6 LGBTQI Films in the next few months We have found SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE – Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Elder, Undocumented Immigrants, Documentary, Narrative – even one on LGBTQI Comix.Instead of having OUTwatch’s Film Festival in October in the middle of fire season, we decided to work with the Rialto Cinemas and present
6 GREAT LGBTQI films this summer and early fall.All films are at Rialto Cinemas, Sebastopol
Thursday July 15, 7 PM NO STRAIGHT LINES – THE RISE OF QUEER COMICSDid you follow Dykes to Watch Out For? Or Cathartic Comics with African American LGBT characters? Or Wendel by Howard Cruise? Or Rude Girls and Dangerous Women? Or Come Out. Comix by Mary Wings? “No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer comics,” tells the story of five scrappy and pioneering cartoonists who depicted everything from the AIDS crisis, coming out, and same-sex marriage, to themes of race, gender, and disability. Their work is funny, smart, and profound, and provides a unique, uncensored window into LGBTQ lives from the 1970s onward, beginning at a time in which there was no other genuine queer storytelling in popular culture.
Sunday July 18, 4:15 PMI Carry You With Me. A Benefit for QAA (Queer Asylum Accompaniment)
The story of Undocumented Immigrants. Ambition and societal pressure propel an aspiring chef to leave his soulmate in Mexico and make the treacherous journey to New York, where life will never be the same. It’s based on the real life love story of Ivan Garcia and Geraldo Zabaleta, where their fresh romance is tested by the fact closeted Ivan wants to make an illegal move to the US while openly gay Geraldo is afraid to make the leap. It follows these two men as they fall in love, cross the border and struggle to carve out a piece of the American Dream for themselves.
Thursday August 12, 7 PM No Ordinary Man No Ordinary Man is an in-depth look at the life of musician and trans culture icon Billy Tipton. Complicated, beautiful and historically unrivaled, this groundbreaking film shows what is possible when a community collaborates to honor the legacy of an unlikely hero.
For decades, the life of American Jazz musician Billy Tipton was framed as the story of an ambitious woman passing as a man in pursuit of a music career. In NO ORDINARY MAN, Tipton’s story is re-imagined and performed by trans artists as they collectively paint a portrait of an unlikely hero. Together, the filmmakers join Tipton’s son Billy Jr. to reckon with a complicated and contested legacy: how do you tell the story of someone who was hiding in plain sight yet desperate to be seen?
Thursday August 19, 7 PM Swan Song
Retired hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger is the Liberace of Sandusky, Ohio!. When he is offered $25,000 to style an estranged friend for her funeral, he does the only sensible thing: he escapes his nursing home and hitchhikes into town with a sign boasting “free beauty tips.” As Pat makes his way through his now-alien hometown shoplifting beauty supplies, he finds himself reconnecting with friends, confronting old rivals, and facing the demons of his past. This is based on Pitsenbarger’s real life.
Look for MORE Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay films during September and October.
Tickets for all the films are at the Rialto Cinemas, Sebastopol the week the film is showing.
“No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer comics,” tells the story of five scrappy and pioneering cartoonists who depicted everything from the AIDS crisis, coming out, and same-sex marriage, to themes of race, gender, and disability. They tackled the humor in queer lives in a changing world, and the everyday pursuits of love, sex, and community. Their work is funny, smart, and profound, and provides a unique, uncensored window into LGBTQ lives from the 1970s onward, beginning at a time in which there was no other genuine queer storytelling in popular culture. Equally engaging are their personal journeys, as they, against all odds, helped build a queer comics underground that has been able to grow and evolve in remarkable ways
The Film’s director/producer Vivian Kleiman is a Peabody Award-winning documentaryfilmmaker.[1] She has received a National Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Research and executive produced an Academy Award nominated documentary. Her films include: “Families Are Forever” “Always My Son” “Out for the Count.”
In 2019, Kleiman was awarded a Eureka Fellowship of the Fleishhacker Foundation, a fellowship program for visual artists. Also an educator, she served as Adjunct Faculty at Stanford University‘s Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video Production from 1995–2004.
“No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer comics,” which will be screened as part of Outwatch’s Film Series Thursday, July 15th at Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol.
Gary Carnivele: Have you always been a fan of Queer Comics and which were some of the first that you followed?
Vivian Klienman: I was a huge fan of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For when it was serialized in the local women’s newspaper, Plexus. We all would chomp at the bit in anticipation of the next installment, and learn what exploits our fave characters got into. And of course, Hothead Paisan was a hoot.
GC: Did they play a part in opening up a new, big, queer world to you?
