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A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking
Directed byMichel Auder
Written byGary Indiana
Produced by
  • Michel Auder
  • Florence Lambert[1]
Starring
CinematographyMichel Auder
Edited byMichel Auder
Color processColor & b/w
Distributed by
Running time
60 minutes[a]

A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking is a shot-on-video film directed by French–American filmmaker Michel Auder based on a script by the American actor and writer Gary Indiana. It stars Gary Indiana, Taylor Mead, Cookie Mueller, Alexandra Auder, Jackie Curtis. It had its premiere in 1981 at The Kitchen, New York City and has had limited distribution since then. While receiving mixed reviews at the time it has since been recognized as an important work of early queer narrative video.

The title is a reference to John Ford Noonan's play A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking which opened Off-Broadway at the Astor Place Theatre in 1980, although the film borrows little from the play except from the title.

Plot

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Dom is the son of a wealthy conservative politician in California; his family pays him to live in New York to avoid causing any sort of scandal for his father's political career. Dom meets with his sister, Lucy, and the family lawyer, Morgan, who reiterate this arrangement and pay him extra to avoid going to California for a wedding. Rippley, Dom's neighbor in his apartment building, introduces himself; Rippley is a gay author and TV personality who interviews characters such as a swimmer for his morning show. Dom also meets his upstairs neighbor, Mavis, who is a high-end dominatrix. Mavis is balancing looking after her foul-mouthed niece, Liza, with seeing her various clients including Judge Mapplethorpe and a senator. Mavis also spends time with her friend Nina and her mother. Dom meets Buddy at a bar and he comes over to have sex, although he leaves with Dom's key for an extended period of time. Critics have mentioned "nothing really 'happens' to these people" in "whatever plot there is",[2] or prefaced their description to the events of the play with "Insofar as A Coupla White Faggots has a plot."[3]

Mavis urinates on a lawyer's head[4]

Liza[5]


Black and white archival footage sporadically appears throughout.[3]

Other scenes appear in Indiana's screenplay,[6] and various sources discussing the film, but do not appear in the 60-minute version.[a] For instance, Indiana's 1985 obituary of Jackie Curtis mentions Buddy robbing Dom's apartment.[7] A review of the premiere mentions a toga-clad, Latin-chanting character known as the Angel of Death who perches on a roof.[8] A maid also appears in some scenes;[9] Auder explains that he removed the scene with the maid, portrayed by an actor in blackface, "because the film is not so political and it was taken the wrong way and I didn't want to deal with it".[10]

Cast

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The following list of cast and characters represents the version of A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking as it premiered in 1981;[11] some actors and characters may not appear in the 60-minute version due to scenes being deleted.[a]

Indiana's screenplay lists Florence Lambert as playing a second role;[13] a contemporary review of the film noted that Florence played "a champion swimmer" whom "Rippley interviews [...] by the East River".[14]

Production

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The teleplay was written by Gary Indiana and was later published in the 2010 collection Last Seen Entering the Biltmore.[15] Michel Auder noted, "There was a play [...] at that time that was kind of famous called A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking so we took the title and replaced it with faggots."[16] That play, written by John Ford Noonan, opened Off-Broadway at the Astor Place Theatre on April 21, 1980, and starred Susan Sarandon; Auder and Indiana's film borrows little from the play except for the title.[17] In a 2000 interview, Auder said, "Gary [Indiana] wrote A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking as a vehicle for Taylor [Mead] to be able to make fun of Truman Capote".[18] The film did not strictly adhere to Indiana's script; Auder said in a 2025 interview that A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking was "based on one of his plays, but it's mostly improvised after that".[19] For instance, Phoebe Hoban, in her biography of Alice Neel, notes that Neel began her cameo appearance by reading from the script, but the rest was "totally ad-libbed", including remarks about her recent portraiture subjects, Kate Millett and Adrienne Rich.[20] A contemporary review also noted that Neel "seems to have composed her own dialogue under the lights".[21]

The film had no budget; Auder said, "My whole idea is to have as little as possible to make films. A Coupla White Faggots – it was so difficult to make that film because no one had money including the downtown actors."[22] He later recalled, "I made that film myself. I carried the camera, set up the lights, did the whole thing for days."[19] He also noted, "the film kind of degenerated by being copied on some lower equipment" but added he had "no regrets".[22] The film used Jack Youngerman's apartment as a filming location; his art appears in the film.[23] Auder later recalled, "When he saw the film and realized we were putting down art, he got very upset. Our friendship was broken".[24] A contemporary review noted that the scene where Dom and Buddy meet took place at the Colonnades bar.[3]


(Grote 2005) maybe

Release

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1980s

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A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking has its premiere at The Kitchen in New York City on February 5, 1981.[25][26] It played at Anthology Film Archives in April that same year.[27]

1990s

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  • "University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI" 1990 screening[29] (maybe Madision)

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in 1994[30]

2000s

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The SoHo arts venue Thread Waxing Space [cs] screened A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking as part of a three-day retrospective on Auder in November 2000.[31]

  • "Michel Auder: Chronicles and Other Scenes", February 14–May 23, 2004, Williams College Museum of Art, organized by Lisa Dorin and C. Ondine Chavoya.[32]

In August 2009, the Hammer Museum included Michel Auder’s A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking in its “Elective Affinities” film series, curated by Larry Johnson and William E. Jones, highlighting works where “art films” collide with “nudies.” The evening’s program also featured Christopher Münch’s The Hours and Times (1991) and a rarely screened short by Johnson himself, forming a triple bill that explored “artistic ambition, opportunism, and sexual desire.”

