by Gary Morris

In City of Borders, a gay Israeli man says, “I kissed an Arab guy. This place allowed it to happen.” The speaker is referring to a gay bar – the only one – in Jerusalem. But in a sense, his words could apply to the QDoc Festival, which also allows “it” – queer self-expression, love, celebration – to happen. City of Borders kicks off the festival’s third year, and while society is evolving so rapidly (five states having approved gay marriage at press time) that the queer film festival may eventually become redundant, it remains at this point a window into our world, as indispensable as any space where queer folk congregate.

QDoc has a special importance as the only festival in the country devoted to gay, lesbian, bi and trans documentaries. Programmed by Russ Gage and David Weissman, it boasts the virtues of both depth and brevity, immersing viewers in a wide range of queer personalities and communities over a single weekend. Running Thursday, May 28 to Sunday, May 31 at the Clinton Street Theater, QDoc showcases 11 diverse documentary features, accompanied by two shorter works.

Previous years have spotlighted the fest’s role as a community as well as artistic event, with sell-out crowds spilling in and out of the theater and engaging in dialogue about the films and their issues. This year’s lineup promises to be equally winning, highlighting gay, lesbian, bi and trans senior housing and women’s sports, queercore rockers, the world’s first transsexual Member of Parliament, and more.

One of QDoc’s main attractions is its peek into subcultures that are rarely visible otherwise. Yun Suh’s City of Borders is a case in point. Probably few outside Jerusalem know about Shushan, a gay bar that caters to both Israelis and Palestinians. Shushan plays a variety of critical roles in these troubled cultures – dance club, performance space, safe haven, dating service. As the film opens, a group of Palestinian queens defy the Israeli military and sneak through a fence to “have a little fun.” Once they are at Shushan, the borders that obsess and define both Israeli and Palestine melt away: Enemies become friends, tricks, lovers, family.

Boody is a devout Muslim who endures death threats and performs at the bar as “Miss Haifa.” Gorgeous dykes Samira, an Israeli Palestinian, and Ravit, an Israeli, navigate Jerusalem’s homophobia and their own kind of culture clash. Hunky settler Adam wants to set up house with his bear boyfriend. Presiding over Shushan and its denizens is fearless Sa’ar, Jerusalem’s only gay city council member, who daily suffers the venomous insults of the council’s ultra-orthodox members.

Like Sa’ar, the people featured in the film show understandable fear, but also incredible bravery. Even Adam, stabbed by an orthodox Jew during a gay rights rally and with the scars to remind us, methodically makes plans to marry his lover and build a home. Highlights include a rarely glimpsed lesbian Shabbat ceremony, interviews with Jerusalemites on both sides of the issue, and Samira and Ravit’s ongoing tug-of-war over whether or not to have children. But the film’s heart is the strength of its subjects in a world that can turn deadly at any moment. Director Yun Suh will appear at the screening.

Friday’s double feature opens with U People. At first glance, the film, directed by Hanifah Walidah and Olive Demetrius, appears too feel-good to be true. A group of black women in a Brooklyn brownstone offer breathless testimonials about the transformative power of a two-day music video shoot they’ve just finished: “The whole room just took off into space,” one says.

Skepticism soon fades, however, as the women’s personalities and the filmmakers’ purpose come into focus. This remarkable documentary is a freewheeling blend of raucous humor, personal drama, gender theorizing, even film-production primer – all wrapped up in a queer-inflected tribute to the classic “house party,” in which black women get together to shoot the breeze and explore every nook and cranny of sisterhood.

U People came about when Walidah and Demetrius noticed that the casual, off-set footage they shot was as intriguing as the video itself. Snippets of the video are seen throughout, along with re-creations of high-style black culture in the Harlem Renaissance mode as a kind of queer spiritual muse. These stylish sequences are interwoven with striking, occasionally devastating dialogues as the women explore personal struggles to find their place. In one of the most searing stories, a butch woman describes her toxic relationship with her mother, whose nasty dismissal of her daughter as a “bull dagger” triggers a violent fight that changed both their lives.