VK: Dykes to Watch Out For was so important for many of us – it was the first time many of us lesbians in the 80s actually got to see ourselves represented in comics. Goodbye to the hokey white bread romances. Goodbye funny little animal stories. Instead, it was poking fun at our real lives with elegance and insight. That was such a gift to lesbians as we were creating new networks of connection (eg bookstores, cafés, and community health care providers.)
GC: What made you decide to make “No Straight Lines” and what were your first steps to get others interested in joining you on this cinematic journey?
VK: I was approached by a colleague Greg Sirota and his friend Justin Hall (an expert in the subject) to take on the project. Justin encouraged me to attend the first Queers & Comics Conference (an international in-gathering of a wide diversity of artists) held in NYC in May 2015. It was a casting director’s dream. When I walked in and saw a young person with chartreuse-colored hair talking with an older gentleman with balding head wearing a buttoned-down collared shirt, surrounded by a panoply of gender non-binary non-conforrming (to ANY standards and assumptions), I was drawn in. And once I attended the panels over the next 3 days, and heard the remarkable stories and saw the range of artwork, I knew it would be my next film project.
GC: I can imagine you and your team did a huge amount of research. What was that process like?
GC::Did you and your team straight away know who you wanted to be in the film?
VK: I knew that I did not want to do a film that replicated Justin’s anthology of queer comics, which would be an encyclopedic history of who did what when.
Instead, I wanted to create a film that took the viewer on an experience that touched many different emotional notes: from the humorous, to the poignant, and the painful moments.
So, I limited the film to profile 5 pioneer queer cartoonists and that was a challenge: who to omit when there are so many talented and important artists to profile. Justin and I carefully deliberated that decision.
GC: How receptive were the subjects of your film to tell their stories on camera?
VK: All of the comic book artists who I met are eager to tell their stories. While they are content to have solitude and do creative work, contrary to the stereotype of a curmudgeonly artist, these folks are genuinely eager to share their work.
GC: What surprised you the most about them, their work, and their careers?
VK: I never expected this band of mischievous artists to be appealing to such a broad audience. I think it boils down to this: a well-made film about people who follow their passion. Instead of the drive to earn money, these artists are motivated to be creative in a world where there isn’t much likelihood of financial remuneration. Their passion for their work is infectious.
GC: Who are some of the artists that you weren’t aware of and what do they bring to the medium?
VK: The new generation of web artists were all new to me. I love the fact that the Internet and tech can continue to be a place where the DIY artform continues to flourish.
GC: You do a terrific job representing the doc’s subjects creative process in the film. What did you find most interesting about the development of their work?
VK: One of the important themes that I braided in the film is that of “the means of production,” as Karl Marx would say. I really enjoy taking the viewer on this historical journey not only of queer history in the U.S., but of the evolution of the art form itself. The journey starts from a pen and paper, then expands to offset printing, to Xerox machines, to major printing processes, and finally the web.
At the same time, the nature of the images evolved. After Rupert realized that he had been drawing only white people, he trained his eyes on his own experience as a Black gay man. Diane diMassa gave voice to the rage of inequality and violence against women. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, queer artists responded with comics that ranged from the tragic to the humorous.
GC: Did you have a real sense of what the film would look like or did that come about during editing?
VK: During the editing, I realized that the film felt stale. I wanted to infuse it with a vitality and with a connection to my targeted audience: queer youth. So I did an experiment: I spent a day filming “speed interviews” with a dozen Next Gen artists who were attending the 2017 Queers & Comics conference. I had exactly 10 minutes with each artist, enough time to say hello and ask them just a few basic questions. At the end of the day, I didn’t know how I was going to use that material, but I knew I had something special. Those became the “Greek Chorus” in the film, and immensely changed the tone and impact of the film.
GC: Even though the focus of the film is Queer Comics, you truly take us on a trip through LGBTQ+ history. Why was it important for you to firmly set the work on the background of the Queer experience?
VK: You know, despite the many successes in the journey towards acceptance of queers in this country and others, the statistics about attempted suicide among queer youth is by far disproportionate to the general population. This is deplorable. And our youth still need our help towards self-acceptance.
I wanted to create a film that I wish I had when I was young and struggling with coming out. And I wanted to offer young queers today who similarly are struggling with their identity, to understand that there were many who encountered similar obstacles along the way. The history of queer comics is a wonderful journey from isolation to the formation of community that I hope will inspire a new generation.
GC: You premiered the film at Tribeca and it was featured at Frameline. At what other festivals was it screened and what was the virtual film festival experience like for you?
