James Kleinmann

Director Mercedes Kane’s touching and surprisingly expansive feature documentary Art and Pep, which received its world premiere at the 40th anniversary Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Film Festival, introduces us to two Chicagoans, Art Johnston and José Pepe Peña, who’ve been at the centre of the city’s queer community together for nearly fifty years. Partners in life and in business, they’ve owned and run the popular Boystown’s bar Sidetrack since April 1982. Signless and windowless, the bar first opened with homophobic spray-painted graffiti on the front door that read, ‘fag bar’. At least its patrons knew where to come. That first night was such a success that Art and Pep had to borrow beer from a neighboring bar after they’d run out. 

Over the decades, Sidetrack has thrived and become a vibrant and inclusive LGBTQ+ community space, with its absence deeply felt during the pandemic-induced shutdown of 2020 as the film documents. There may not have been a “sip-in” there like at Julius in 1966, or a riot like at Stonewall in ’69 or the Black Cat Tavern two years before that, but Art and Pep makes a strong case for Sidetrack’s place among the nation’s most significant queer bars; a watering hole that’s helped to sustain the community through its gains and losses and aided with activism fundraising. With Sidetrack, Art and Pep have not only created local jobs, but a sense of family among their many employees, with several contributing interviews throughout the film, including one barman who tearfully recalls the owners offering to adopt him if he couldn’t successfully apply for US citizenship. 

With a wealth of archive video footage and photographs (including the bar’s opening night), and stylish comic strip style animated sequences (by Dom Soo, Jackie Chand, and Bobby Sims), Kane engagingly chronicles the entwined narrative of Art and Pep’s love story and the history of Sidetrack. It’s a history that inevitably leads to the height of the AIDS crisis, with countless members of the community and the bar’s staff lost, while Art stood at the forefront of the fight for the city to take action. 

Through Art and Pep’s story, Kane traces the history of LGBTQ+ activism in Chicago, including ACT UP, leading to the formation of Equality Illinois, co-founded by Art, and the continuing fight for equal rights for all. Many of the demonstrations in the late 80s and early 90s targeted the city’s then Mayor Richard Daley, who eventually began to listen and take action. One surprising detail is the support that queer activists found among the city’s Catholic nuns. When it comes to documentaries and narrative features, the focus has generally been on ACT UP in New York and Los Angeles, so it is refreshing to see Chicago’s chapter receive attention here, along with recognition for the city’s key activist figures such as Laurie Dittman, Jon-Henri Damski, Rick Garcia, and Danny Sotomayor, who died of AIDS in 1992 aged 33. 

As Art and Pep take part in Chicago’s 2020 pride march, they’re moved by its refocused, less corporate, more grassroots and political purpose, and its centering of Black trans lives; reminding them of the AIDS activism that they’d been such a vital part of. Art has clearly been an admired mentor and inspiration to many, including two current Black queer community leaders, State Senator Mike Simmons (Illinois’ first openly LGBTQ+ state senator) and Anna DeShawn, founder of E3 Radio. As we see them interact there’s a sense of the baton being passed on to a new generation.

Always at Art’s side, Pep is the quieter interview subject of the two, but becomes particularly animated when talking about the much-loved Musical Mondays night he created and has VJed at Sidetrack since 1983, which includes the tradition of exuberantly throwing paper napkins in the air. It’s moving to see this couple, often in intimate fly-on-the-wall footage shot by DP Sanghoon Lee, who’ve spent so much of their lives together navigate aging, the prospect of retirement, and the health issues that come along when Art is hospitalized with Covid. It’s also fascinating to get a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to reopen a bar in 2021 with severe restrictions still in place and their efforts are a testament to the resilience of queer bars across the nation that have managed to operate over the past two years. At its core, Art and Pep is an inspiring reminder of what the LGBTQ+ community can be at its best, and a tribute to the vital role that our cherished bars continue to have at the centre of it.

