Inside Out Film Fest: A Filmic History of Funding Gay Toronto, and Other Highlights
By Liam Lacey
Toronto, a city famous for pretending to be other cities in commercial movies, plays itself in the documentary Supporting Our Selves, the centerpiece gala of this year’s Inside Out Film Festival.
This engaging, conversational documentary traces the history of the Community One Foundation, a non-profit organization which, for more than 40 years, has raised money for various needs in 2SLGBTQ+ people (two-spirited, lesbian gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer or questioning) in the greater Toronto area.
More than an institutional history, the film uses the organization as a lens to examine some of the crises, successes, controversies and generational differences of the gay community at large.
In some way, the film is something of an inside job. Producer Jenn Mason was approached by realtor Philip Kocev, whose partner, Andrew Mainprize, co-chairs the Community One Foundation. He thought a documentary about the organization, the evolution from grassroots activism in the 1970s to the present, could be a rich subject. He’s an executive director of the film.
“As a queer filmmaker,” says Jenn, “I was struck by the idea that this organization had such a massive impact in helping other organizations during a really bad time. They also gave Inside Out of some of their initial funding. But no one had really heard of them. I was also interested in the idea of looking back at what the need was back then and comparing it to the state of our community today.”
She went looking for a director who could “make this more than the organization’s history, to really use it to tell a story about our community, its strengths and struggles and growth.”
She connected with Lulu Wei, a cinematographer and director whose 2020 documentary feature, There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace (available on CBC GEM) was another Toronto story, the demolition and redevelopment of the historic Honest Ed's department store and the effects of gentrification on the neighbourhood.
“I hadn’t heard of the organization,” Lulu admits. “But I felt it was a way to look at the future of the community and some bigger issues like intersectionality and intergenerational connections, so that’s what drew me to it.”
The film moves between individuals and conversational clusters in loosely defined groups. There’s the old guard, including Harvey Hamburg, an activist lawyer, who brought together various gay and lesbian activists to form the Gay Community Appeal back in 1980.
This group also includes Rosemary Barnes, Geremy Vincent, Harold Desmarais, and Debbie Read and Michelle Jelley, who helped create the early Fruit Cocktail revues which raised money.
They lived through the police bathhouse raids of 1981, which politicized the community (the first Pride Parade happened four months later). This was also the generation that was scarred and shaped by the trauma of the AIDS crisis through the ‘80s and ‘90s and brought us to age of marriage equality and corporate and politically-supported Pride celebrations.
This younger generation is more diverse, intersectional, and worried less about the past than the next set of conflicts. They’re represented by Jay Baldwin, creator of the Disabled Queer and Fabulous Facebook dating page, and Christopher Nkambwe, a trans woman from Uganda, who, while working as a cleaner, formed an agency to help gay African refugees.
New compound identities have sprung up. For example: Tyler J Sloane, a multidisciplinary artist and self-described “Anishinaabe, Chinese, Irish, Scottish, British, French, mixed-race, mixed-gendered non-binary, queer demi-sexual political hot mess.”
The ever-expanding “alphabet soup” of the rainbow is treated with humour. When one of the old guard, Harold Demarais, complains about having to learn a 15-letter acronym, his friend suggests to just use the umbrella term, “queer.” But, as Tyler puts it, “Because I grew up in such a White conservative space, I crave so much to take up all the spaces I can and all my identities!”
Lulu, also a person of colour, says they did not “necessarily identify” with the largely white queer history they encountered. They found a more critical, parallel perspective on that history from leZlie lee kam, a Trinidadian-born self-styled activist “dyke” (as in political lesbian).
Kam was instrumental in getting women and men of colour into floats on the annual Pride Parade, promoting intergenerational exchanges and advocating for queer seniors. The film includes a scene of leZlie, during the pandemic in a group Zoom call, as moderator of a program connecting elders and youth, talking to Tyler Sloane and Jay Baldwin.
Lulu says they never set out to assemble a cast of characters offering representative viewpoints: “I was looking for subjects to follow and it naturally unfolded. One person connected me to the next, and then the next, and I felt each person had a really interesting story to tell. And they all had connections and ties back to the original organization.”
Near the middle of the film, the director returns to two of its earlier interview subjects, the Community One Foundation founders Harvey Hamburg, and Rosemary Barnes, seen sharing coffee and reflecting on changes they have witnessed.
They discuss the 2016 Pride Parade, which created a media storm when it was halted by the Black Lives Matter float, who refused to budge until organizers agreed to a list of demands, including more representation in the leadership and banning policemen in uniform from participating in the parade. Hamburg disagreed with the decision about the police, and what he describes as the “no, never” mindset of some younger activists. Barnes is more sympathetic to racialized minorities who continue to be targeted or neglected by the police. The conversation is friendly, though not resolved.
Lulu says they didn’t stage the scene, beyond evoking the early kitchen table meetings that spawned the organization and encouraging the founders to talk about change: “I wanted to show that people can have different views but at the same time can have genuine, nice, discussions about topics without attacking one another, and actually have some life-learning moments.”
Another film in this year’s festival, Jeffrey Schwartz’s Commitment to Life, also tells the story of gay history of one city, Aids Project Los Angeles. In terms of wider appeal, it has the advantage of including Hollywood movie stars. Among them: Tom Hanks and the late Elizabeth Taylor. Can Supporting Our Selves find an audience far from the Toronto cross-streets of Church and Wellesley?