VK: It’s an independent filmmaker’s dream to premiere at Tribeca. But No Straight Lines continued further, and reached the perfect trifecta of major venues for its launch: Tribeca, Sheffield Doc Fest (England), and American Film Institute Doc Fest in DC – this is such a joy! It’s also a testament to the amazing team of collaborators who together helped me shape a film that aimed for more than information and journalism. We all were dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. And that infused the work with a vitality that touches a much larger audience than I set out to reach.
GC: When you were finally able to experience a live audience’s reaction, what aspects of the doc did they seem to connect to the most?
VK: I love how everyone erupts in a deep guffaw when seeing two older gay men, who have lived together and loved one another for over 40 years, sit down in front of the tv to watch the morning news with eggs and coffee on the tray. So ordinary and so unremarkably the daily experience of so many.
GC: What are you working on now?
VK: I often serve as an Executive Producer on documentary films, especially ones with a challenging subject and filmic approach. Currently, a film by Vicky Funari is in post-production. It’s a profile of a group of seniors who take an aquacize class at their neighborhood YMCA swimming pool – older bodies and souls in water.
In the Fall 2019, I was honored with a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation that I planned to start this winter. However, with the arrival of Covid-19, and the incredible loss of over 600,000 American lives, I am probably going to change the focus of that film. Stay tuned!
The documentary that brings to light the fascinating, seemingly untold story of the queer community within the comic book world. Introducing the vast achievements, as well as obstacles faced by, the queer comic-book artists featured in Justin Hall’s eponymous anthology – including Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, Howard Cruse, Rupert Kinnard and Mary Wings – director Vivian Kleiman, in her first feature-length documentary, reveals the inspirations, creations and adversities unique to LGBQT+ writers. The story not only covers modern-day artists and illustrators, but the earlier “golden age” of comic books, and what issues and images were pushed to the shadows at that time.
No Straight Lines fully captures the queer comic-book experience, though it follows a fairly formulaic structure, moving between the five main featured artists and delving into their unique writing/illustrating styles. We also see their personal viewpoints of the comic world, taking a look at how the mainstream comic franchises (Marvel, DC, newspaper comics, etc.) played an integral part in inspiring each writer, even as they forced queer writers underground at their humble beginnings.
Outside of its personal reflections, No Straight Lines tackles major world events as they pertain to those in the LGBQT+ community, including the discrimination they face, overlapping themes with the “hippie” era, the AIDS epidemic, Stonewall, and many other relevant experiences. All of this content mixes together well with the informational elements of the film, as we see the emotional (even traumatic) effect the world and its historical content had on the writers profiled.
While No Straight Lines is otherwise strong, as a documentary I found it often quite repetitive. By its conclusion, the film struggles to introduce new ideas, and the freshness of the topic dwindles towards the second half. Without affecting the overall impact for the viewer, No Straight Lines starts to recycle ideas and information as it wraps up its narrative. All the same, the story is a must-see look at representation, and fits in perfectly with our modern-day push for greater inclusion.
This book about pornography—with 28 pages of endnotes, a colon in the title, and a $173 price tag on the hardcover edition—unapologetically identifies itself as an academic tome. Flipping through its charts and statistics, we might hear our own inner voice grumbling, Even queer fuckfilms have succumbed to the graphs of social scientists.
But, as with pornography itself, first impressions can be misleading. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography, at $28 for the eBook, is enlightening and even affordable. Its author, Jeffrey Escoffier, a founder of OutLook and director of Out/Write, a professor who has taught at Berkeley, Rutgers, and The New School and is now a researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, avoids pedantry. His graphs, viewed in close focus, give us a rich view of the upheaval in global culture that has taken place since the nudist and bodybuilding magazines like Physique Pictorial, passed furtively from hand-to-hand among closeted men in the 1950s, giving way to Tom of Finland and the abundantly stuffed crotches of his models, and all that has followed since.
“Perversions” and “Scripts”
Escoffier’s book recounts an engaging history that culminates, after millennia, in the mainstreaming of modern hard-core porn—meaning, in his very specific definition, sexual imagery, particularly in videos, of explicit depictions of intercourse, including oral copulation. Escoffier notes that sex researchers of the 1920s, whose focus was primarily on married heterosexual couples, broke ground that later was deeply plowed by Alfred Kinsey, who began in the 1940s publishing the results of surveys that included homosexual feelings, fantasies, and behavior. He doesn’t mention Magnus “Max” Hirschfeld, the German doctor whose Institute for Sex Research, founded in 1919 in Berlin, was the first association in the modern world to promote homosexual and transgender rights.