Showings – select to order tickets:

Fri, Mar 17th, 7:00 PM @ Rialto Cinemas® #9

[Available March 20, 12:00 AM – March 30, 12:00 AM, 2023] Stream online…

Even if you didn’t know the full title of the bestselling memoir by entertainment journalist Michael Ausiello that this film is based on—Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies—within the opening moments you’ll find out where it’s eventually headed. We see a heathy looking, but distraught Michael (Jim Parsons) in a hospital bed lovingly facing an ailing Kit (Ben Aldridge) with Michael’s voice-over telling us, “this isn’t how our story was supposed to end”. He then takes us back through their lives together, from the moment he first caught sight of the “sweatband-wearing matinee idol” on jock night at a New York gay club he was dragged to by his colleague Nick (an appealingly effervescent Jeffery Self), through the highs and lows of their relationship, right up until this tragic point. No spoiler alert required: you’ll need to keep the Kleenex handy.

When Michael takes us back to the start, he’s working as a staff writer for TV Guide, pitching stories about Gilmore Girls to his editor who is more interested in him covering the reality show Fear Factor. Both of which are airing at the time, given that this is the early 2000s, with Felicitybeing Michael’s favourite contemporary series. His passion for and deep knowledge of television informs how he views the world and his relationship with Kit, which is nicely woven into the fabric of the film by director Michael Showalter (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Big Sick). In a bold stylistic choice, the flashbacks to Michael’s childhood are in the form of an imagined family sitcom, The Ausiellos. Complete with canned laughter and intentionally treacly incongruous music, the sequences both playfully and poignantly take us through a youth spent watching soaps with his mom and being bullied at school for being an overweight gay kid with a dead dad, with actor Brody Caines capturing the sweetness and insecurities of the young Michael. 

As our leading men have their nightclub meet-cute, Michael immediately makes a connection to a TV show—the 80s hit with a killer theme tune, Knight Rider—in which David Hasselhoff’s character, Michael, had a talking car named Kit. Meanwhile, photographer Kit who doesn’t even own a TV and has never heard of the show, kindly humours Michael that the coincidence must mean that their meeting is kismet. Kit’s rather full-on and tipsy bff Nina (a fun Nikki M. James making the most of every second she’s on screen) is on hand to inform Michael that he’s just Kit’s type: “a tall dweeb”. While Kit—”the hero” of the book’s title—is the epitome of cool in Michael’s eyes, not to mention dashingly handsome. There’s instant chemistry there and I was quickly rooting for them get together and for their relationship to work. Early on at least, there’s a similar dynamic to the central relationship in Bros, with Michael feeling a little inadequate next to the attractive and assured Kit, who has until now been happily playing the field and never committed to having a boyfriend. As Michael puts it—in TV terms of course—he’s a “network soap” entering Kit’s sophisticated world that’s more “premium cable”. 

Sprinkled with the kind of quirky details that tend to only come from a story based on real life, Spoiler Alert captures all the excitement and uncertainty of getting to know someone and falling in love; the significance attached to creating some closet space for their things, who says I love you first, and the anxiety over whether our secret obsessions once revealed might be a deal-breaker. David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage’s well-crafted screenplay requires a skillful blend of comic timing and emotional depth from its leads, and crucially Parsons and Aldridge both deliver excellent performances that are precise yet feel effortless and natural and invite us in. Parsons brings a sharp wit combined with an adorable vulnerability to the tightly-wound Michael, who has some self-esteem issues as a self-described “FFK” (former fat kid) and doesn’t quite realize he’s a catch too. Aldridge (who appeared in the first season of Fleabag and stars as Thomas Wayne in Pennyworth) might be a dreamboat with a smile that has Julia Roberts levels of disarming charm but, like his character, he never rests on his looks, grounding Kit in a sense that he hasn’t quite got life figured out yet despite his alluring confidence and charisma. Although this story is told from Michael’s perspective looking back on his lost love, he doesn’t canonize Kit, or ignore the issues in the relationship. 