— TO REWRITE

2010s

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Participant Inc (Kley 2010)

Dirty Looks NY

November 1, 2011 – New York City Dirty Looks, a roving queer experimental film and video series curated by Bradford Nordeen, partnered with the Queer Text reading series, curated by Nicholas Boggs at Dixon Place, a performance space in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to present A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking. After the screening, Gary Indiana spoke about the teleplay—later reprinted in Last Seen Entering the Biltmore—and his early 1980s theatrical projects. A recording of their conversation was subsequently posted on SoundCloud.[1][2][3]

— REWRITE

Culturgest [pt] did something in 2013 [35]

In November 2014, the Berlin film and video institute Arsenal [de] had the retrospective "A Woman in Flames: A Night of Cookie Mueller on Film" to mark the publication of the book Edgewise; three of Mueller's films were screened: A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, Female Trouble, and Subway Riders.[36]

Dirty Looks: Los Angeles, Semiotext(e) + 356 Mission Road present (2015)[37] [38]

November 13, 2015 – Los Angeles Dirty Looks again showcased the film in collaboration with Semiotext(e), an independent radical press, and 356 S. Mission Rd, an artist-run space in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. The screening was paired with John Boskovich’s short film North (2001) and introduced by Bradford Nordeen. It was held alongside an exhibition of Gary Indiana’s work at 356 S. Mission Rd, further contextualizing the video within Indiana’s broader literary and artistic practice.

— REWRITE

2020s

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The New York City movie theater Metrograph screened the film as one of six in May 2022 as part of its series "Stumbling Onto Wildness: Cookie Mueller on Film" to mark the reprint of Mueller's 1990 memoir Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black.[39]

Anthology Film Archives screened it in January 2025 as part of its series on Gary Indiana.[40] Maybe something about Auder being protective of this film's screening when others asked for this film after Indiana died?

Distribution

[edit]

A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking has only ever had a limited distribution.[17] In the 1980s and 90s, The Video Source Book listed the Kitchen Center for Video and Music as the distributor for the film, which had the video on ¾-inch U-matic film.[41] The 1994–95 edition of Film & Video Finder also lists The Kitchen as producer and distributor, and notes that they had the video in ½-inch tape in addition to ¾-inch tape.[42] Video Data Bank also distributed the film on U-matic in the 1980s.[43] A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking was included in Video Data Bank's "Double Features" series alongside other films such as Vito Acconci's The Red Tapes, Eleanor Antin's The Nurse And The Hijackers, Antoni Muntadas's Between the Frames, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto's Green Card: An American Romance.[44] By 2000, Video Source Book noted that there was "No known distributor."[45]

Reception

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Its 1981 premiere had mixed reception in New York papers. J. Hoberman for The Village Voice wrote "[t]he tape is often witty, occasionally offensive", an "affable, slapdash videotape", and "an entertaining comedy of manners and erotic vicissitude"; he also praised Indiana's "poignant performance as the tape's hapless hero". Jonathan Rosenbaum for Soho News said "the pleasures in this superstar sitcom are mainly local and actorly" and "the laughs usually come from the deliveries"; he noted this lacks the "sharper, nastier political edge" of the theatrical works Indiana wrote and directed, and noted "[i]nsofar as A Coupla White Faggots has a plot, it doesn't stray much farther than its Harold Robbins premises."[3] Merle Ginsberg's review for Soho News wrote that the film "is funny, but its jokes are limited — mostly to its cast members and their friends and people who follow that scene" and that "[a]t worst, it's just an attempt of some of downtown's personages to get on their own TV show".[46] John Greyson reviewed the videotape in 1985 for Jump Cut saying it had "a banality exceeded only by its incompetence".[47]

Subsequent reception has been more favorable. A 1994 description in The New Yorker called it "a worthy Mudd Club–era successor to Warhol's epochal The Chelsea Girls" with its "series of scabrous and hilarious vignettes".[30] In 2025, Elizabeth Purchell called it "undoubtedly an underheralded major work of early queer narrative video" in an article for Screen Slate; she also wrote "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."[17] Cinematographer Sean Price Williams and director Michael M. Bilandic both included A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking as one of their favorite "first viewings and discoveries" of 2022;[48] writer Natasha Stagg named it as her "best film experience" from 2022.[49]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ a b c The official length is listed as "1:00:05 h" on Auder's website[50] and his catalogue raisonné;[51] other recent sources also list the film as being 60 minutes.[52] However, longer times have also been reported for this film, including 90 minutes[43] and 115 minutes.[53] Chloé Griffin wrote that she "watch[ed] the whole of Michel Auder's two-hour avant-garde film A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking" at Gary Indiana's House.[54]
  2. ^ Also listed as "Terrell Robinson".[12]
  3. ^ Also listed as "Madelyn LeRoux".[12]