The author employs the words “perverse” and “perversion” in a way that might be off-putting to an LGBTQ audience. But he is openly gay himself, and no prude, and uses these words in context as a social scientist and historian. Escoffier is known, among many other things, for his earlier studies of “gay for pay” film actors wh6ose heterosexual orientation does not impede their sexual performance with men. He has examined with particular interest what he calls “the social conditions that enable heterosexually-identified men to turn in credible sexual performances in gay pornographic videos.”
Like “perversion,” the word “script” has a special meaning for Escoffier, who devotes most of the book’s attention to films featuring sex between men, and treats pornography as a vast screen on which all of our fantasies are projected. He writes boldly, “Sexual scripts are necessary at every stage of production and are the reason that people watch porn.”
Such a broad assertion concerning people’s interest in porn risks neglecting the developments we see in amateur, do-it-yourself fuckbuddy videos, in which guys who obviously like and are attracted to each other are having fun—not posing or “performing” together. Amateur videos may prove to be a more reliable measure of what people want than statistical analyses of commercial video sales. Joe Gage, creator of rough-trade classics beginning with Kansas City Trucking Co. in 1976, commented in a 2007 Butt Magazine interview, when asked if he liked the work of other directors, “I like amateur porn the best, because it’s real. It’s real sex.”
Do-it-yourself
As is so often the case, LGBTQ people were at the forefront of a social upheaval that soon paid benefits to the entire world. Remember “Chat Rooms”? Maybe you don’t, but if you use any form of social media you are an heir to the slow, noisy, dial-up services that began in the early 1980s, patronized by gay men eager to hook up in a new, virtual way. Personal use of the Internet exploded as men learned to cruise without having to look their best—and, as the technology evolved and allowed them to share photos and videos, to create a new species of pornography. This new generation of do-it-yourself porn embraces various body types, ages, and racial groupings—not as fetish categories for commercial-porn keyword clicks, but as real-life guys doing what comes naturally.
Escoffier refers to the video audience as “spectators,” reinforcing the understanding of porn as a creation tightly controlled by producers who believe they know what the porn-consuming public wants. He nods to Pornhub as the world’s largest distributor of porn and notes that “video pornography on the Internet is not only a hugely popular form of entertainment, but also a body of knowledge about sex that is both a form of sex education as well as a self-help guide”—the modern pillow book. What he doesn’t mention is that the early growth of Pornhub was driven largely by non-commercial, amateur, DIY videos making Pornhub and other amateur sites like XHamster and @ment4us wildly profitable.
From the 1970s through the end of the last century, commercial studios refined and professionalized their product, catering to increasing numbers of fetishes, “perversions,” and interests, in slickly produced, high-quality, keyword-driven commodities. Long gone are the original black-and-white “Old Reliable” films of the early 1970s, which featured snarly, rough-trade types masturbating on camera, often on a familiar worn-out couch, chewing cigars and, occasionally, flipping off the viewer. Meanwhile, technology has allowed fuckbuddies to make quality video recordings of themselves and to post their videos online for anyone to enjoy. The production values are not as impressive, but the intimacy more than compensates.
The Object of Knowledge
But even this erudite observation is subject to reexamination: In a section near the end of Escoffier’s book, perhaps to atone for the statistics and graphs in earlier chapters, he quotes from reviews written by film critics who have had the opportunity to hire their favorite porn actors for live, in-the-room-together, sex. A film scholar studying PornHub and OnlyFans is likely to be able to find his favorites on RentMen. An enterprising performer/escort uses his recognized profile name everywhere, and posts his travel schedule months in advance.
These explicit reviews end the book on a good-humored note: “He was not Rick Gonzales the porn star… he was Rick Gonzales my LOVER for two hours and he just made love to me.”
Andrew Holleran, in his 2015 essay “Notes on Porn,” commented that the occasional moment “when two men do make contact is more powerful than all the anonymous pistonlike fucking of ordinary porn films.” The three-page essay was one of the most often cited items ever to appear in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Concerning the illusion furthered by porn that the viewer is, in Plato’s terms, experiencing “the object of knowledge,” Holleran wrote, “…you are as alone after sex with someone in a porn film as you were when you began. Depending on your age or temperament or circumstances, this may be a good or a bad thing.”
Sunday July 11 @ 4 pm. Second Sunday Summer Series #2 at Occidental Center for the Arts, featuring Solid Air and Heartwood Trio. Enjoy Sonoma County’s finest musicians live in our outdoor amphitheater! Seating will follow current public safety guidelines, please bring cushions or stadium chairs to sit on. Wheelchair/special needs seating will be facilitated .There will be fine refreshments available for sale, and our new plaza will be open. Advanced tickets are required. Admission is $20 for OCA members, $25 for non-members. Our first Sunday concert sold out, so be sure to get your tickets early at www.occidentalcenterforthearts.org. Become an OCA Member and get free tickets. We are thrilled to celebrate the safe return of live music with you! 3850 Doris Murphy Ct. Occidental, CA. 95465. 707-874-9392
Queer friendships, in art as in life, are often complex. Zak Salih’s debut novel Let’s Get Back to the Party powerfully and broadly explores these friendships—the joys and tensions that exist within them, and the lines between platonic and romantic that can blur to the point of disappearance—celebrating the ways in which they help define us.
