own and only interpretation of visibility?

Does gender equality only take place when we demand it at the top of our voice? What do you think?

© Brigitte Dummer