LBGT – Memphis Flyer

Thursday night sees the long-awaited national debut of Morgan Jon Fox’s streaming series Feral.

“It’s been almost exactly two years since we wrapped filming,” says Fox, the pioneering Memphis director whose films like This Is What Love In Action Looks Like and Blue Citrus Hearts have been attracting acclaim for more than a decade.

Seth Daniel in Feral

Feral is the flagship original series of a new streaming service called Dekkoo, which will bring LBGT themed films and series to a national audience. It was originally scheduled for release last summer, when I wrote this in-depth Memphis Flyer cover feature about the show. “I’m so excited for it to finally come out, but there were some moments there, when we had so many supposed release dates, that I was a little worried, to be honest. You hear nightmare stories about projects that never end up being released, for whatever complications. But as it tuns out, it’s just that it’s a brand new company that took a lot longer than they planned to get their footing.”

The Dekkoo app is available on Roku and Apple TV, or through Google Play and iTunes, and boasts “the largest streaming collection of gay-centric entertainment available boasting a larger selection than Netflix or Amazon Video.”

Here’s an exclusive clip from Feral:

FERAL – Exclusive Clip – 2 from Morgan Jon Fox on Vimeo.

Morgan Jon Fox’s Series Feral Celebrates National Premiere With Local Screening (2)

“I feel great about it,” he says. “A lot of things aligned perfectly in my head. I took some time off from my career to work on other, bigger productions. I worked with Craig Brewer on his projects, and I worked as a producer and assistant director on other projects all around the country. It was truly like going to film school. Everything aligned perfectly for crew members to help make it and edit it and actors to be in it. All of those things fell into place in a way I feel lucky and fortunate for. “

In the two years since filming completed, many of the show’s stars have seen their careers take an upward trajectory, such as singer/songwriter Julian Baker. “I saw her for the first time in my back yard at a going away party for my friend Ryan Azada. She played solo acoustic, just a few songs. I knew that she was in a band with some guys playing harder stuff, but this was the first time I had seen her. It was an incredible moment that I’ll never forget…the lights in the back yard, all these people there to say goodbye to a good friend of hours. It was a golden moment. I knew this person was going to be huge star. Her music was coming from an emotional, authentic space, and that was the space I was working out of to create Feral. She hadn’t even recorded anything except on her iPhone. The songs on her Soundcloud page had from 5-30 listens. By the time it got around to actually being released, I had to work with her publicist, who had to approve the way we mentioned her in our press releases. She had a team now. Memphis has always had a hotbed for music, but people like Julian Baker don’t come around all the time. She’s a rare being.”

The series other big music stars, the Midtown punk band Nots, just opened Gonerfest last weekend before embarking on a huge east coast tour. Female lead Leah Beth Bolton is now an on-air reporter for Fox 24 in Memphis. “She’s doing traffic, which I think is so cool. It’s perfect for her personality. She brought so much light to the project. Her character is essential, because there so much depressing shit happening, and dudes taking themselves very seriously. She inserts a necessary emotional perspective. ‘Stop being so self-absorbed, dudes!’”

Breezy Lucia

Leah Beth Bolton, Chase Brother, Seth Daneil, and Jordan Nichols in Feral.

Ryan Masson and Seth Daniel are now working actors in Los Angeles, and Jordan Nichols is a stage actor and director who, Fox says, “is acting and directing every play, and winning awards every year. He’s a dedicated actor who works very hard, but he has a natural inclination.”

“There are a lot of stereotypical gay characters presented in media. They tend to be comic relief, or stuck up fashion designers. There’s also stereotypes about the South: It’s backwards, the Bible Belt, all those things. I’ve dealt with those things in my previous work, and I didn’t have a desire or energy to continue to tackle those things.”

Breezy Lucia

Seth Daniel and director Morgan Jon Fox on the set of Feral

Fox says his goal for Feral was to present a different view of life in the South “I just wanted to reflect what it was like for me growing up in this Midtown community of artists, where everyone’s kind of smushed together. You go to the Cove, which isn’t a gay bar. You go to Otherlands, which isn’t a gay coffee shop. When you’re a Midtown artist, you’re a Midtown artist, whether you’re a queer artist or a straight artist. I love that about this community. The problems that affect me and young people in their 20s in Midtown are the same problems that anyone in our position would deal with. They’re universal. I just wanted them to be people in this situation who intermingle in a very regular way. I didn’t want them to be a community of wealth. I didn’t want them only going to gay bars or going gay things. I didn’t want them to be a part of a South that is hateful or pressing them…I wanted the fact that they’re gay to be unremarkable.”

Fox and Dekkoo will host a release party at Studio on the Square on Thursday, Oct. 6, where the first five episodes of the series will be shown on the big screen. Showtime will be at 7:30 PM.

Morgan Jon Fox’s Series Feral Celebrates National Premiere With Local Screening

The 19th year of the Outflix Film Festival finds it at a crossroads. Outgoing director Jeffrey Harwood thinks it’s a good place to be. “I’ve been working with Outflix since 2008,” and serving as director for two years, he says. “It really has been a learning experience for me, seeing the crowds get bigger and the movies change. The quality of the films we have has changed. They’ve gotten better.”

Harwood says queer cinema worldwide has expanded both in scope and subject matter. This year’s Outflix features works from Sweden, Germany, Chile, Argentina, the U.K., Ireland, France, and India. Subject matter has expanded from coming out stories and campy comedies to stories that encompass every aspect of life. “We’re seeing universal issues approached in LGBT terms — family issues, adoptions. These films aren’t all just about being gay, but because these characters are gay, it influences how they approach life. I think that’s one of the good ways that LGBT cinema is growing. We still have the campy comedies and the coming out stories, and we need them, because there are still people coming out — especially in the ‘flyover zone.’ People still need these stories, but for the rest of the community, we’re seeing ourselves reflected in far more and different ways than we were even five years ago,” Harwood says.

