- Hello and welcome to my video
about five documentaries about LGBTQ+ people,
slash life, slash culture.
I am a massive fan of documentaries.
I will pretty much watch them about anything,
any genre, any type, I find them all completely fascinating,
from the very, kind of, predictable presenter led ones,
to the kind of weird experimental strange ones.
I'm into all of them.
And so what I've got to give you is just
five of the ones I have enjoyed
or that are quite iconic or well known,
that are sort of ones to start with
in terms of LGBT content.
But if you have any more recommendations,
then please leave them in the comments
for people to check out.
So I know I said five,
but the first one's gonna be a kind of double bill.
So Paris Is Burning and Kiki.
These are very much two different films
but they both cover the New York ballroom scene.
Paris Is Burning is a 1990 film
which is about the New York scene then,
the balls, the houses.
It looked quite seriously at the intersections between,
like, race and sexuality and poverty,
and had very frank interviews of people
across the whole community,
including different ages and different genders.
Then Kiki has been described as a sort of
spiritual child of Paris Is Burning.
But with a little more of a hopeful note.
It shows, like, the legacy of the balls from the 80s and 90s
but also how LGBTQ+ youth of colour
are still kind of using the art form in the community today.
I think a lot of LGBTQ+ documentaries have a reasonably,
kind of sad note,
in that a lot of the big things
that have happened to our community are kind of tragic.
And so these are ones that maybe are fascinating,
and have those elements of hardship to them,
but also have this celebration of community.
So if that's what you're looking for, can highly recommend.
Second recommendation is How to Survive a Plague.
So I think that with any film
that is looking at the aids epidemic,
it is something which could be,
very much fall into, like, misery porn,
that it could just be all of the sadness.
And this I think is particularly poignant,
because it doesn't just focus on that.
It focuses on the activists that were fighting to change it.
This was actually the film makers first film.
He was a journalist who had covered the, kind of,
aids epidemic in LGBT life for like a long time,
and then subsequently wrote a book
that was kind of brought out along side the film,
which has had massive critical acclaim.
Both the book and the film have.
It is a recent film, but it does look much older,
because it is basically just like archive footage,
and interviews from the time.
So it has that kind of 80s feel to it, 90s feel to it.
Very grainy films, stuff like that.
But do not let that put you off in any way.
This is a film I can highly recommend
to you people interested in activism
or to people who are sort of
maybe familiar with the aids crisis,
but not with the
very horrific intersection of,
like, religion and politics,
and the medical field which actually hindered
the solutions to this thing
that was killing so many queer people.
The third one I'm gonna recommend is Do I Sound Gay?
This is actually from the same producer as the last one,
but looks at a very different topic.
Namely as the title suggests,
what does it mean to sound gay?
Can you sound gay?
And also, what does that tell us about things like
nature versus nurture, internalised homophobia,
gay subculture, et cetera, et cetera.
This one is really interesting mix of, kind of,
lightheartedness and humour,
while also talking about topics that are
a little bit more heavy, but having that kind of,
that lightness to it as well.
Whilst not being completely surface level.
Number four, Southern Comfort.
So this is
a emotionally harrowing documentary.
It follows the story of a trans man
who is diagnosed with ovarian cancer,
but then is denied treatment by multiple doctors,
because they are basically worried about their reputations.
Like, there's no way to sugar coat
what this documentary is about, but it also,
like a lot of queer documentaries, kind of,
either on purpose or accidentally, these films,
when they're capturing queer life,
also capture these positives,
these shining little nuggets of positivity,
there are things like found family,
and queer spaces and communities.
And, like, self identity and those things are all key here,
even in the face of such tragedy.
And I'm very aware, as I said earlier,
that these kind of very sad documentaries
might be something which
you are not that interested in getting into,
because they are quite difficult to handle,
and sometimes you're like,
I'm sad enough already, I don't need this.
So my fifth recommendation is gonna be one
which is, like, kind of treated with humour and aggravation,
I feel like I feel when I watch it, rather than sadness.
Which is the iconic The Celluloid Closet.
It is a, just, landmark documentary,
which is so comprehensive about
the portrayal of queer people and queerness on screen.
It covers over a hundred films.
It has interviews,
it has a tonne of footage from those films, archive footage.
It is just sweeping and brilliant.
It was released at a time
when these conversations
were starting to pickup about representation,
and it basically just like blew the doors open
on all of these stereotypes and tropes,
and things that had been happening for years,
and had basically just like tumbled through,
and created the representation
that they were having at the time.
This one is a must watch for anyone
who is into queer cinema, which to be honest,
if you're subscribed to this channel, I mean,
that's you, so you should go and watch it.
So yeah, those were just five, slash six,
films that I've really enjoyed.
If you have any recommendations for LGBT documentaries,
please put them in the comments,
as I said at the start of the video.
And if you'd like to help support me making these videos,
please consider becoming a patron on Patreon.
I'm gonna leave details to that in the description,
along with all my social media.
So you can find me all over the internet,
and until I see you next time, bye.