Then my answer:

My girlfriend and I have just seen your beautiful film about Ashley and Kisha, and we just had to tell you that we loved it. The love-scene at the end was incredibly real and beautiful, and we both had tears in our eyes afterwards.

Thank you!

Lots of love from Sxx & Cxxxxx

No, thank you! Thanks to you I’m going into the weekend with a lump in my throat and a smile on my face!

One thing. I can’t actually find ASHLEY AND KISHA, or any of our other films on the Eden Fantasy website. No wonder they haven’t made a re-order!

Scratch that! They’re right here. Don’t know what was wrong with me this morning. Need more coffee I guess!

Two women smile shyly into the camera. They are young. They are black. They sit entwined as only lovers do, talking about sex and being black. Then the camera cuts to them having sex.

Ashley and Kisha: Finding the Right Fit is a documentary showcasing the love story of a lesbian couple.

So how does a sweet little movie about tender young love spark a fist-pumping, civil rights-questioning brawl? By getting banned from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF).

In Australia, for a film to be sold it has to be “classified,” or given a rating, by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC). And if a movie is classified as “X,” it can’t be sold. Many film festivals will request exemptions for the films they show because the classification process is long and expensive.

At this year’s MUFF, festival director Richard Wolstencroft applied for an exemption for Ashley and Kisha. The OFLC denied the request without seeing the film, based on the director Tony Comstock’s previous explicit documentaries that depict real couples having real sex.

Comstock says that the denial may not have been a reaction to the explicit content of the film, but retribution. In 2006, Wolstencroft went against the orders of the OFLC and screened one of Comstock’s movies. So this year, the OFLC forbade Wolstencroft from showing seven movies, and even sent police to ensure that Ashley and Kisha wasn’t screened.

Comstock maintains that the movie is only controversial because it’s about lesbians. “If you’re a realist you’re saying, ‘Of course it’s controversial,’ and if you’re an idealist you’re saying, ‘What’s controversial about people being in love?’”

Comstock has many reasons for taking up arms against the OFLC.

First, there are his subjects and his product. “There’s a sense of responsibility and of trust … I haven’t had to fight for my sexuality, I fight for my movies.” Second, he thinks of himself as fighting the latest battle against censorship and the moral majority. “This is the last little gasp of a dying way of thinking about the world.”

But most importantly, he sees the ban as an affront to human rights. “It’s not Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Malaysia. It’s not one of these places with oppressive regimes. It’s Australia, for Christ’s sake … It’s a freedom issue. Freedom is not liberal or conservative. Totalitarians don’t care about freedom. It’s exciting that this little film is provoking some discussion about these big ideas.”

And it is. In light of the controversy, an ad hoc community of the Australian body politic has come together to support a lesbian film. From the LGBT community to the Institute of Public Affairs (a free-market think tank), people have all come together to protest the ban. This delights Comstock. “Black, white, gay, straight–the people who like our stuff like our stuff. You’re getting to something transcendent about the nature of love and sex and gender.”

Pinched, Amsterdam June 2
Feminist Fantasies

An evening that focuses on female sexuality and pornography. Jennifer Lyon Bell (Blue Artichoke Films & Rated X Festival) will create a film program especially for PINCHED. Marije Lieuwens(Beperkt Houdbaar) will express her views on female pornography in a column that she presents at this theme night.

Programme:
“Matt and Khym: Better Than Ever” (Comstock Films, Dir: Tony Comstock)
“One Night Stand”/”Red Fetish Bathroom” (Hysterie Production, Dir: Emilie Jouvet)
“Afrodite Superstar” (Femme Chocolat, Dir: Venus Hottentot)
“Intimate Moments: More Real Orgasms” (abbywinters.com)
“Headshot” (Blue Artichoke Films, Dir: Jennifer Lyon Bell)

PINCHED is about the countermovements in the field of love, sexuality and pornography. What are the daring initiatives we can find when we look at art, theory, practice and academics? In what way can sexuality be set free from the commercial pornographic representations we find in everyday life? The current debate concerning these topics focuses on suppression and exploitation, where are the positive alternatives?
We want to take the debate to another level in a serie of theme-nights, an exhibition in collaboration with Meneer de Wit, centre for art, culture and development, and an international festival on the 21st of June.
New and daring thoughts and ideas will seduce you to look beyond that what pretends to be our ideal standard.
During these events the audience is confronted with questions like: how are women dealing with commercial representations of their sexuality, what can we learnfrom the sexualrevolution in the 60s and 70s and our main question: are we part of the sexual revolution of the 21st century? We will be looking for answers in on different levels: lectures, screenings, performance and media-art.

http://www.pinched.nl

Posted the same to a professional documentary forum that I’m fairly active on and got this:

I think it’s very complimentary that you are the only male director in the lot. You must be incredibly sexually sensitive… uh… emotionally speaking, of course.