Such serious scenes are counterpointed with moments of raunchy humor: “Everybody likes a big ass,” laughs one femme. Co-director Demetrius says something that’s typical of a film simmering with insights: “I have to come out every day, all the time. I’m very comfortable in my lesbian identity. I’m not proud. It’s like being proud of your big toe.” The statement foretells a future in which gender identity will be just as accepted as any other part of the person. Directors Walidah and Demetrius will attend the presentation.

Following U People is It Came from Kuchar, Jennifer Kroot’s warm documentary about gay twin filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar. The Kuchars, who live in San Francisco, are noted as major influences on trashmeister John Waters and other modern underground filmmakers. Indeed, Waters’ scandalous films have a clear antecedent in the Kuchars’ work, as the generous clips on view here reveal.

Titles like Hold Me While I’m Naked, Sins of the Fleshapoids, The Devil’s Cleavage, and Eclipse of the Sun Virgin mine the same camp territory as Waters, but there’s a rampaging creativity at work that makes them distinctive. The Kuchars, born of working-class Bronx parents, began making films as pre-teens in the 1950s. Their inspiration came from watching Hollywood melodramas and remaking them as dime-store epics. Both skilled visual artists, the twins devised their own special effects from the start, using puppets, miniatures, paintings – any kind of prop they could grab – even staging mock-Biblical floods and epic conflagrations.

The film depicts George boldly maintaining those early DIY traditions at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he teaches students how to make movies on almost no budget by doing it with them. It Came from Kuchar includes interviews with students, as well as actors, directors Wayne Wang and Atom Egoyan, Warhol superstars like Gerard Malanga and others in this well-rounded portrait of two treasures of filmdom – and gay culture. Director Kroot will appear at the fest.

The first of four documentaries on Saturday’s bill, Georgie Girl is like It Came from Kuchar, profiling a unique personality. This time it’s a member of the New Zealand Parliament who’s a Maori, a former sex worker and transsexual, Georgina Beyer. The rise of Beyer to a powerhouse role in New Zealand politics during the 1990s met with shock in some quarters, but most of her constituents – and her fellow MPs – clearly adore her. Georgie Girl, directed by Annie Goldson and Peter Wells, gives plenty cause why.

Beyer, whose voice brings to mind Dame Edna’s, is absolutely authoritative, funny and direct – as she’d have to be to gain the respect of the largely white rural population that comprises her constituency. Unlike most politicians, Beyer is accessible, whether she’s judging a children’s sheep-riding contest or visiting an old woman in a retirement home. Salt-of-the-earth types cheer her on. As one elderly woman says, “She has a wonderful range of talent. She could go to the top!”

The film doesn’t shy away from Beyer’s controversial and sometimes troubled history – prostitution, being gaybashed and raped, and going on drug binges to how she says “obliterate my mind.” Vintage footage shows her as an exotic dancer in drag clubs. Beyer’s comfort level in her own skin is unmistakable, and when she tells a reporter she had no qualms about undergoing her sex change – despite the physical pain and psychological adjustments – we believe her. That’s how strong and self-directed she is.

Following this singular profile is a group portrait, groundbreaking 1977 documentary Word Is Out. Here 26 queer folk talk about their lives. The film has much to say about pre-liberation gay life and those who survived it. Tede Matthews, alluring in multicolored blouse and nose ring, discusses his “early drag feelings” and pointedly reminds us that “all clothes are drag.” George Mendenhall recalls his teenage years as a sexual aggressor with men in their forties and fifties. Pat Bond drolly describes lesbian military life, particularly the rigid behavior codes within her group: “You were only allowed to wear Old Spice and jockey shorts!” Inevitably, there are grim accounts of the unholy trinity of the medical establishment, the church, and the government conspiring to destroy some of these people for the crime of trying to be themselves.