Shortly after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, Sebastian Mote, a high school art history teacher, runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding. In the decades since they last saw each other, Sebastian has faded from Oscar’s memory, while Oscar still occupies a potent space in Sebastian’s mind. As children, Sebastian’s role as Oscar’s protector defined their closeness—their friendship was a cocoon within which Oscar could forget about his difficult home life and severe father.
Now, at least on the surface, they couldn’t be more different. Oscar, distressed by the new “epidemic” of marriage, sees gay domestication as a death. He is equally affronted by the “colonization” of uniquely queer spaces—gay clubs attracting straight women, the gayborhood now “just another neighborhood.” Endlessly pursuing casual, detached sex as a distraction from everyone around him coupling off and settling down, Oscar is, at first, a frustratingly one-dimensional character. (Aware his friends see him this way, he can’t quite admit they’re right.)
After a chance meeting with Sean Stokes, an older writer whose frank, explicit autobiographical novels of 1970s gay life captivate Oscar, leading to a friendship and correspondence through which Oscar becomes enthralled by what he sees as a distant past where “being queer was still strange.” Sean’s words become manifesto-like truths for Oscar—amidst the tame “storybook love” now ubiquitous, he glamorizes a lost era of risky, rebellious sex, the “grit and grime … the sheer faggotry of it all.”
Meanwhile, a failed “experiment in domesticity” with a now-ex-boyfriend has left Sebastian single, housesitting at his father’s rural northern Virginia home. Unlike outgoing Oscar, Sebastian keeps to himself: avoiding the popular gay dating apps, he spends long afternoons at museums and pores over biographies of the artists he teaches. (One of the most moving and inventive episodes in the novel is an extended section in which Sebastian recalls moments in his boyhood through works of art—Copley, Turner, Pollock—interleaving these memories with the story of a gay student’s suicide at the school where he teaches. Perhaps, he argues, intimacy and artmaking come from the same impulse, that “uncanny, inexplicable compulsion” to reach out to another.)
Sebastian takes an interest in the self-assured, magnetic Arthur, a student whose “uncanny confidence” he admires and envies. Like Oscar and Sean, Sebastian and Arthur form something like a friendship, but while Oscar longs for Sean’s past, Sebastian yearns for Arthur’s present. For him, Arthur is a reminder of the desperation and shame of his own adolescence: “[the] boyhood I never had, the warped manhood I was stuck with for the rest of my life. … If I had his life, then I wouldn’t have to have my own.”
Salih treats his two narrators’ sensibilities with meticulous care. They begin as distinct voices: Sebastian’s episodic, digressive reflections, populated with nods to art history (“…flung across the flannel sheets like a troubled Fuseli dreamer”) are a stark contrast to Oscar’s snappy, bold observations, which pulse with attitude and sarcasm, recalling the bullet-like directness of cruising apps. But as the novel progresses, a shift takes place; the two voices blend and blur. Most strikingly, Oscar begins to transform—growth that is no less moving for its expectedness. His aversion to change yields as he starts to feel the hollowness in the reports he brings Sean of his sexual escapades; he attempts to frame queer rebellion in new ways. Sebastian changes, too. His friendship with Arthur allows him to reconsider how he sees himself as a gay man and to search deeply for the beginnings that lie within all endings.
In a letter to Oscar, Sean writes, “Perhaps experience without transformation isn’t experience at all.” Whether in pursuit of gay rights or in search of our own queer identities, what is the point of the struggle if we can’t, then, acknowledge and celebrate the progress? Salih addresses the queer “struggle” within and without—how the ways we fight in the community are always in conversation with the ways we fight within ourselves; our need “to be desired, to be seen” but also the need to look inward and see ourselves. Throughout the novel, Salih deftly captures the pervasive, intangible melancholy that can color experiences of detachment and isolation, writing movingly of the relationships—friendships and otherwise—that can bring us back from these moments. Let’s Get Back to the Party reminds us how we fight to keep going in spite of it all.
Queen Latifah, receiving the BET Lifetime Achievement Award, was honored for her one-of-a-kind 35-year career as a rapper, performer, actress, and more. MC Lyte, Rapsody, Lil’ Kim and Monie Love performed together and thanked her for being their peer or paving the way for them.
