Be sure to have your tissues ready when watching Gay Chorus Deep South. The critically-acclaimed movie, directed by Greek-American-Brazilian filmmaker and equal rights activist David Charles Rodrigues, will make its broadcast premiere Sunday, December 20 at 9:00PM ET/PT on Pop and Logo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Nc_VZr3Vdk&feature=emb_title
It follows The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus as they venture out of their very LGBTQ-friendly city for areas across the country that are quite the opposite. These men are doing this in response to a wave of discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws and the divisive 2016 election.
Led by Gay Chorus Conductor Dr. Tim Seelig and joined by The Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir; the tour brings a message of music, love and acceptance to communities and individuals confronting intolerance. Over 300 singers travelled from Mississippi to Tennessee through the Carolinas and over the bridge in Selma. They performed in churches, community centers and concert halls in hopes of uniting Americans in a time of difference.
The journey also challenged Seelig and other Chorus members who fled the South to confront their own fears, pain and prejudices on a journey towards reconciliation. The conversations and connections that emerge offer a glimpse of a less divided America, where the things that divide us—faith, politics, sexual identity—are set aside by the soaring power of music, humanity and a little drag.
Gay Chorus Deep South made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival where it won the Documentary Audience Award. Along the way it scored many other coveted honors and has a 100 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
HBO did something similar to GCDS earlier this year with the premiere of We’re Here. Three of RuPaul’s Drag Race‘s biggest stars (Eureka O’Hara, Shangela, Bob The Drag Queen) travel via bus to many small towns across America where they profile all types of subjects who want to step out of their comfort zone for a night of full-on drag.
“I’m not a big crier, but I cried,” Shangela said in an interview about We’re Here. “This show is something powerful and moving, it’s emotional, and it also has that surprise production element that we were producing a one-night-only show in places that have hardly ever had them, to showcase that there’s this queer community [already there that] they didn’t even know existed”.