One reason the film has not dated is because its subjects are so vibrant and individuated: So accustomed to defending themselves, they even confront the filmmakers. The lovely, late septuagenarian Elsa Gidlow says bluntly, “You want to fit me into a structure that you have — this happens to be a character who doesn’t want to be pushed around.” Gidlow, a poet, shifts the focus to the human condition, in the process giving the film a breadth and depth that keep it relevant.

Women’s sports is a niche with which some of us are not conversant – not surprising, given the lengths to which male-dominated institutions, and some individuals, have gone to suppress it. Within that general suppression is homophobia. Training Rules, directed by Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker, is an unsettling but must-see story of the enormous damage one person driven by “religious” convictions can affect upon young minds. The perpetrator here is Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland. Portland was notorious among students for her three rules: “No drinking, no drugs, no lesbians.” Aided by an indifferent administration, cheered on by alumni for her ability to win, Portland simply shrugged off the school’s anti-discrimination policy, going after her players’ sexual orientations with a vengeance.

A player didn’t have to be gay to invoke the coach’s wrath; she could associate with a lesbian, or even be straight but seem gay to Portland. And her crusade was all-encompassing: “I’ll tell the school, the media, and your parents. I’ll revoke your scholarship. You’ll never work in sports again.” Training Rules tells the story of this appalling character whose career spanned 27 years (1980-2007), and how a gifted straight player, Jennifer Harris, fought back. The film mixes game footage and interviews with diversity trainers and lesbian coaches from other sports, and, of course, the young women victimized by Portland’s reign of terror.

Most disturbing are these latter interviews; some of the women, brilliant players by all accounts, remain scarred by their experiences. Directors Mosbacher (appearing at the fest) and Yacker deserve kudos for clearly laying out the issues and personalities in this wrenching story. Accompanying Training Rules is the short Breakin’ the Glass, a lively glimpse of the rise and fall of the all-female American Basketball League.

Wrapping up Saturday’s program is Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band. Pansy Division is the most celebrated group from the rarefied realm of queercore, aka homocore, a 1980s offshoot of three-chord punk rock filtered through a queer lens. Pansy Division was one of numerous bands working the genre, but it was the most prominent, infamous for its blatantly sexual lyrics and for opening for megastars Green Day.

In interviews with band members, promoters and label owners, along with extensive concert and rehearsal footage, director Michael Carmona paints an affectionate portrait of the group, the vagaries of the music business, and how self-expression is often the main – sometimes the only – payoff. The head “pansy” is sexy Jim Ginoli, who sings, plays guitar and pens the outrageous lyrics. Sample: “We’re queer rockers! / We’re the buttfuckers of rock and roll / We want to sock it to your hole!” A detailed look at the daily life of driven DIY rockers, Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band, well, rocks. Ginoli will attend the screening.

Sunday’s quartet of films starts with one of the fest’s knockouts, A Place to Live: The Story of Triangle Square. With gay boomers aging rapidly alongside their straight counterparts, this documentary couldn’t be more timely. Directed by Carolyn Coal, the film follows the creation of Los Angeles’ first affordable housing project for gay, lesbian, bi and trans seniors. Coal profiles seven gay men and lesbians who join the lottery in hopes of securing one of 104 apartments. The “Triangle Square Seven” are reminiscent of the cast of Word Is Out – there’s a shared sense of profound, sometimes traumatizing experience with pre-Stonewall American culture.

Seventy-five-year-old Nancy remembers the sad “masquerade” of queer life, thinking as a teenager that gay people must be “the dregs of society” if they had to disguise themselves to avoid being hurt or killed. Sixty-two-year-old Philip walks with a cane, the result of a football injury he suffered from “trying to be a man.” There’s high drama as Nancy, Philip, and five others nervously hope, pray and wait to see if each next step toward reaching their goal is a positive one.