References

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  1. ^ The Kitchen (1981a); The Kitchen (1981b).
  2. ^ Ginsberg (1981), p. 58.
  3. ^ a b c d Rosenbaum (1981).
  4. ^ Griffin (2015), p. 305.
  5. ^ A. Auder (2023), pp. 76–77.
  6. ^ Indiana (2010).
  7. ^ Indiana (2018), p. 79, cf. Indiana (2010), pp. 142, 152 (Scenes 15, 30).
  8. ^ Rosenbaum (1981), cf. Indiana (2010), pp. 120, 128, 140, 150, 153 (Scenes 1, 5, 14, 27, 32)..
  9. ^ Griffin (2015), p. 131, cf. Indiana (2010), pp. 136–137, 153 (Scenes 11, 31).
  10. ^ Griffin (2015), p. 131, cf. Hoberman (1981)'s mention of the "unfortunate blackface routine".
  11. ^ The Kitchen (1981a); The Kitchen (1981b); Anthology (1991), p. 36; cf. Indiana (2010), p. 117.
  12. ^ a b Indiana (2010), p. 217.
  13. ^ Indiana (2010), p. 117.
  14. ^ Rosenbaum (1981); cf. Indiana (2010), pp. 131–132 (Scene 8).
  15. ^ Indiana (2010); Maxwell (2011).
  16. ^ Griffin (2015), p. 131, italics around the word "faggots" added.
  17. ^ a b c d Purchell (2025).
  18. ^ M. Auder (2000), p. 21.
  19. ^ a b M. Auder (2025).
  20. ^ Hoban (2010), pp. 307–308, 463.
  21. ^ Hoberman (1981).
  22. ^ a b M. Auder (2014), n.p.
  23. ^ Trimboli (2022); Griffin (2015), pp. 130–131.
  24. ^ Griffin (2015), p. 131.
  25. ^ "A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking". The Kitchen Archive. Retrieved February 5, 2025.
  26. ^ "Movies: Theater Guide: Museums, Societies, Etc". Cue Listings. New York. Vol. 14, no. 6. February 9, 1981. p. 64.
  27. ^ "Movies: Theater Guide: Museums, Societies, Etc". Cue Listings. New York. Vol. 14, no. 15. April 13, 1981. p. 68.
  28. ^ Anthology (1991), p. 94.
  29. ^ Anthology (1991), p. 91.
  30. ^ a b "Art: Galleries—Downtown". Goings on about Town. The New Yorker. Vol. 69, no. 49. February 7, 1994. p. 20.
  31. ^ "Film & Video: Thursday 11/9". Listings. New York Press. Vol. 13, no. 45. November 8, 2000. p. 64. Archived from the original on March 4, 2025.
  32. ^ Dorin & Chavoya (2004), p. 23.
  33. ^ "Happening Today". Los Angeles Times. August 11, 2009. p. D2. ProQuest 1965014568.
  34. ^ Hammer Museum (Summer 2009). "Larry Johnson". Calendar (PDF). Los Angeles: Hammer Museum. pp. 4–5.
  35. ^ Halter (2013).
  36. ^ "A Woman in Flames: A night of Cookie Mueller on film". Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. (in German).
  37. ^ "A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking (with Semiotext[e])". Dirty Looks. Archived from the original on November 9, 2024.
  38. ^ "To Do: The Standard's Guide to November Goings-on in New York, LA, and Miami". Standard Hotels. November 5, 2015. Archived from the original on January 14, 2025.
  39. ^ "Stumbling Onto Wildness: Cookie Mueller on Film". Series. Screen Slate. Archived from the original on February 8, 2025.
  40. ^ "Gary Indiana". Series. Screen Slate. Archived from the original on February 8, 2025.
  41. ^ NVC (1981); NVC (1985); NVC (1987); Furtaw (1992).
  42. ^ NICEM (1994–1995).
  43. ^ a b Video Data Bank (1983), p. 2.
  44. ^ Prelinger & Hoffnar (1989), p. 222–223.
  45. ^ Craddock (2000).
  46. ^ Ginsberg (1981).
  47. ^ Greyson (1985), p. 37.
  48. ^ "Best Movies of 2022: First Viewings & Discoveries and Individual Ballots". Articles. Screen Slate. December 12, 2022. Archived from the original on December 13, 2024.
  49. ^ "Metrograph's Best of 2022". Journal. Metrograph. December 30, 2022. Archived from the original on June 27, 2024.
  50. ^ "Auder Final Master List of Works, Timing, Dates". Michel Auder. January 16, 2014. Archived from the original on December 9, 2024.
  51. ^ Latimer & Szymczyk (2014), n.p..
  52. ^ Anthology (1991), p. 36; Gangitano (2000), pp. 10–11; Dorin & Chavoya (2004).
  53. ^ NVC (1981); NICEM (1994–1995).
  54. ^ Griffin (2015), p. 14.

Works Cited

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FILM & VIDEO FINDER??

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