While Michael and his mother simultaneously realized that he was gay as a pre-teen watching Days of Our Lives together, Kit’s queer awakening and self-acceptance came more recently, and when we first meet him he hasn’t yet come out to his parents, Marilyn (Sally Field) and Bob (Bill Irwin). Cue a deliciously awkward sequence when they unexpectedly come to stay at Kit’s apartment. Although Michael has throughly “de-gayed” Kit’s room by the time they arrive—with the help of Kit’s “monosyllabic” queer roommate Kirby (a hilariously deadpan Sadie Scott)—removing any telltale clothes, books, DVDs, and photographs, the one thing that remains is the rainbow flag of giveaways, Michael himself. Field and Irwin make for an endearing double act, with the rhythms of people who’ve spent a lifetime in each other’s company, bringing levity and an affecting warmth to this loving couple who quickly embrace Michael as part of the family.

When it comes to Kit’s inevitable illness, the scenes of medial appointments, treatment, and agonizing pain are just raw enough to make things feel authentic, without becoming too distressing for the audience. It’s easy enough to imagine what we don’t see or hear, like the effective scene of Kit telling his parents about his diagnosis, which we observe out of earshot through a closed window from outside the house.

With the help of Peter Teschner’s tight editing, Showalter keeps things pacey and continually engaging. Knowing how it’s all going to end, particularly given that this is based on a real relationship, gives even the most buoyant and romantic scenes an edge and encourages us to pay close attention, conscious that all of their time together is precious. The desire to capture a fleeting moment is represented in the photographs that the men take of each other, including their annual self-timed portrait next to their Christmas tree. Along with soap operas, one of Michael’s lifelong obsessions is the festive season and as he reflects back on his life with Kit he measures their years together in Christmas trees. It’s an element that makes this romantic gay weepie a welcome addition to the growing number of LGBTQ+ Christmas movies. Well, if Gremlins and Die Hard count as Christmas flicks, this one definitely does. 

Along with Kylie, Robyn, and Drag Race, there’s added queer culture in the form of Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski as Kit’s coworker Sebastian, who Michael jealously refers to as Tom Daley’s doppelgänger. In a nice visual flourish at one point, we see a ripped Porowski through Michael’s eyes in a Speedo ready to take a dive at the Olympics. Although Michael has his suspicions that something is going on between the men, he stews in his concerns rather than directly addressing it with Kit, villainizing him in the TV show playing out in his head. As the years go by, the film tracks the decline in open communication between the two, leading to a simple but powerfully moving scene as the end draws near with them discussing what lies ahead for both of them. 

When we hear, or even speak the words “till death do us part” as a promise to another human, their overfamiliarity can rob them of some their meaning. Happily ever after only happens in fairy tales. In real life, if a relationship goes the distance, then sooner or later its eventual conclusion is inevitable. For obvious reasons, most of us don’t spend too much time dwelling on death, but when we’re forced to face it in our lives with the loss of a loved one, or vicariously through movies or television, it tends to remind us to appreciate and cherish those who we care about most. Spoiler Alert is heartbreaking but beautifully life-affirming, and made me hold me husband’s hand that bit tighter, and hug him that bit closer.

Rita Baghdadi’s feature documentary Sirens, which world premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, is a nuanced, intimate, and upbeat portrait of Lebanon’s only all-female thrash metal band, Slave to Sirens. Although it opens with footage of protests on the streets of Beirut with chants of “revolution” and shots of graffiti with phrases like, “homophobia is a crime”, Baghdadi’s focus for the first third of the film is introducing the band and giving us a sense of its history and the dynamics between the five members, rather than Lebanon’s uneasy social and political state.

Cut with a pace and an energy that captures the passionate spirit of the band by editor Grace Zahrah, it’s a refreshing, stigma-busting look at the country through the lens of these young women as they establish their identities that go against the grain and strive to build their careers in a place where there’s a lack of venues and a limited audience for their brand of music. As we’re given an engaging insight into the band’s creative process through fly-on-the-wall composing session and rehearsal footage, it’s clear how residual, generational scars from the country’s civil war and recent events, like the devastating Port of Beirut explosion in August 2020, feed into their music and performances. 

