Hooray! It’s film-festival time! Other than Christmas, this is one of my favorite times of the year. I love the chance to glimpse into other people’s lives (hence this column), learn about life in far away places, see what my LGBT brothers and sisters around the globe are going through or rejoicing in, and having a good cry or belly laugh. Film festivals have all of that and a bag of popcorn.
In full disclosure, I am one of the programmers of the women’s films for qFLIX Philadelphia, coming to our town July 7-12. Produced by Thom Cardwell and James Duggan, the festival will present approximately 50 features, documentaries and short films. This year’s selections boast five world premieres, two U.S. premieres, 16 East Coast premieres, two Northeast premieres and three Mid-Atlantic premieres.
Truly an international festival, the films come from 15 different nations, from Argentina to Uganda. There is also a strong local flavor, as the opening-night film, “Beautiful Something,” will have its Philadelphia premiere in the city in which it was entirely shot by local filmmaker/screenwriter/director Joseph Graham (local filmmaker Kelly Burkhardt served as executive producer).
We spoke this week with the charming and indefatigable Cardwell.
PGN: Describe the Cardwell household when you were growing up.
TC: The Cardwell household was atypical from the other families in the neighborhood I grew up in. I was born at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and at 5 we moved to the suburbs. I was born in 1945, so it would have been part of the white flight in the ’50s. It was atypical because my Irish/Welsh father was from North Carolina, a Southern Baptist, and my Italian mother was from Connecticut and was a Roman Catholic. They were both first-generation Americans and because they had more than one religion in the same house, it was considered a mixed marriage! The kids used to ask me why my father didn’t go to church with my mother and sister and me. When I said that he was Southern Baptist, they had no idea what that was. So right from the start, I was considered a little bit of an outcast, an outsider.
PGN: Huh, I never imagined you having a father with a Southern drawl!
TC: [Laughs] No one does. People are surprised to find that I’m half-Southern.
PGN: How many kids?
TC: Just me and my sister, who is five years younger than me. Growing up with parents from different parts of the country made me aware that everyone was not the same. I think that helped me a lot later in life, especially being gay in high school, which was not exactly fashionable at the time. I was also a regular on “American Bandstand,” and there were always rumors about all us kids being gay. Most of the kids on “Bandstand” were from the city, so that separated me even more from the kids at school in the suburbs.
PGN: How did you end up on “Bandstand”?
TC: By accident! A fellow freshman friend of mine had two passes to go to the show and asked if I wanted to go with him. I’d watched the show on television — it was the only youth-oriented show on the air at the time — and so I called my parents and told them I’d be home late and off I went. I had a great time and met all sorts of people. I danced the whole show and, as we were leaving, they gave me passes to come back. I invited the friend who invited me, but he hated the experience and didn’t want to come back. We stayed friends, it just wasn’t his thing. I went back the next day and ended up on the show for three-and-a-half years!
PGN: It sounds like you took to it like a duck to water.
TC: Yes. It’s funny, in middle school, when I was in seventh grade, they actually had dance classes — not tap and jazz, but how to waltz and foxtrot and jitterbug. I thought, Now that could be fun! And I signed up. It was in the gym after school and I went religiously. I became passionate about dancing so, by the time “Bandstand” came along, I knew dancing.
PGN: Was taking foxtrot in seventh grade the first sign that you were gay?
TC: [Laughs] No, there were many more, but that certainly was one of them.
PGN: What was exciting about being on the show?
TC: Attending “American Bandstand” gave me a taste of the entertainment industry, opened up my world to urban life and high-schoolers from different ethnic, racial, religious, educational, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. My suburban upbringing was homogenous and white. Some of the first Puerto Rican, Jewish and African-American people I met were AB regulars. It opened up my world, even to different neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
PGN: Did you become a “regular” on the show?
TC: Yes, I got letters and signed autographs, and was featured in magazines, all that stuff. I’m in Dick Clark’s archives and all of that. It was also my first foray into writing professionally, because I got hired by Sixteen magazine to write about the show. I was a ghost writer so I didn’t get a byline, but I still have copies of the magazine with my stories. I wrote gossip about the show — who was dating, who was feuding, who threw a party and who went, etc. They especially wanted to hear about the girls’ looks. Like Hillary Clinton, if a girl changed her hairdo, it was big news. Personal facts — who was in the drama club, who made the team, stuff like that.
PGN: What was a crazy moment?
TC: Well, when people wrote and asked if they could start a fan club for you, it was pretty unbelievable. Having fan clubs, enjoying penpal writing to kids all over the country was just crazy. And helpful. I learned American geography looking up where cities and towns in different states were. I have a few old “Bandstand” fans that have been in touch. One of my fan club presidents is a grandmother living in Massachusetts. She found me on Facebook and we keep in touch. She found old copies of some of the magazines I was featured in and sent them to me. I was asked by the William Way Archives to donate all of my archives, including 29 years of writing for the PGN and A&E magazine OutWeek and various other outlets along with my “Bandstand” memorabilia.
PGN: With all the hats you wear — producer, director, PR guy, event planner, columnist — which one do you think fits you best?
TC: I’d say “writer” fits best, with all of the columns I’ve done over the years. I have a few screenwriting projects in various states and I’ve had a few books of poems published. I write something every day, especially now that I have Queertimes, plus all the blog postings for the film festival.
PGN: What sparked your love of and involvement with films?