But her closing remarks are drawing the most attention, after the star mentioned her longtime partner, Eboni Nichols, and their son, Rebel. She ended her speech by wishing viewers a “Happy Pride!”
Queen Latifah’s sexual orientation has been a nonstop source of gossip for years as the hit singer and actress has steadfastly refused to confirm or deny that she is a lesbian.
She has been quiet about her personal life and her reluctance to talk about her sexual orientation has frequently been compared to actors Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey’s years-long non-denial denials. She would neither confirm nor deny that she is a lesbian.
Next to her father, Queen Latifah remembered her mother while accepting the honor, who passed away in 2018.
“There is no way that I could have had the parents that I was born to – my father, my mother [who died in 2018], who is still so much in me – my family, I love you – my siblings. My best friends who ride or die with me whether my face is on the dirt or I’m flying in the skies – they know me. And they’re there for me.”
“I’m gonna get off this stage, but I thank you so much for all of you, the fans for supporting every crazy-ass thing I’ve done through the years. And thank you for making Equalizer No. 1. Eboni, my love. Rebel, my love. Peace. Happy Pride!”
“Queen Latifah expressing her love for her partner and wishing us all a happy Pride as she accepted her Lifetime Achievement Award tonight had me emotional,” McKensie Mack tweeted after the speech. “So many Black queer kids watching the show tonight are being so affirmed by our people”
Ruth Coker Burks never intended to be an advocate, activist or even an angel. She just wanted to do the right thing.
“Oh, I’m no angel,” Coker Burks, 62, told TODAY. “I’m just a person.”
But that’s how her legacy has been defined when one fateful day in 1986, at just 26 years old, she was visiting a friend, Bonnie, at a local hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, who had been suffering from oral cancer. Bonnie had her tongue removed, and Coker Burks was her interpreter. This was their fifth extended hospital stay, but this time there was something different. Out of the corner of her eye, Coker Burks spotted a door down the hall with a bright red tarp across it, food trays piled up outside and a group of nurses at the door, unwilling to go in.
Ruth Coker Burks in the mid-1980s.Courtesy Ruth Coker Burks / Grove Atlantic
“I had been in hospitals a lot of times and so I thought that was really bizarre,” she said of the biohazard red door. “The nurses were literally drawing straws to see who would go in and check on this person. They would draw straws and it’d be best out of three, and then they didn’t like that and so then it’d be best 2 out of 3 and then no one would end up going in to check in on this person. They just walked away.”
Her curiosity overcame her, so when the nurses left their stations, she snuck into the room to see who was there. She struggled finding the person at first, who was so frail and near death, she couldn’t even tell he was in his bed. “I had to look for him,” she explained. “I thought maybe he was in the bathroom. You couldn’t tell the difference between him and the bedsheets. It was just horrible.”
This was the first time she would encounter a person dying from AIDS, but it wouldn’t be the last. Over the next decade, Coker Burks would care for over 1,000 gay men dying of the disease who were abandoned by their families.
In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month and the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in 1981, TODAY had the opportunity to talk with the accidental activist to look back on her incredible story that above all else, shows what happens when someone overcomes fear for love and life.
‘Nobody’s coming’
Prior to that fateful hospital visit, Coker Burks had heard rumors about the then-unnamed disease when visiting her hairdresser cousin in Hawaii. A devout Christian, single mother of one and real estate agent working in the timeshare industry, Coker Burks pretended to know a lot more about the gay community than she actually did.
“Oh honey, don’t worry about that,” her cousin told her about the disease soon to be labeled HIV and AIDS. “Just the leather guys in San Francisco are getting that.”
But it was that day while caring for her friend Bonnie when she encountered AIDS for the first time in person — and knew it wasn’t just affecting the “leather guys” in California.
“I went over to the bed and I didn’t know what to do but I took his hand and I said, ‘Honey, what can I do for you?’” she remembers of the fateful encounter. “He looked up at me and he didn’t have any more tears to cry. He was so dehydrated there was nothing left to produce any tears. But he looked up at me and he said he wanted his mama.”
Coker Burks felt this was something she could do: Get his mother to come to the hospital and then go back to Bonnie and get back to minding her own business, something she admits she’s never been very good at doing. But what she quickly realized is that his mother knew where he was, and she had no intentions to visit him.
“I went over to speak with the nurses, and they backed up like I had them at gunpoint,” she said. “They said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ Well yeah, I noticed that y’all weren’t going in. So they started fussing at me and then they just backed up even more.”
She recounted what they said to her: “His mother’s not coming. Nobody’s coming. He’s been in this hospital for six weeks, nobody’s been here and nobody’s coming and don’t you go back in that room.”