We spend most of the film’s running time with founding members, rhythm guitarist Lilas Mayassi and lead guitarist Shery Bechara, following Lilas most closely. The two have a romantic history with one another, and although both have moved on in their dating lives by the time we meet them, some unresolved issues linger which start to complicate band life as we witness in some increasingly tense songwriting sessions. Baghdadi, who takes on much of the cinematography herself, clearly earned the trust of these young women and is patient as they begin to open up about themselves. We never get the sense that she’s forcing or manipulating what happens on screen, just there to capture it unfolding.

Lilas being filmed in lesbian bars, talking about making out with women, and allowing the cameras into her home when a girl she is dating travels across the border from Syria to visit would be exposing under any circumstances, but given that she lives with her mother in the suburbs of Beirut, it feels particularly brave. As a caption informs us, “Article 534 of the law is vague. It says that any sexual relations that ‘contradicts the laws of nature’ is punishable by up to one year in prison”. In spite of this, although understandably circumspect when necessary, we see Shery and Lilas beginning to live more openly and boldly as queer women. Meanwhile, we don’t get to know much about the other Sirens, bassist Alma, vocalist Maya, and drummer Tatyana, outside of their time in the band. 

Pre-pandemic, we follow the Sirens to Glastonbury when a rare opportunity to perform internationally comes up. Taking in the crowds and atmosphere at the festival’s world famous Pyramid stage, we then see the band open their potentially career-changing set to an empty field, without so much as tumbleweed in the air. Before long though, there’s a small but appreciative group of Glasto headbangers getting into it. Throughout the film, Baghdadi only gives us sparing flashes of the band performing, which serve to convey their considerable musical talent and stage presence without being potentially off-putting to non-metalhead viewers whose ears might not being able to take too much of their intense sound. Not much of a mettaler myself, I did find myself wanting to hear more and immediately downloaded their 2018 EP Terminal Leeches, which I’m nodding along to as I write. 

When it comes to other music in the film, there’s a beautifully poignant score by frequent Céline Sciamma collaborator, composer Jean-Baptiste de Laubier aka Para One, which makes for a striking contrast to the band’s output and helps to bring out the emotional layers. Frequently visually stunning, the interiors have a raw vertité style while there are some breathtaking shots of natural beauty in the nearby mountains; sunsets, vividly coloured flowers, and underwater camerawork, along with gorgeous behind the scenes tableaux of the band on photoshoots.

Ultimately, as the end credits rolled, it was the band’s creative talent and perseverance to succeed that stayed with me, and I’m excited about the potential of this film—produced by Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph’s Animal Pictures—to introduce them to a wealth of new horn-signing, headbanging fans, even unlikely ones like me.

Chase Joynt’s follow up to his exceptional No Ordinary Man (co-directed with Aisling Chin-Yee) about the life of jazz musician Billy Tipton, is the equally thrillingly and similarly genre-defying feature Framing Ages—expanding upon his own 2019 short—which just had its world premiere in the NEXT lineup at Sundance. It’s a fitting section of the festival for the film to play given that it not only poses questions about what is next in the evolution of the representation of trans lives on screen, but also continually challenges broader notions about storytelling and form. 

Agnes is the pseudonym of a trans woman who sought gender affirming surgery in the late 1950s, taking part in research interviews conducted by sociologist Harold Garfinkel at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Garfinkel would go on to write about his conversations with her as a case study, which became widely known when it was published in 1967’s Studies in Ethnomethodology. Agnes would later admit to fabricating elements of her medical history in order to gain the health care she needed. In the process of doing his own research on Agnes in the UCLA archives in 2017, Chase discovered a rusted cabinet containing case files on numerous other gender non-conforming folks who had also been interviewed by Garfinkel. 

This isn’t a biographical documentary about his work at UCLA, instead it takes the radical approach of using the framing device of a contemporary TV talk show, inspired by The Mike Wallace Interview, with Joynt taking on the role of host and interrogator (asking Garfinkel’s questions), while some of toady’s most prominent trans creatives embody the case study subjects. 

