On 25 January 1992 a group of gay and queer film-makers took to a stage at Sundance film festival to discuss a watershed moment for LGBTQ representation on screen. On the panel were a young Todd Haynes and the veteran British director Derek Jarman, as well as the 18-year-old prodigy Sadie Benning (who would go on to co-found the riot grrrl act Le Tigre). Among this august company were two Sydney film-makers: Stephen Cummins, then 31, and a 29-year-old Simon Hunt, who would later become a satirical sensation through his alter ego Pauline Pantsdown.
The Australian duo were at Sundance to show their homoerotic experimental short film Resonance and the mood was electric: the previous year, Haynes’ debut feature Poison and Jennie Livingston’s now-canonical documentary Paris Is Burning had won big prizes at Sundance – and “a million queer people”, had turned out, Hunt recalls. It was also the peak of the Aids crisis. “Art itself was seen as [a form of] activism,” he says. “[The feeling was,] we don’t know how long we’re going to live, so we have to find happiness, we have to make a mark, we have to be seen. It drove everything, really.”