Lulu thinks so. They says their previous documentary, on the destruction of the Honest Ed neighbourhood, was well-received in U.S. festivals and as far away as Germany, where they saw gentrification in their own worlds.
“One principle I have is that I don’t want to tell stories of communities in which I’m not involved, as an outsider and in an extractive way, but to highlight voices to your own community. I think this film will resonate with a lot folks. There’s a lot of the queer history here that other communities have felt as well, especially now, with what’s happening in America.”
Supporting Our Selves screens Tuesday, May 30, 6:45 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 and can be streamed starting May 31. The film will debut on Out TV in June.
More Inside Out Highlights
Fresh from its SXSW debut, this first feature from Canadian writer-director Ally Pankiw (Netflix’s series Feel Good), stars the reliably excellent Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby) as Sam, a Toronto-based stand-up comedian and former nanny to an adolescent girl who has run away from home. Sam’s struggling with depression in the aftermath of a traumatic event, which is gradually revealed in flashbacks. Comedy club scenes and the blackly funny banter between Sam and her two queer comedian housemates (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon) sparkle, though the movie-of-the-week trauma story is less convincing.
Wacky road trips bring families together! This South African film by Ian Gabriel follows a South Asian tailor and former conman, Varun (Ace Bhatti) and his transgender son River (the director’s scriptwriter son, Gabe Gabriel) as they take a long journey and sneak across a border to spring River’s estranged mother, Monica (Deaan Lawerenson) from a rehab centre. This big-hearted if farcical film involves double-crosses, surprise revelations, and a culminating drag and lip-synch contest.
Robert (Hubert Milkowski), a brooding 19-year-old Polish immigrant, starts work at a hellish Norwegian fish factory, where he finds himself attracted to a free-spirited gay colleague, Ivar (Karl Bekele Steinland). After some tentative advances and retreats, things get complicated when the exploited Polish workers begin to organize for their rights and the impoverished Robert’s loyalties are tested. Sell out or do the right thing? Well-acted and atmospheric, the film gets somewhat tangled in its double themes of coming out and sticking to the union.
A scene from It Runs in the Family
This solid, conventional documentary on the history of the organization known as AIDS Prevention Los Angeles uses talking-head interviews and archival clips to describe the West Coast experience of the catastrophic disease. Most of this history is grimly familiar, as fear, homophobia and misinformation led to needless suffering of victims, who were fired from jobs, ostracized and sometimes left alone to die. Ultimately, the presence of Hollywood — and celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, David Geffen, Tammy Faye Baker, Madonna and others — proved key to turning public opinion. Special attention is given to the near erasure of people of colour in the media’s coverage, though the film ultimately celebrates the triumph of compassion and creativity.
This exceptional first film from Spanish director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguern played at the Berlin Film Festival where its eight-year-old star, Sofia Otero, won the best actress prize. Shot in a fluid documentary style that evokes the Dardennes brothers, the film features Otero as a trans girl nicknamed Cocoa, with Patricia Lopez Arnaiz as her mother, a sculptor facing marital and career crises. The film follows them over a summer in a feminine setting on a Basque farm, where Cocoa bonds with her great aunt, a beekeeper, in an exploration of the importance of transformation and expression.
A Queer’s Guide to Spiritual Living
This casually upbeat documentary focuses on four Canadians who refuse to throw their traditional faiths out because of traditional religions’ intolerance for everything except straight sexuality. The subjects include the gender-fluid Summeiya, who established a group called Queer Muslim Network Toronto; Juliana, a bisexual Christian teacher and poet; Vaibhav, a gay Hindu dancer; and Ari, a trans Coptic Orthodox drag artist(!). Each discuss their personal relationship to their culture and their versions of their higher power, or as Ari says, “the Godex.” Religious belief, as they see it, can be as fluid as sexuality. While this is interesting as far as it goes, viewers might hope the film could go beyond the anecdotal to exploring the idea of queer theology.
A new middle-school student arrives late to a sex ed class in 1987 Alberta. Girls are on one side of the room, boys on the other. New kid Robin (Vaughan Murrae) sits in the middle. Later, school bully Carter (Dominic Lippa) confronts Robin with the question, “What are you?” Writer-director Trevor Anderson’s script declines to offer an answer to that question, as Robin makes his way through adolescence, in a candy-coloured world that evokes John Hughes teen movies of the era, including a complicated love triangle involving Robin, Carter, and singer Izzy (Lacey Oake). An interesting concept, unevenly executed, Before I Change Mind has moments of camp comedy, peaking with a musical knockoff of Jesus Christ Superstar, but the parental characters are cartoonish and there’s little preparation for the dark last act.
This hometown documentary is essentially a promotional profile of Toronto musician Etmet Musa, a.k.a. Ayo Leilani, who performs under the stage name Witch Prophet. Drawing from her Ethiopian-Eritrean roots, she creates incantatory songs, looping her voice over electronic tracks, working with her wife, Sun Sun, and rap-electronic collectives. Despite the challenges of raising a young son and struggling with health issues, she’s tireless in promoting her music and positive vibes.