Artist Zackary Drucker takes on the rather enigmatic Agnes who doesn’t have any other gender non-conforming people in her life, but has a longterm boyfriend and works as a secretary. While Angelica Ross inhabits Georgia, a religious trans woman from the South who although is happily married talks about the discrimination she faces from police and her difficulty in finding employment. Silas Howard portrays World War II vet Denny who has steady work and wife, and is invasively questioned about using shared toilet facilities. We hear Henry, embodied by Max Wolf Valerio, discuss the difficulties that having official identification that does not match his gender identity has caused him, detailing an incident where a police officer pulled him over and scratched off the paint he’d put on his driver’s license to cover the prohibitive ‘F’. Trans teenager Jimmy, as played by Stephen Ira, brings a playful humour to many of is answers and exudes a relaxed confidence in himself and his gender identity that suggests a certainty that he is right and the rest of the world is wrong. We also learn the detail that his mother accompanied him to the session, a possible sign of her acceptance. Some of the most fascinating moments in the film come while Jen Richards is playing Barbara. Whereas Agnes describes being isolated from other trans people, Barbara, as interpreted by Richards, has a sense of joy as she discusses being part of a network of trans women which she describes as being “like a club”. 

Cinematographer Aubree Bernier-Clarke captures each of these talk show performances in crisp black and white. While recreations are often used to pad out or to provide a visual element in other documentaries, here they form the heart of it; compelling, nuanced and emotionally rich, they offer a glimpse into the inner lives of these subjects with the actors mining the transcripts for subtext and exploring the nuance of what’s spoken and deliberately left unsaid. Brought to life in this way, I wanted to hear these transcripts in their entirety and to know every detail about these people. The TV talk show format is effective in exploring the wrestling power dynamic of cis interviewer and trans subject, while also acknowledges the importance of the talk show, for better or worse, in the history of trans visibility. 

We also see brief out of character interactions between Joynt and the actors before the interviews begin, as they discuss a line in the script or consider how the scene might play out. These are “off camera” moments in a film where the cameras are never really off, but rather the frame shifts to capture another layer of meaning and another aspect of creating the film. In an insightful parallel, each performer is interviewed as themselves by Joynt about their participation in Framing Agnes, what it means to them to embody these gender non-conforming folks from the past and, as we also saw in No Ordinary Man, how the experiences of these case study subjects relate to their own lives. Angelica Ross for instance finds connections with Georgia, while voicing her initial reluctance about taking part in the project and her frustration with the way that her own story often gets framed as “exceptional”, just as Christine Jorgensen’s and Agnes’ stories were before her. While Max Wolf Valerio reflects on the way that Henry wrote about his own post-World War II life, just as Valerio has with works such as The Testosterone Files and continues to do so with his poetry. 

While what the actors bring from the own lives allows them to fully inhabit these voices from the past, the film also raises questions about what assumptions we bring with us when we encounter historical trans folks. In reading and interpreting these medical transcripts from over half a century ago what imaginative license do we use and what do we ultimately want to get from these figures to help us navigate our own lives today? The dichotomy of medical and societal categorization that both affirms existence and places people in potentially restricting boxes is also examined. These questions emerge as the film progresses and are explicitly voiced by the eloquent Jules Gill-Peterson, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and author of Histories of the Transgender Child in an insightful and stimulating interview which is used extensively throughout the film. While the acting performances are extraordinary, and there’s so much power in even brief moments, such as an intimate exchange of glances between Angelica Ross as Georgia and Brian Michael Smith in church, these recreations are interrogated for what is being brought to them from our present day perspective. 

Joynt and his collaborators begin by asking who Agnes was, her place in history, and how she should be framed now, and expand their own frame to question what we might hope to gain by looking back and how much of ourselves we might project on to those we discover, while continuing the conversation about trans visibility sparked by Disclosure. It is a declaration that it’s not enough for gender non-conforming people to tell their own stories, but new forms must be forged in which to do so. The result is an exhilarating endeavor, cerebral, but accessible and often deeply moving, that continually demands its viewer to be an active participant. 

By James Kleinmann 

Framing Agnes world premiered in the NEXT section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. For details of further screenings head to Festival.Sundance.org.