The "small town gay bar" program Monday morning at Sundance opened with Silas Howard's short, "What I Love About Dying." The film is a documentary about Kris Kovick, a San Francisco author, humorist and activist who suffered from cancer. Howard's film captures Kovick's brilliance leaping from the screen and the confusion her choices about self-delivery left in her tight-knit community. Malcolm Ingram's "small town gay bar" visits a Mississippi community built around two tiny bars, Rumors and Crossroads. The film focuses on a group of folks who are less concerned with the national debate over gay marriage than they are with the life risks they take any time they drive their cars into a parking lot to grab a Bud Light with their friends.
Just two blocks down the road, Ingram conducts an interview with patrons of a neighboring establishment. "I don't like niggers . . . and it's the blacks that started that bar. Blacks started Rumors . . . " one man says. "As long as they keep to themselves, it's not a problem, but if they step one foot near me, I'd crack their heads wide open."
In the face of this hostility, we meet Alicia, a beautiful drag queen who lives with her five tiny furball dogs and her boyfriend. She performs at the bars on the weekends and during the week works in a veterinary office -- sans her silicone Victoria Secret padding and her perfect eyebrows. Alicia is a warrior of the film, forging a gay life in a town in which a local boy is so hated that after hours of torture, his body is dragged into the woods and lit on fire. Alicia continues to don her gorgeous wares, work a dance pole, and sit with her girls in the back of a limo flipping off the camera at the mention of another of the film's stars, the Rev. Fred Phelps.
Phelps is a chatty man, a buoyant crusader for the Lord against the horror of gay lives. Ingram captures his true passion for loathing. Sitting in a dark theater, it's impossible to imagine what it must be like to be there with Ingram, in a room with this man chatting away, hating, blaming the murder victim's parents for his untimely departure: "It was their job to warn him of the abomination. And now he is where the Lord wants him, burning in Hell."
But Alicia's story and the stories of the people who come together in the bars are the tonic for Phelps. They are now, and they always will be, the testament to true queer power. These are the survivors. These are the people who thrive in a home they can't or don't want to leave.
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