The opening night film is Girls Lost, directed by Alexandra-Therese Keining. It’s the story of a trio of teenage outcasts who find a magic flower that turns them into boys. Once gender switched, they find attitudes toward them have changed dramatically. “The movie speaks to transgender issues and misogyny. They find that as boys, they are completely accepted. One of the girls discovers that the reason that she never felt at home [as a girl] is because this is who she is. She is trans.”

Friday evening’s programming features films aimed at young people. In Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, “A 17-year-old preacher’s kid is having a swim party for his birthday. One of his friends named Logan is attracted to him, and Henry is attracted to another guy who is not out yet. It examines the role of not just homosexuality, but sexuality and gender in role types. There are people at the party who are at various points on the spectrum of acceptance,” Harwood says.

Harwood is leaving Memphis to go to graduate school in Ohio, so this will be his last year as director. “We are going to be having a town hall on Sunday. We’ll fill the cinema at Ridgeway. This is an opportunity for a talkback, for the public to say what they like about Outflix, and what they would like to see changed … We want to talk about where we want to take Outflix, because next year is our 20th anniversary. So where does it need to go? How does it need to grow? … LGBT film festivals are still needed, because it’s an opportunity for us to come together in one place and an opportunity to educate the community. Here we are, we’re a part of Memphis, but you don’t know who we are. Come watch our films, and learn a little bit about us.”

Check It

Friday, September 9, 9:25 p.m.

It’s an old TV trope — Kid gets bullied. Dad tells kid to fight back. Next time kid gets bullied, kid fights back. Bullies back off.

But for many of the LGBTQ youth in a Washington, D.C.-based street gang called Check It, there was no dad to offer encouragement. And for many, there was no mom either because mom was off getting high on crack or too busy calling her son or daughter a “faggy-ass bitch” to care what was happening at school.

That’s what happened to Alton, a young, slim, African-American transgender woman with long, dark hair and a penchant for Jackie O-style sunglasses. Alton’s mom called her a “faggy-ass bitch” too many times, so Alton pushed her mother down a flight of stairs and was then sent to what she describes as a “mental home.” Then Alton found a new family in Check It.

The gang, whose members carry brass knuckles and knives and are known around D.C. for not taking any shit, is the subject of Check It, a documentary that follows the lives of a few of the gang’s members and their efforts to make positive changes in their lives.

Check It was formed in 2005 by three gay ninth-graders who were tired of being bullied. They started fighting back, and their bullies backed off. Eventually, the gang of mostly black teens and young adults grew to more than 200 members.

While the idea of a homophobia-fighting street gang sounds largely positive, the documentary makes clear that Check It often resorts to illegal activity for both defense and survival. Many of its transgender members, like Alton, are also sex workers on D.C.’s infamous K Street because it’s the only way they can find work.

Others are just really into fighting. A gay man named Skittles, who has a cross tattoo under his eye and multiple piercings on his face, tells the camera that once he starts fighting, he doesn’t stop until the cops pull him off someone.

A D.C.-area gang counselor named Ron “Mo” Moten comes along and tries to help a few Check It members get out of the gang life. He enrolls Alton and several others in a summer fashion camp, and he gets Skittles hooked up with a boxing coach.

Mo’s results are mixed, and, as the members either embrace or reject the new positive outlets, the film showcases how these youth have been set up for failure. To succeed, they have to fight not only their bullies but also their own demons developed through years of parental neglect and societal oppression. — Bianca Phillips

Upstairs Inferno

Girls Lost

Upstairs Inferno

Sunday, Sept. 7, 5 p.m.

To hear its former patrons tell it, the Up Stairs Lounge was pretty tame for a New Orleans gay bar in the early 1970s. Piano Dave would regularly entertain the patrons, and beer busts would end with folks in a circle holding hands and singing. “It was more like a social club than a bar,” says Stewart Butler in Upstairs Inferno, Outflix 2016’s closing night documentary.

The bar’s back room featured a small stage that was usually used for drag shows the regulars called “Nellydramas.” On Sunday nights, as the beer busts raged in the front room, it was transformed into the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). It was on one of those Sunday nights, June 24, 1973, that the Up Stairs Lounge passed into infamy. Someone emptied a can of lighter fluid in the stairwell and started a fire that claimed the lives of 32 gay men. It was a tragedy, a crime, and a wake-up call for the Southern city’s gay community.

Upstairs Inferno is director Robert L. Camina’s second documentary after 2012’s Raid of the Rainbow Lounge. The story of the Up Stairs arson has so many facets: A homosexual community on the cusp of liberation in the Stonewall era, the perilous position of LGBT-friendly Christianity, and a mystery that leads to uncomfortable answers. Camina chooses not to focus on the whodunit aspects of the story but spends his time immersed in the survivors’ emotional aftermath. He tracks down the survivors of the atrocity and their allies and people who candidly recall their own discomfort at the fact that the crime made the homosexual community impossible to ignore. The interviews are powerful and harrowing, especially with Rev. Elder Troy Perry, an MCC pastor who fought for recognition of the victim’s basic humanity while the police dithered and the city’s mayor, chief of police, and archbishop ignored the carnage. “God does not hate us,” he told his grieving flock. “This is mass murder. Some human did this, not God.” — Chris McCoy