TC: Thinking back on 70 years, I grew up in a time where television was central to people’s lives. That’s why both physically and symbolically the TV was in people’s living room. Most people didn’t have foyers, so you entered from the outside world into the living room as well. But there were only so many choices, so movies were still in vogue. They would have double, even triple features on Saturdays for the kids. But they weren’t just kid movies; they had Westerns and romantic films, science fiction and comedies. That was also the time when the studio system still existed so glamour and movie stars were heavily promoted. If you look at old trailers, they barely told you what the movie was about. It was more “See Elizabeth Taylor in … !” or “See Rock Hudson in his new film!” That was the beginning of my love of movies. During the summers, we would go to Wildwood, N.J., and I’d sneak off to the movies with my cousins. We’d spend our allowance for the week on a movie and then we’d sometimes sneak back in the exit and watch it again. I remember when I was about 12, we watched “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” with Marilyn Monroe five times!
PGN: Another early sign you were gay!
TC: Ha! Yes, it wasn’t like I was trying to see a John Wayne picture.
PGN: Who are two stars you’ve met who impressed you?
TC: Oh, there are so many who’ve made good impressions. Susan Sarandon is a big Hollywood star but is an anti-Hollywood type of person. She’s really down to earth and pleasant to be around. She genuinely cares about people. We had her at an event and she said to me, “I really have to get going” but as we were walking out, she saw two girls that were waiting to speak to her so she went back. She did that about three times with different people. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone. Another one was William H. Macy. He’s into wood-turning, so we took him to The Center for Art in Wood and he loved it. He was another one who was very nice to everyone and easy to get along with. Oh, and one more! Malcolm McDowell has a wicked, wild, unrelenting sense of humor. He would leave me the most hilarious message on my voicemail, which I kept for months after the festival was over.
PGN: So what is “Bittersweet”?
TC: Oh wow! How did you know about that? It’s an autobiographical screenplay I’m working on that’s about a “love at first sight” relationship that I had with a man I met at a GALA [Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses] conference. He was in the Los Angeles Gay Men’s choir and I was with the Spruce Street Singers and by the end of the second evening, we were inseparable. It had a very profound effect on my life. On the way home, our choir director said, “From the minute you met him, your feet have not touched the ground. I predict that you’re leaving us.” And sure enough, I moved to California. The bittersweet part was that he was dying of AIDS. This was in 1989 and he was HIV-positive, something he revealed to me in the first hour. I lived there until 1992 and took care of him and all of that. It was an experience that I’ll always remember without any regrets.
PGN: Tell me about your relationship now.
TC: Well, my partner and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary on Halloween night 2015. His name is Randal L. Stein. We met outside Woody’s and we lived together for 10 years before he went to Memphis, Tenn., to take care of his ailing parents. It’s a longterm, long-distance relationship. People don’t understand how we do it, but you just make it work. There are good and bad parts but we’ve weathered it all. He’s a Southerner too, born in Kentucky and living in Tennessee.
PGN: Backtracking, what did you study in school?
TC: I studied American and English Literature at Fordham University. Most people choose their school by the program they want to study, but I choose Fordham because of the location. I really wanted to live in New York. I began organizing film festivals as a sophomore in college when I was on student government and in charge of events. I was a renegade in the English Department, always studying film in graduate school, taking courses in film at The New School University while pursuing a Ph.D. at Fordham. I took film courses at Villanova University too.
PGN: And I saw you were at Saint Francis too, all religious schools.
TC: It’s funny. Because my mother was in a “mixed marriage,” our Catholic Church made her sign documents saying that the children would be raised in the Catholic faith and go to Catholic schools or study. I think of myself now more of a spiritual person than a religious person. I flourished in New York and expanded my horizons in amazing directions, meeting new people and learning new things, including a relationship with a professor (from a different school) who was 20 years older than me. He introduced me to opera and theater, visual arts and jazz. It was an exciting time.
PGN: Speaking of an exciting time, let’s talk about the film festival. Why is it important to have an LGBT film festival when you can turn on the TV and find gay characters on “Modern Family”?
TC: Yes, you can watch “Modern Family” or “Will & Grace” reruns or the darling of daytime TV, Ellen DeGeneres, hosting a talk show for the masses and it’s great, but there are still a lot of stories to be told. We have a lot of very creative people in the LGBTQ community and film is a great way for them to communicate. And our festival is international in scope. Here in America, with things like the recent Supreme Court ruling, we can get complacent and forget that there’s still a lot to fight for, here and abroad. One of the things we’re really proud of is a film called “Outed: The Painful Reality,” which is about the LGBT people who have been killed after being outed publicly in newspapers in Uganda. The director, activist Hassan Kamoga, decided to make the film after a friend of his was brutally murdered by a mob after being outed. We are trying to raise funds to bring him to the states to speak about the film and the situation. We have another film called “Mala, Mala” about drag queens and transgender people in Puerto Rico who are treated like outcasts. We have fun films too, like the one you programmed, “S&M Sally,” a cute comedy from the director of “Butch Jamie” and “Heterosexual Jill.” We have special guests, world premieres, parties and satellite events. It’s going to be an exciting six days for film lovers!
PGN: What movie set do you wish you could have been on?
TC: With Orson Wells and “Citizen Kane.”
PGN: What is one thing that you would really like to learn how to do and why?
TC: I’d like to be a fashion designer of men’s clothing. Men’s clothing really hasn’t changed very dramatically since the Industrial Revolution. Just think of the tie and jacket! It’s still basically variations on a theme.
PGN: What advice would you give the you of 25 years ago?
TC: To plan strategically for the future (I didn’t expect to reach 70 years and the senior-citizen period in life) and to take many more chances, to be more daring in life.
For more information on qFLIX, visit www.qflixphilly.com.