Well, Coker Burks didn’t listen.
The man’s name was Jimmy, and his experience was more common than not. Many gay men who became sick with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s were shunned by their families, abandoned and left to die alone.
Coker Burks tried calling Jimmy’s mother numerous times, but each time his mother refused to take the call. After a few attempts — and a heated threat to put his obituary in her local newspaper — his mother answered her questions. “My son died years ago when he went gay,” she told Coker Burks. “I don’t know what thing you have at that hospital but that’s not my son.”
Coker Burks knew that was the best she was going to get out of her, so she stayed by Jimmy’s side until he died the next day.
“I thought he would be the only one, and I would get back to going to church every Sunday and you know, being a good Christian living the best life I could,” she said. “I had a young daughter, her father and I were divorced, and I was just trying to be the best mother and set the best example I could for her. I thought I’d just go back to that.”
Coker Burks and her daughter, Allison. Grove Atlantic
But after leaving Jimmy’s hospital room after he passed, she learned that the homophobia these men experienced lived on well after their final breathes. The nurses said the body needed to be dealt with, and that the hospital’s morgue didn’t want him because they were scared the other bodies would get contaminated. (She jokes, “Of course, you don’t want a dead body contaminated with anything, especially imagination.”)
The nurses insisted she take him. It was difficult to find a funeral home who would take Jimmy, but after many attempts she was able to find a place that would cremate him and she buried him with her father. With her daughter Allison by her side, they got a cookie jar for his ashes, dug a hole above her father’s coffin and planted flowers to mark the spot.
“We had a little do-it-yourself funeral, said the Lord’s prayer, put the flowers and a big rock on top of him and we left,” she explained. “And I thought, you know, that’s going to be the only person I ever have to do this for. I mean, who would think you would ever have to do it twice in your life, right?”
She went back to selling timeshares. Then more and more local men in Arkansas began getting infected with HIV and becoming sick with AIDS. Nurses started giving out Coker Burks’ number to their patients.
No matter what, Coker Burks answered their calls. She buried 39 others in her family’s cemetery and cared for hundreds more for over a decade.
Coker Burks with Billy, who became one of her best friends before he died of AIDS at 24.Grove Atlantic
Hope, friendship and understanding
Coker Burks tells her story in the book, “All the Young Men,” published in December 2020.
“It is not to diminish her story to say that heterosexual angels weren’t the dominant narrative of the AIDS crisis, but a vanishingly rare exception to a rule of homophobia, cruelty and prejudice,” writes The Guardian’s Olivia Laing. “That said, there’s something immensely uplifting about her decision to involve herself in the travails of a community not her own, simply because she could see that there was a need. It’s a brighter story of human nature…”
Last year, it was also announced that her story will be made into a film as well, “The Book of Ruth,” starring Ruth Wilson and Matt Bomer.
Above all else, Coker Burks wants people to understand that her story is one of hope.
“It’s about friendships, and it’s about having the very worst of situations and turning it into something else,” she said. “It’s about kindness and stepping through the door, whatever the door is. It’s a fear that you override. Whatever fear you have and you just walk into that room, because everybody always asked me what made me walk into that room. To me, it was a voice of God saying, ‘Go in there. It’s going to be OK.’”
Coker Burks and drag queens from the Discovery Nightclub in Little Rock, Arkansas.Grove Atlantic
Coker Burks said what she learned the most was to see joy in everything, even in death.
“Oh no, my guys lived until the day they died,” she said. “I learned more about living from the dying than I ever learned about dying with the dying.”
“Hope was all they had. That was it. And, you know, we would go to drag shows. … I had never even heard of a drag queen but I would stand by the stage with my dollars, I wouldn’t even go back to my chair, I was just handing out dollars all night, thinking to myself these are the most fabulous creatures I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Step out of your lives, step out of your boundaries and deliberately meet new people who aren’t you.”
During LGBTQ Pride Month, TODAY is sharing the community’s history, pain, joy and what’s next for the movement. We will be publishing personal essays, stories, videos and specials throughout the entire month of June. For more, head here.
Sesame Street is celebrating Pride month with an adorable special episode introducing its first ever same-sex couple.
The milestone episode, titled “Family Day,” debuted on HBO Max and YouTube on Thursday (17 June) and sees characters welcome their family members to the famous street.
Among them are Frank and Dave, the brother of Nina, who works as a bike store owner on the street, and their daughter, Mia.
The iconic kids’ show has discussed LGBT+ families in the past, but Yahooreports this is first time it’s ever featured a same-sex couple (not counting Bert and Ernie, of course).