The building is conveniently located in Hollywood, and the apartments themselves are simple and elegant, each with a balcony. As we get to know these people, Triangle becomes more than a name. Seen through their eyes, it becomes a kind of dream space, a place of ease and acceptance and camaraderie, and a vindication for a past whose wounds remain. Producer Cynthia Childs will appear at the screening.

Next up is Walter McIntosh’s Projecting the Body, a portrait of Stephen Cummins. Cummins was an experimental filmmaker in Australia, whose short films and TV commercials can be viewed as a more avant-garde version of the vaunted New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. Hailing from a rural area, he moved to Sydney in his twenties and became a key member of an innovative queer arts scene there, integrating dance, photography, performance and cinema in his work.

Projecting the Body assesses Cummins’ life and career, with ample selections from his films. Taste the Difference is an extreme close-up of two men kissing, made for Australian television. Community Advancement startlingly visualizes AIDS as a Grim Reaper with a bowling ball, knocking down people of all ages, races and sexes. Resonance transforms a brutal gay bashing (based on Cummins’ own experience) into a homoerotic boxing ballet. During his short filmography, Cummins combined activist politics with a stunning visual sense, and his 1997 death at age 37 was indeed a loss. The QDoc program includes Resonance.

Joan Nestle resembles Cummins in one respect: She, too, mixes politics with artistry, the latter embodied in her writings – erotica, memoirs, poetry – and performance. Nestle was also a rebel. One of the most intriguing sections of Joyce Warshow’s loving biography, Hands on the Pulse, examines Nestle’s pivotal role, at the height of the 1980s feminist, anti-porn “sex wars,” celebrating lesbianism and butch-femme relationships in particular.

A self-described femme, Nestle pioneered the backward glance at 1950s gay bar culture, finding power in women who dressed like men and early versions of the lipstick lesbian – something we now take for granted. The film explores Nestle’s unusual upbringing by a mother who became a prostitute; her early activism and teaching; and her co-founding of the indispensable Lesbian Herstory Archives. The Lambda Award-winning Nestle emerges as a generous, brilliantly articulate woman with an endless capacity for discovery, and a hero to women – and men – seeking liberation.

The fest concludes with Fig Trees, written and directed by Canadian auteur John Greyson. Greyson is known for his experimental films (Lilies, Zero Patience) that incorporate all manner of “cinemagic,” from split screens to kaleidoscopic effects and, in this case, a boy soprano and an animated albino squirrel with red eyes. Here Greyson deploys more than his usual share of sleight-of-hand, to often dazzling effect. Originally a music and video installation, the film is at heart a tribute to two “saints” of the AIDS activist movement: Cape Town’s Zackie Achmat, who famously boycotted drug companies (and earned their wrath via a lawsuit) for refusing to provide low-cost meds to South Africans; and Toronto’s Tim McCaskell, a tireless agitator.

Their stories are juxtaposed with gay icons Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, “kidnapping” them to make an opera out of their lives. (The gorgeous music, by David Wall, samples everything from medieval polyphony and classical opera to more contemporary sounds.) While this may sound too outré to be intelligible, Greyson’s constant inventiveness keeps the eye and mind riveted.

In a typical, irresistibly over-the-top sequence, a black queen dressed in candy colors and surrounded by a rainbow of pills sings a version of Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues (Marry Me Bill)” that indicts Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Big Pharma for not doing more to stop the pandemic: “I was on your side, Bill,” croons the queen, “when you were spending. I believed you, Bill, when you said AIDS was ending.... / Come on and cure me now, Bill!” It’s just one of the many surprising pleasures of Fig Trees, a high point and fitting end to a festival that educates as it entertains.

QDoc runs May 28-31 at Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St.

Individual tickets are $8 general admission, $6 student/senior 62+, with festival passes and admission to the opening night film and party available.

Visit www.queerdocfest.org for details.