That's Rosenberg's way of assessing his stewardship of the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which he founded in 1999 and, as its director over the next four years, turned into one of the city's annual cultural highlights -- gay or straight. It is also the organization from which he has just been ousted, a move he is still trying to process.
"Yeah, I'm difficult," he concedes with a shrug. "What's the surprise here?"
Since the news of Rosenberg's forced resignation, that's the very question local film fans have been asking as well. How exactly could the figure virtually synonymous with the festival itself, be kicked out of it?
Dueling press releases from Rosenberg and festival board co-chairs Fran Levey and Mike Perez, as well as a subsequent Herald account on September 27, have only confused matters. Rosenberg cites "differences in the visions of the direction the festival should take," while the board's statement speaks vaguely of "struggling with management, structural, and financial issues." In the Herald piece, board co-chair Levey opined, "We've been phenomenally successful in a very short time. You can't have that kind of success without some kind of growing pains."
Amid these abstract explanations, one thing is clear: The crisis within the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival couldn't have come at a worse time. That much was driven home by the razor-thin preservation of Miami-Dade's gay-rights law on September 10, a ballot victory that left few people popping open champagne bottles. In a city of 2.5 million people, a margin of less than 17,000 kept the anti-gay-discrimination ordinance intact. The numbers -- 47 percent voted for a repeal -- are even more alarming when broken down by neighborhood: Predominantly Hispanic precincts backed the repeal effort by 63 percent.
Gay life in Miami may be larger and more visible than ever before. Yet despite a multimillion-dollar media campaign on the part of the gay-rights group SAVE Dade -- one that bent over backward to present a politically sanitized version of gays who wanted only to serve in the military, marry in a church, and quietly raise their adopted children in their Morningside manors -- a broad swath of Miami harbors deep antipathy toward it.
All of which makes the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival -- one of the few unified tents under which the area's gay community assembles -- that much more important. Presented there, without apology, is an honest portrait of the fractured reality of gay life in all its glory. Yes, there are freshly scrubbed Anglos, ready to bring home to Mom. But they rub up against throngs of shirtless queens packed together on the dance floor, towering black transvestites, and Latino lesbian drag kings -- all of whom need to carry on with their lives regardless of anyone else's sentiments or ballot choices.
"My heart is broken over this," says local philanthropist Harvey Burstein, a former festival board member who says he has donated nearly $80,000 to it. "The film festival was the largest GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered] event in South Florida. A lot of other arts organizations came about as a result of it. People said, 'Wow, there's an audience here! Let's do the South Beach Gay Men's Choir! Let's do gay theater!' Now that the main organization is faltering, it's a blow to the community."
For Burstein, who says his checkbook is now closed as far as the festival is concerned, the villain in this story is obvious. "The board was there to support Robbie [Rosenberg]'s dream, not push him out and take over. Robbie's very difficult to work with" -- there's that word again -- "but so is Judy Drucker," Burstein argues, referring to the president of the classical-music and dance-oriented Concert Association of Florida. "You don't see Judy Drucker's board pushing her out. A lot of arts organizations have directors that are difficult. These are artistic people, it goes with the territory."
So is this entire dispute just a personality conflict played out to an extreme end, a case of too many drama queens off the screen instead of on it?
In a conversation with Kulchur, festival board co-chair Mike Perez stressed irreconcilable "managerial differences" even as he saluted Rosenberg's programming choices. "Robbie's artistic experience was lauded everywhere," Perez noted. "We wanted him to focus on the things he's so wonderful at."
