CULTURE Screen STORY Loren King
Scenes from “Gay Chorus Deep South”
Local Love Massachusetts is a special place for ‘Gay Chorus Deep South’ The award-winning documentary “Gay Chorus Deep South” has screened around the world since its premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival where it won the Audience Award. But director David Charles Rodrigues, a Massachusetts native, says some of the most memorable screenings have taken place in his home state. “Provincetown was one of my favorite [festivals],” says Rodrigues who was born in Lowell and spent his early years in Chelmsford surrounded by his mother’s Greek-American family. At age eight, he moved with his family to his father’s native Brazil. He still has relatives in Massachusetts and many of them made the trip to the Provincetown International Film Festival in June. In October, “Gay Chorus Deep South” was the opening film in the annual GlobeDocs Film Festival. The packed Coolidge Corner Theater was again attended by Rodrigues, and his many relatives from Chelmsford were among the crowd at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
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“‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ is a documentary about my family,” says Rodrigues with a laugh. “Gay Chorus Deep South,” acquired in September by the new MTV Documentary Films, heads back to the Bay State in February. The film screens February 6 at Tanglewood in Lenox as a collaboration between the Berkshire International Film Festival and Tanglewood Learning Institute. It’s also screening February 7 at Harvard University. It’s easy to see why audiences across all spectrums have embraced this film about the healing power of music to at least begin to bridge cultural, racial, political and geographical divides. Rodrigues and his crew followed the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus when, in 2016 in response to anti-LGBT laws and the divisiveness 2016 presidential election, it embarked on a tour of the Deep South. Led by conductor Dr. Tim Seelig who in the film shares the complicated journey that took him from Texas to San Francisco. Seelig was a Southern Baptist minister with a wife and children. When he came out, he was ostracized by his family,
church and community. The SFGMC joined with the largely black Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir which has several LGBT members for the tour. More than 300 singers travelled from Mississippi to Tennessee and through the Carolinas performing, when they were welcomed, in churches, community centers and concert halls. They sang “We Shall Overcome” as they walked over the historic Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. They faced prejudice and some protests but there was also connection, support and visibility for LGBT youth in the South. For members of the choruses like Seelig who still struggled with the pain of rejection, there was some reconciliation with the past. The positive focus was deliberate from the outset. When Rodrigues, a straight LGBT ally, heard about the SFGMC’s plans to undertake the tour, he immediately wanted to document it. His own life, he says, has been about connecting as a minority with other minorities. “I’m the son of an immigrant and grew up between Brazil and the US, and later lived as a Latino in San Francisco” before moving to Los Angeles where he lives now. Two other production companies with more resources than he could offer also wanted the job. But Rodrigues, whose
