« Perhaps due to avant-garde film studies' indebtedness to art history and literary studies, biography plays an integral role in much of avant-garde film scholarship. When combined with traditional understandings of feminist and gay and lesbian politics, whereby declaring allegiance and identification with such causes (or, at least, knowledge of filmmaker's sexual practices, despite any disavowal, as in the case of Kenneth Anger) is given precedence, many women's experimental films that might otherwise be read as "lesbian" have not been. » make it gay