Ironweed

Small Town Gay Bar (Director: Malcolm Ingram, USA, 2006): This film was part of the June 2007 release from Ironweed Film Club, and fea­tures two short films as well that I haven’t yet watched. I missed this when it played ori­gin­ally at this year’s Inside Out fest­ival, so was glad to see it on DVD so soon.

While my own exper­i­ence with gay bars has been pretty lim­ited, I under­stand that they serve a vital social func­tion within the com­munity, serving as sanc­tu­aries from a world that is very often hos­tile to gay people. The situ­ation is even more dire in the rural South, where pre­ju­dice has been tol­er­ated and even encour­aged for a long time. This small film keeps its focus tightly on a very spe­cific area, north­eastern Mississippi, and on the pat­rons of a bar called Rumors, loc­ated in tiny Shannon, pop­u­la­tion 1,726. In rural com­munities where everyone knows everyone else, it’s not unusual for gay people to stay “in the closet” and so the bar becomes the only place where they can actu­ally be them­selves. However, since Mississippi is in the middle of the “Bible Belt,” the bars are often tar­getted by con­ser­vative church groups and forced out of busi­ness. Part of the film covers the his­tory of gay bars in this part of the state, and Crossroads, once loc­ated in larger Meridian (pop. 39,000), seemed to be just the sort of place that con­ser­vat­ives would want to close. As one former patron put it, the sense of des­per­a­tion was so strong that it became a sort of circus, a place where “any­thing went” and so local law enforce­ment found a way to close it. Happily, this same former patron bought the prop­erty and reopened it as a much more con­genial place, recog­nizing that people were being forced to drive sev­eral hours to Memphis for lack of a local place to go. I found myself reminded very much of British pub cul­ture while watching the film, where the bar is not only a place to drink and meet romantic part­ners, but a hub of inform­a­tion and a sur­rogate family. Ingram’s film does a great job of cap­turing a sense of place and of the very unique people who pop­u­late it.

Perhaps the only weak­ness I found in the film was in its choice of counter-voices. Reverend Fred Phelps (of GodHatesFags.com fame) was born in Meridian, so I can see why the film­maker wanted to fea­ture him, but giving this nutbag so much screen time was unne­ces­sary. Ingram also inter­viewed Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, another extreme organ­iz­a­tion with their headquar­ters in nearby Tupelo. While this gen­er­ated lots of sparks, I was rather hoping to hear more from local reg­ular people and even local pas­tors instead of people whom the majority of Americans would view as raving lun­atics. As well, it would have been inter­esting to hear why the pat­rons of Rumors and the other bars haven’t just given up and moved to larger cities where they could live more openly.

As a side note, I was intrigued when I heard so many Toronto bands on the soundtrack (Metric, The Hidden Cameras, Broken Social Scene) and guessed, right­fully, that dir­ector Malcolm Ingram was indeed from Toronto. I’d love to hear what drew him so far from home to tell this story.

Official site for the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: Documentaries, DVD, DVD Clubs, homosexuality, Inside Out, Ironweed

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