There are a million billion ways to be queer, and every year QDoc reminds us of this with a weekend of excellently curated documentary films about queer icons, histories, and drama! From October 23-25, the festival’s 18th year brings Megan Rapinoe (!), Carole Pope, and plenty of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Cinema 21.
The only US fest devoted exclusively to queer documentaries, Portland’s QDoc Film Festival was originally founded by David Weissman and his partner, Russ Gage—who were both alumni of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ film festival Frameline. After running QDoc for a decade, the couple handed it over to a new duo, Molly King and Deb Kemp in 2017.
This year’s biggest event is doubtless the appearance of two-time World Cup champion Megan Rapinoe at the fest’s sold out screening of Rapinoe, which just debuted at Toronto International Film Festival in September. But don’t overlook the films about Elizabeth Gilbert’s best friend turned partner Rayya Elias and Minnesotan figure skater Roy Blakey—who was also a photographer of dramatically lit muscular nude men. There’s a lot on offer and we’ve barely scratched the gay surface. Here are a few other picks to look for:
Jaripeo
Do you like dreamy long takes of men in tight jeans with big belt buckles riding bulls, striding through corn, and posing under disco lighting? Filmmakers Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig have your number—their 70-minute documentary Jaripeo explores queerness and rural rodeo culture in Michoacán, Mexico with an approach so languid and hyper-saturated that it sometimes feels like a music video. Come prepared to navigate significant aesthetic dissonance between the looks (immaculate!) and the first-person interviews with locals about their love lives. (Toxic! Tragic! Baby boy, you deserve better!) A performance by Hector Zaragoza Valentin: Mexican folkloric dancer, mariachi, and drag performer will help take the edge off the emotional violence. (Fri Oct 23, 7 pm)
Adam’s Apple
As a trans teenager with some agency over his own life, Adam Sieswerda’s life is a little unusual, and became even more so when he decided to make a documentary with his mom. Adam’s Apple follows Sieswerda and said mother—visual artist and filmmaker Amy Jenkins—as they each shoot their own footage to capture both the banality and utter newness of Sieswerda’s adolescence. Ultimately a third collaborator, film editor Kristina Motwani, came on board to distill their over 100 hours of footage into a 98-minute doc that includes such indelible parent-child arguments as, “Why are you emotionally attached to my boobs, Mom?” Stay for the after screening Q&A with Motwani to ask her which parent-teenager disagreements were left on the cutting room floor. (Sat Oct 24, 11 am)
Here I Am
Is it even a queer film festival without at least one hot mess romance? No, it is not. This world premiere follows musician-hairstylist Rayya Elias for what turned out to be the last year of her life, before her death from cancer at age 56. Up until now, you have probably only heard of Elias’ hot mess romance with Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert from Gilbert’s point of view. You can expect this one to be an absolute doozy. A post-screening Q&A with director Marc J. Francis presents an opportunity for additional tea. (Sat Oct 24, 1:30 pm)
Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders
Cruising (1980) is an empirically bad movie about a police officer (Al Pacino) who infiltrates New York’s leather bars while on the hunt for a serial killer. Its only redeeming quality is a scene where Pacino dances awkwardly while huffing a bandanna soaked with amyl nitrate. The fact that Cruising has nonetheless aged into a queer cult classic stands as a testament to the ability of gay culture to transmute any insult into more queerness. (It’s a trauma response.)
Mineshaft excavates the murder case that inspired Cruising, long before its director William Friedkin—who also made The Excorcist—began to haunt leather bars in nothing but a jockstrap, for the purposes of “research.” Interview by interview, director, Jeffrey Schwarz builds out a Rashomon-like narrative about the murder of a young Variety reporter named Addison Verrill. In place of Pacino’s police officer, we find Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell being his own damn detective and trying to persuade NYPD to care. It’s brutal and utterly compelling to watch real people see their story turned into material for a B-movie slasher, and it’s liberating to watch them fight back against it. In the long, hot summer of 1979, the social event of the season was protesting so vigorously outside of Cruising’s shoots that much of the film’s dialogue had to be overdubbed. (Sat Oct 24, 8:30 pm)
Hunky Jesus
Portland has her own chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But everyone should be able to agree that the Easter Sunday celebration put on by the society’s founding order of charitable drag nuns is one of the most charming events of San Francisco. It’s less touristy than Pride, less drunk than Halloween, has more Easter Bonnets than either, and is well worth making a documentary about. The culminating event is the Hunky Jesus competition, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Filmmaker Jennifer M. Kroot delivers a breezy tour of all of the above, plus news footage of the requisite guys on Fox News who are angry about it. Who dares to be angry about the Jesuses? The only real sin we recognize—not mentioned in the doc—is how skyrocketing rents have drastically lowered the overall quality of the competitive Jesus pool. Though Kroot and company (including Sister Roma, Sister Lida, and Honey Mahogany) may address further sins following the screening. (Sat Oct 25, 11 am)
Acting Like Women
From 1973 to 1991 the Women’s Building in Los Angeles was where soon-to-be legendary artists like Judy Chicago produced the kind of work that they wanted to see in the world. As documentary director Cheri Gaulke describes it, women—especially of that era—were raised to be performance artists, expected to play the role of woman 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Acting Like Women shows those women absolutely cutting loose in the space that they created.
At times, the archival footage can feel like a barrage of fake genitalia, real genitalia, and nude bodies smeared with (fake?) blood, as it shows the most feminist performance art that ever feministed. But its interviews make it abundantly clear just how new everything was; many of the artists had only just realized women could even be artists. Gaulke herself initially got into performance art because she wanted to shoot films, but none of the women in her art program were allowed to use any of the cameras. By the film’s end, the tables have turned, and Gaulke is directing male mentees walking across the desert in high heels. Fascinating fact: Lily Tomlin and her partner, Jane Wagner, are executive producers. Gaulke and writer-producer Anne Gauldin appear at a post-screening Q&A. (Sun Oct 25, 4 pm)
Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions
Since the 1980s, Carole Pope has been pulling on a whole lot of black leather and singing unapologetically horny songs about how problematic women make her cream her jeans. Or, as she puts it in Anti-Diva, “I’m like the godmother of all of you bitches.” Both Pope and the doc’s writer-director Michelle Mama will attend a post-screening Q&A. Ask Pope your lingering questions about her yearlong U-Haul romance with torch singer Dusty Springfield IF YOU DARE. (Sun Oct 25, 6:30 pm)
QDoc is at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st, Oct 23-25, $12 per film, under 18 and over 75 attend for FREE, more info at qdocfilmfest.org.
