Doc Shorts: The Art of Realization (2022 shorts program)
Saturday, June 25, 2022, 11:00am Roxie
+Streaming
- Surviving Voices: The Black Community & AIDS 💝
- Body Politics 💝
- Vikken 👍
- Small Congratulations 👍
- Saintmaking 👍
- Salman Toor’s Emerald Green 👍
The National AIDS Memorial has an ongoing oral history project,
Surviving Voices. This year’s installment focuses on the Black
community and HIV/AIDS. The initial portrayal of AIDS in mainstream media was
very much young, middle-class, white gay men (plus a few Haitians and drug
addicts to further the “otherness” narrative). Then we saw “the changing face
of AIDS,” but the true face hadn’t changed, just the media’s belated
realization that they had erased a great many people from the story. The
reality is that AIDS has hit even harder in many of the marginalized
segments of society, especially the marginalized of the marginalized of
the marginalized. The Black community has less access to healthcare, and
often faces stigma in the community when they seek that care. Medical mistrust
(born of real horrors inflicted on Black people by the medical establishment,
not so long ago) is intertwined with police brutality, inadequate and unequal
access to education, redlining, voter suppression, and many other forms of
systemic racism. This worthy addition to the
Surviving Voices series gives voice to those issues. Definitely a
must see.
Dr. Jill Andrew is the first queer Black person elected as a member of a
provincial parliament in Canada, representing part of Toronto, Ontario. She
speaks out against racism, sexism, sizeism, and other issues of the day.
Ontario is currently blighted with a Tory government, but Jill is right there
in the government’s face, fighting for housing as a human right, for the right
to live without shame in the body you have, and for justice for Black and
indigenous people in Canada. It’s an engaging portrait of a tireless advocate
for fairness for all.
Must see.
“Vikken” dir. Dounia Sichov, 2021, France, 27m., in French with full English
subtitles 👍
Vikken, a transgender man about to start hormones, muses on his former
identity, Véronique, and the forced separation of the two identities, as well
as the medical, psychological, and legal maze they must navigate simply to
change their legal status from female to male: mandatory breast removal and
sterilization, mandatory hormone treatments, and declaring themselves to be
Unhappy, in order to be allowed to follow their own sense of self. Combined
with musings about gender nonbinary/gender nonconforming people in various
cultures in history, including specific saints in European Christian
history, particularly Joan of Arc, who was ultimately put to death for the
crime of wearing men’s clothing. A group of drag kings dance while Vikken
narrates. Over the course of the film, Vikken’s voice begins to shift in
timbre, as the male hormones take hold. A strong first-person account of
transition and the labyrinthine process. Highly recommended.
Izzy played hockey in middle school, but quit in embarrassment because she was
both the tallest and the least skilled player on the team. Years later, she
has joined a lesbian hockey team, building her confidence and her skills, in
part using the technique of “small congratulations”: set a series of
achievable goals and give yourself congratulations for each one when you
succeed. Well done, engaging slice of her life. Highly recommended.
In 1990, during the Thatcher era, with Clause 28, hopelessly inadequate
funding for AIDS research and treatment, and the fight to equalize the age of
consent (16 for straights and lesbians, 21 for gay men), the dormant London
House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence reconstituted. Ian McKellen had
very publicly campaigned for gay rights, but then accepted a knighthood from
the Tory government. Derek Jarman wrote in an editorial that McKellen had a
moral obligation to refuse the honor, a position the Sisters agreed with, so
they decided to make him a saint. Gathering together in one room for the first
time in decades, the surviving Sisters from that era reminisce about activism,
anger, and loss, and talk about how activism has changed in the intervening
years.
I lived in London in 1993, still under the unequal age of consent, and spoke
often at Speakers Corner with the Hyde Park Gays & Sapphics. One of the
stalwarts of the group had recently been canonized for her work in HIV
prevention, but sadly I’ve long since forgotten her name. Still, I remember
those days and the anger towards Margaret Thatcher and her successor John
Major. I was also part of the Gay Young London group, basically a social hour
for the under-30 crowd, but the leader of the group told me that he had been
briefed about some of the legal pitfalls. If he introduced two men who then
had sex, and either or both were under 21, he could be criminally charged with
“procurement.” That on top of the fact that two 20-year-olds could both be
charged as adults for the crime of sex with a minor.
Highly recommended.
Pakistani-born artist Salman Toor now lives in New York City, and is working
on a painting to be shown alongside works of the Great Masters in the
Frick Museum. Toor uses
his paintings to express his dream world of freedom and love, but also
nightmarish anxieties, with a special fondness for the color of emerald
green. He talks a bit about his work and getting to exhibit his work, and the
interplay of someone from a post-colonial country returning to showcase his
work among the great European painters of past centuries. Although his
childhood in Pakistan was constrained by a profoundly homophobic culture, he
talks on the phone with his father about the upcoming exhibit. Highly
recommended.
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