Having directed/produced two major queer documentaries in the past : The Cockettes (2002) and We Were Here (2011), Emmy Award nominated filmmaker David Weissman has now created a documentary storytelling project focused on older gay men.
In each of his ‘Conversations With Gay Elders’ Weissman conducts interviews with gay men in their 70’s as they reflect on their often difficult closeted lives which predated the gay liberation movements that didn’t start until after Stonewall. By nature of their age, they are all also survivors of the AIDS era, but none of them escaped unscathed.
The whole interview in this film is with the disarmingly charming twinkly-eyed former pastor Kerby Lauderdale. Gently probed by Weismann this 77 year man relates details of discovering his sexuality as a child, being threatened half to death by his father, and then marrying his best friend after deciding that living life with another man could never be a possibility.
It’s impossible not to be moved by this articulate man’s frankness and sheer honesty as he steered his closeted life with his wife and four adopted children into what he thought was the correct path for them all. In many respects Lauderdale was one of the lucky ones, for when he eventually confronted his wife with the fact that his sexaulity issues that he had mentioned prior to marriage could no longer be suppressed, they parted amicably and are still very good friends.
Their divorce in the 1980’s actually became the subject of a book and so there is archival footage of them doing the rounds of the daytime TV talk shows discussing ‘I Married A Gay Man ‘ etc.
Lauderdale’s luck changed when we finally was ‘out’ and in the first loving relationship of his life, but that sadly ended prematurely.
Weissman’s project is so much more than just oral histories as he allows men like Lauderdale to paint a very vivid picture of how they made their life choices from very limited options and how it all turned out. The fact that their own liberation often coincided with advent of the AIDS pandemic so often meant that they then had no control over their own narrative after all.
The mere notion that a one hour one-on-one interview/conversation could be so utterly gripping like this owes a lot to Weissman’s careful selection of participants. But whether like he, and his subjects, you a senior yourself or not is irrelevant as there is so much that all of us gay men (and women) can really relate too on a personal level from these remark stories.
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Labels: 2018, documentary