Replied:

Tea shot out of my wife’s nose when I showed her your post. None the less, the sentiment is appreciated.

 I met Dr. Jenn last October at a trade show in Las Vegas. She asked me if I’d sit for an interview. Somehow we ended up talking about the second time Peggy and I ever filmed a couple making love. We didn’t expect, (nor Dr. Jenn, I think) that was going to involve fisting and anal sex.

Yesterday I say I didn’t know where to start. But when it’s hard to know where to start, the easiest place to start is at the beginning, and where sailing is concerned my beginning is in Corona Del Mar, sometime in the late Seventies. My childhood best friend’s mother had remarried and I was just old enough to take the train up the coast to visit for a weekend during the Summer. The new husband (Ned) was a yachtsman. He had a big ketch, and my best friend (Jay) now spent his weekends sailing his sabot.

So that’s what we did on my first visit to Jay’s new home. We sailed his sabot all around Newport Harbor, and by the end of the weekend I understood the basics of how a sailboat worked. I was also hooked, completing the surfing, fishing, boating trifecta that has formed foundation my avocational life ever since.

Since the late Nineties I’ve been building boats, crafts ranging from a six foot pram for my daughter to a 25 foot sharpie schooner named after her, and I had been entertaining the fantasy of building a boat that we’d all be able to sail away on (and come back!)

But the economics of the last few years have been so weird that building big boats makes less and less sense. The cost of materials (wood, epoxy, paint, etc.) has skyrocketed. Meanwhile there’s a surfeit of well-found GRP boats from the Sixties and Seventies. (The ultimate useful life of glass reinforced plastic hulls is still unknown, but so far they appear to be nearly indestructible.)

This all came into focus late last Summer (I was outlining yet another design concept on my lawn with stakes and string.) I realized that the fantasy of building a boat was getting in the way of the fantasy of sailing away on a boat. I began looking at classified ads.

In October I found a boat that was sea-worthy, big enough, and within our budget (which is to say we’ve put off replacing our 1990 Volvo with a minivan for another few years.) It was in Georgia, so I flew down to look at it and spent about a week sailing it and living on it. In November we bought it, and in late December we drove from New York to Georgia, got on the boat and began our adventure.

We spent the next few weeks working our way down the coast of Florida. By late February we had (somehow) made it to Lake Worth, and the day after the full moon, we set out for our first (modest) open water passage; the jump across the Gulf Stream to the Abacos.

We made it and spent the next four weeks in the Abacos, then sailed back, running the 140 miles from Grand Keys to Port Canaveral in one long 32 hour stretch. With the benefit of our hard-won experience, we made the trip back to our car in Georgia in another six days. (Going the other way, getting from the car to Grand Keys had taken two months.)

Our trip was plagued by, perhaps even characterized by bad luck, bad weather, neophyte mistakes, doubt and uncertainty. The Southeast had one of its worst Winters in recent years, and it turns out that the Abacos is about the worst place you could choose to go on a boat in March (frontal passages, often violent, every 48-96 hours; very few all-weather anchorages; none of them deep enough for our boat to enter on low tide, if at all.)

Yes, sprinkled in amongst the drama and the trauma there were some wonderful moments, but mostly it was the most relentlessly grueling thing I’ve ever done, and I did it with my wife (who’s deathly afraid of water over her head,) my eight year old and two year old daughters, a very big dog and a small cat. It was never truly dangerous, but danger constantly lurked at the edges of our trip. Stress makes people make mistakes, we were under nearly constant stress, and mistakes on a boat can kill you.

Yet somehow we made it. Things were often bad, but not once did things go from bad to worse. My hydrophobic wife is the same person who shot the beautiful and award-winning “Ashley and Kisha” the very first time she raised a film camera to her eye. My wife is nothing if not resilient, adaptable, and able to rise to a challenge. Yesterday I wrote about falling asleep while the boat made way under a starry sky; well that was on our run back across the Gulf Stream to Port Canaveral, and Peggy was at the helm.

My girls drove back from Georgia. I posted a noticed to a boat-building list that I needed crew, and four weeks later we were all together again, 1000 miles from where we first got on the boat. Who knows what our two year old thought of the trip, but our eight year old thought it was wonderful, says she’d do it again in an instant. (Has she already forgotten how scared she was when the last front that we endured started spinning off water-spouts at a rate of about one a minute, or just come to an early understanding that life is a rich stew of varied experiences? Or maybe sitting on the bow while dolphins splashed and lept was that good.)

Yesterday afternoon she and I went out to boat for study-hall (she is bedeviled by the same inane reading comprehension assignments that tormented me when I was in the third grade.) The weather’s just nice enough to be on the boat (with a sweater) but it’s still too early to be in the water. But those days will here soon enough, and they’ll be no insipid reading comprehension homework to muck it up.