Cast member Alan Muraoka, who helped create the episode, shared his happiness on Facebook.
“Sesame Street has always been a welcoming place of diversity and inclusion. So I’m so excited to introduce Nina’s brother Dave, his husband Frank, and their daughter Mia to our sunny street,” he wrote.
“I am so honoured and humbled to have co-directed this important and milestone episode. Love is love, and we are so happy to add this special family to our Sesame family. Happy Pride to all!”
His post was welcomed by scores of parents who were delighted to see the beloved show changing with the times.
“Thank you for showing my boys a family like ours!” commented one. “As a mother of a gay son and a gay daughter, I approve!!!!” wrote another.
When maverick Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Debra Chasnoff is diagnosed with stage-4 cancer, she faces down injustice as she always has – with her camera. With the help of her wife Nancy and their chosen family, she traces a journey through the twists and turns of the end of her life. What emerges is an emotionally raw, funny and profoundly intimate portrait of shifting relationships and identities — a story about hanging onto life, as you prepare to let it go.
The World Premiere of PROGNOSIS – notes on living will be held on June 19 in the Frameline45 San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival; followed by a special live Q&A with filmmakers (encore screening June 26).
PROGNOSIS – notes on living is a production of Citizen Film & Groundspark, is in English, and is not rated by the MPA.
ABOUT THE FILM After being diagnosed with stage-4 breast cancer, documentary director Debra Chasnoff decides to make a film about what it’s like to navigate life with a potentially terminal illness. Accompanied by her wife Nancy, her adult sons, and her LGBTQ2SIA+ chosen family, Debra sets out to capture the physical and emotional rollercoaster of treatment. Underpinned by their decision to not hear the prognosis, Debra and Nancy reveal their most vulnerable moments, as Debra struggles to reconcile her professional identity of activist social justice documentary filmmaker with that of stage-4 cancer patient. Facing the overwhelming bureaucracy and logistics of being a cancer patient, they try everything possible to stall Debra’s slowly declining health, including alternative healing methods like meditation, cannabis treatments, qi gong movement and sound-healing practices. Through it all, they lovingly work toward their common goal—Debra’s survival. With Debra at the helm, their on-camera honesty and candor offer a level of emotional access that is difficult to achieve when mediated by a film crew. They bravely put themselves on display, hoping that their experience would help others.
Debra Chasnoff and executive producer Carrie Lozano initiated the film project in 2015. The world-renowned UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center granted Debra full access to filming her medical treatments. From there forward, Debra and an intimate circle of family and friends collectively recorded over 200 hours of footage. In a unique co-creation, filmmakers Carrie Lozano, Lidia Szajko, Joan Lefkowitz and Kate Stilley Steiner completed the film with her wife Nancy Otto and editor Mike Shen. The team progressively assumed the roles of co-caregivers as well as co-creators, determined to carry Debra through to her final act, and her film through to completion.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS Debra Chasnoff Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker Debra Chasnoff was a nationally recognized champion of using film as an organizing tool for social justice campaigns. A pioneering leader, she was at the forefront of the international movement working to create safe and welcoming schools and communities. Debra’s highly acclaimed documentaries addressing youth and bias issues, including the groundbreaking film It’s Elementary, are widely hailed by educators and advocates as among the best tools available today to help open up dialogue and activism around many of the most challenging issues affecting young people’s lives and school environments. Her first film, Choosing Children, explored the once unheard of idea that lesbians and gay men could become parents after coming out. She won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for her film Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment. She was also the founder of GroundSpark, and served the organization in a directing capacity from 1982 until her death in 2017.
Kate Stilley Steiner Kate Stilley Steiner is a documentary filmmaking producer, director and editor. She also is a co-founder and co-director of Citizen Film, the documentary non-profit media organization she started in 2001 with Sam Ball and Sophie Constantinou. Her most recent producing credits include American Creed. The CPB-funded feature-length documentary premiered in 2018 in the PBS primetime core schedule and was one of 2018’s most widely carried documentaries. Debra Chasnoff’s long-time collaborator, Kate edited several films with her, including two in the Respect for All series. They also co-produced several titles together, including Let’s Get Real, It’s Still Elementary and One Wedding & a Revolution.
ABOUT OUR PARTNERS & CAMPAIGN PROGNOSIS – notes on living, in partnership with Bay Area organizations the Koret Foundation, Breast Cancer Action, J-Sei, and San Francisco Village, as well as national organizations International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA), and SAGE(Advocacy & Services for LGBT Elders), will spark discussion around the often challenging topics of serious illness, end of life care, and death. The film is designed to invite audiences to consider their mortality and discover ways to live more fully in the present.
