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Spanning everyone from Audre Lorde to Madeleine Tress, a cross-dressing lesbian with the FBI on her tail, this thrilling Disney+ show flies the flag for the full spectrum of LGBTQ+ life. What a wonder
Remember Madeleine Tress? The charismatic lawyer born in Brooklyn in 1932? A cross-dressing lesbian who liked to frequent mafia bars, where “with a Smart cigarette hanging out of my mouth, I passed”, who was investigated by the FBI, and who wrote a memoir about her life and love for her partner of 40 years, Jan? No, me neither. Happily, my head is now crowded with such thrilling, courageous and previously obscure(d) figures thanks to Pride (Disney+), a giant mosaic of a mini-series spanning six decades of LGBTQ+ history in the US. The kind of big-hearted, big-moneyed, inherently American show that would probably be condensed into a single late-night hour on BBC Four if it was covering British queer history.
Each episode inhabits a different decade – from the 1950s to the 2000s – and is made by a different queer film-maker. The approaches are various – with mixed, sometimes untidy results, which is precisely what you would expect from a creative patchwork project like this. Andrew Ahn’s film about the 1960s relies mostly on archive footage, which is usually the best part of a historical documentary. Cheryl Dunye’s 1970s episode is a personal love letter to film-maker Barbara Hammer and poet Audre Lorde. The 1980s chapter, directed by Anthony Caronna and Alexander Smith, chronicles the well-documented story of the Aids crisis in New York through lesser-known perspectives: the joyous, intimate home movies of Nelson Sullivan, who spent most of the 80s wandering around downtown with his camcorder and his dog, Blackout. And the life and times of black trans advocate Ceyenne Doroshow, in a touching telling of a history familiar to all of us who fell in love with Pose. Visibility is an overriding theme here. Many films use framing devices (such as Sullivan’s tapes) to reframe familiar queer narratives: a manoeuvre that feels at once radical, overdue, and – to reclaim a loaded word – entirely natural. Continue reading...