I’m home, and it’s good to be home.

Peggy and the girls got home last month (they got off the boat in Georgia,) and I just finished the month-long task of bringing our boat up the Eastern Seaboard. I got home three days ago. I’ve been doing laundry, mowing the lawn, sleeping, and reading my friends’ and colleagues’ blogs to get up to speed on everything that’s been going on during my four month hiatus, and it looks like there are a lot of exciting projects cooking — books, collumns, art-spaces, new films — all sorts of things!

Would you like to know about our trip? I’d like to tell you, but it’s hard to know where to start, except that long before I ever had any aspiration to make films, I dreamed of sailing a boat out of sight of land, through the night, and on to someplace with warm clear water.  I can now say, with more than a little satisfaction, that I’ve fallen asleep on deck while the boat made way under a star-filled sky, and I’ve played with my children in water as clear and warm as any five-star hotel’s pool. Some days were heaven, some were indescribably hard; little, if any of it, was anything like a vacation.  But in the sum and total the trip was one of the most worthwhile things I’ve ever done.

Against that, I am, for the moment, enjoying the fantasy that making films and getting them seen is going to feel easy by comparison to what we’ve just done. But of course they are different adventures, each with their own frustrations and satisfactions. But maybe (just maybe) I’ll find that I have a little more perspective on the film ‘ting. No matter how frustrating (or financially damaging) it may be to have a film banned, or passed over by a festival, neither poses a risk to life or limb.

So, back to the edit bay, and “Bill and Desiree”. Back to blogging. Back to newsletters and press releases. Back to all of the things that are my (so called) real life. And it’s good to be back. It’s good to be home.

First: an apology. I didn’t mean to disappear without a trace; and it really didn’t occur to me that anyone would notice, let alone worry.

Second: thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you to my friends who wrote me when our Web site went offline. Thank you to my friends who wrote to say , “Is everything okay?” And thank you to my friends who wrote to say, “Hey, I miss you.”

Everything is fine. Peggy and I are spending some long overdue time with our children, having one of those family adventures that has been as much hard work as it has been adventurous fun. (Yesterday we sailed through a 40kts+ squall, with blinding rain so fierce it blocked our GPS signal for 15 minutes. Thank goodness for compasses and the rock solid reliability of the Earth’s magnetic field!)

I thought I might get some work done on this trip. Ha! If you think it’s hard to find time to edit while managing the marketing and promotion of a small film production company, try going sailing with two young children, a dog and a cat! So for those of you who have asked, no, there isn’t another film on the eve of release.

But, we’ll be back home before too much longer, and I’ve learned one thing that will (hopefully) help me get the next film finished. These films are good enough that they keep selling, even without me flogging them relentlessly. Hopefully that will help keep me from worrying that this will all come crashing down around me while I’m spending time in the edit bay instead of blogging, writing press releases, and generally blowing my own horn.

Speaking of blowing my own horn, some exciting news. Both DAMON AND HUNTER and ASHLEY AND KISHA will be a part of this year’s Israel International LGBT Film Festival, taking place June 24-28 in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa. And this morning we got a request to submit a screener of ASHLEY AND KISHA to New York’s Newfest. No, I won’t be going to Israel, so cross your fingers for Newfest. I’d really like to see ASHLEY AND KISHA play in front of an audience!

Now I’ve got to use the rest of my internet time to see if I can find an “Idiot’s Guide to Tapping Aluminum.” The boat’s boom and gooseneck are trying to part ways, and there’s still 500 miles between us and where we left our car…

What can I say? I was just over at TinyNibbles.com and saw that Violet has named ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT to her Top Five of 2007 list! Also on the list:

Triple Ecstasy, dir. Kimberly Kane
Debbie Loves Dallas, dir. Eon McKai
Tristan Taormino’s Chemistry #3, dir. Tristan Taormino
Skateboard Kink Freak, dir. Maria Beatty

Yesterday it was a bunch of my blog posts that had the same sort of erroneous porny-spammy text scrapes in Google’s index of our site. Today they’re (as far as I’ve looked) gone, but now Google snap-shot of my wife’s blog is poisoned. Where’s Google getting this stuff from? It’s certainly not anything I wrote, or Peggy wrote?

The scrapes on bunch of other posts on my blog simply have the menu bar alt-text instead of the actual post content. I’m sure the page-rank for those posts has fallen through the floor. Oh well.

Normally December is our biggest month of the year, but this December it’s just average. Fortunately since our last Google debacle we’ve developed other avenues of getting our work to market, so we can absorb the hit. But no doubt that are other web-based merchants out there for whom this isn’t going to be a very merry Christmas.