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For the Vancouver Fringe Festival this year, I really wanted to see some comedy. After scrolling through the program guide I came across Peter n’ Chris (Peter Carlone and Chris Wilson) and their self-written play Here Lies Chris. These two Canadian comics are veterans of the Canadian Fringe circuit and have also appeared in the Just for Laughs Festival.

The show took place at the Pacific Theatre on 12th Avenue, a very cool space tucked away in the corner of an old church building. The crowd was warm and friendly, a solid group of typical smiling Fringe-goers. I sat high up the risers and waited anxiously to see what would come my way.

Peter and Chris walk out while performing a lip sync and dance number set to “Some Nights” by Fun–a perfect introduction to the folly of these two comics. Their sketch show is loose and leaves lots of room for improvisation. First an foremost, Here Lies Chris is an initiation into sketch comedy as a genre (they begin with a ‘lesson in sketch’). But as the show opens up, it transforms into an intergalactic journey.

There’s a touch of the chaotic as Peter and Chris run up and down risers, talking from off-stage during the performance. After much drama–and even an on-stage shooting–the audience learns that Chris has recently moved to Toronto, leaving Peter alone in Vancouver. This heartbreak moves the play towards its conclusion, which ends with Peter and Chris grieving their separation.

It was clear from the moment I sat down that Peter and Chris are seasoned improvisers. With great timing and writing, Here Lies Chris is enjoyable to the tragic end.

Peter N’ Chris Present: Here Lies Chris is part of the 2015 Vancouver Fringe Festival, which runs until Sept 20. For a full listing of upcoming Fringe events, visit the festival website.

SAD Mag’s Nana Heed reviews Beira-Mar, Los Hongos and A Loucura Entre Nos, three stunning films from this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Violence, humour, heartbreak, despair–this years festival lineup was not to be missed.

Beira-Mar (“Seashore”)

After debuting at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, directors Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon brought Beira-Mar (“Seashore”) to Vancouver screens for the 2015 Latin American Film Festival. Their first feature-length film, Beira-Mar, presents a sweet inspection of sexuality, youth, family, and liberation.

Following his grandfather’s passing, our young male protagonist, Martin, and his friend Tomaz venture to southern Brazil to collect a document from distant extended family. The trip prompts the two boys to explore their relationship, while also providing Martin an opportunity to heal old wounds with his estranged family. Finally, the protagonist learns to overcome his tumultuous relationship with the sea.

Unfortunately, the slow pace of the film prevented it from inspiring the audience completely. I found it hard to stay engaged, even when I could tell the scene was meant to be meaningful for Martin. One conversation with his grandmother, for instance, is exceptionally long and communicates very little–though this moment of reconnection is clearly an important one for their relationship.

Despite its shortcomings, the film has the right ingredients and intention to be an insightful foray into adolescence. The stripped down nature of the scenes enhances the remoteness and despair Martin feels during his trip. Meanwhile, the rough, bare bones cinematography uses the qualities of the landscape to enhance Martin’s feelings toward the less-than-promising meet-up with his family.

Los Hongos

Los Hongos is an engaging film about two young boys, Ras and Calvin, immersing themselves deeply into the subversive world of street art. The film is set in Cali, Colombia, and the colours of the city alone make the film vibrant to watch. The story follows both boys home to their respective neighbourhoods, and then brings them back together to unfold a shared passion for something forbidden by civic authority. By the film’s conclusion, audiences will have developed an affection for both protagonists, as well as for many of the supporting, equally likeable characters.

Throughout the film, Calvin cares for his grandmother, who is battling cancer. The old woman is stunning–she easily wins the audience’s love–and the relationship between wizened elder and caring grandson is inspiring.

Ras’ mother, meanwhile, worries about her son and tries unrelentingly to bring him into the fold of her church. She disapproves of his street art, something that is hard for Ras to deal with. But as the film progresses, we learn that Ras’ mother is as lost as her son and in need of a beacon of hope. For her, this is provided by the church, while for Ras, it’s painting that provides him with this gateway to feeling alive–an escape from life’s sinister moments.

There is a sense of urgency to the film that concentrates itself in certain scenes. At one point, police crack down on a painting session and become violent with the artists; at another, graphic footage from the Arab Spring protests inspire Ras and Calvin’s artwork. The two boys are later arrested while out painting. These moments of serious tension remind the audience of a collective struggle to survive and overcome oppressive systems; these scenes bring Los Hongos close to home.

A Loucura Entre Nós (“The Madness Among Us”)

The documentary by Fernanda Vareille takes place in Bahia, Brazil within a psychiatric hospital. Criamundo is the name of an NGO run inside the hospital that works to reintegrate previously committed patients back into society. We listen to various patients, with a focus on two women, and get a sense from them what life is like within the walls of the psychiatric wards, what it’s like working within the program, and what their lives entail beyond the walls of the hospital.

Vareille’s depiction of her interview subjects is sensitive to avoid exploiting a vulnerable minority. Elisangela is one of the two main interviewees with a powerful voice, a loving relationship to her daughter, and a strong desire to work hard and preserve her dignity in life. With Elisangela, we walk through the psych ward on a ‘normal day’ and see where she sleeps, who else shares the space, and other things that happen while Vareille’s camera is rolling. Seeing a combination of prepared interviews with various people who access Criamundo as well as what was caught on camera after Vareille seemed to have left it rolling in front of a gate, or walked through the halls holding it, builds a sense of trust towards her explorations of ‘normalcy’ and the struggle to be alive in each of us.

The film rolls along in such a way that you can be moved by each moment–there is a spectrum of humour, heartbreak, and critical commentary. Not once is the film overly fixated on a person’s mental illness as the main point of inspection. We become more invested in where the different interviewees wish to take us–be it the struggle to find work, or the internal struggle to identify as a person with a mental illness among other things. I was so moved by watching this documentary and would highly recommend trying to track it down!
For more information about the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, visit the festival website.

If you’d asked me last week whether I would like to spend my Friday night in a dark theatre watching homemade pornography with a bunch of strangers, my answer would have been a simple, resounding, “Never.”

But that was before I spoke to sex columnist Dan Savage about HUMP! Dirty Film Festival, an amateur porn festival that has been bringing surprise, love and laughter to audiences since 2005. Curated by Savage himself, HUMP! encourages everyday citizens to create their own homemade five-minute dirty videos for the chance to “become temporary, weekend porn stars” and win cash prizes. This year, Savage is taking the festival on a tour of the Pacific Northwest with 18 of the hottest HUMP! films in action. As always, the lineup for this year is diverse in style, content, and tone, and showcases a variety of sexual orientations, genders, and kinks. Highlights include Beethoven’s Stiff (2013), described on the HUMP! website as “precisely what would happen if your genitals dedicated themselves to classical music,” and Porn All The Time (2013), a rap video about excessive porn intake.

Needless to say, HUMP! got me curious. To find out more about the festival, I interviewed Savage for the scoop on the good, the bad, and the dirty of amateur pornography.

SAD Mag: Why do you think that people make amateur porn?

Dan Savage: People make a porn because they want to show off, they want to share their particular things, because whatever it is that they’re interested in–whatever it is [that] turns their crank–may be underrepresented, or not represented, in commercial porn or in mainstream porn.

The porn we get at HUMP! isn’t just exhibitionist, and it isn’t just from people with a social justice point agenda. We tell people that we’re going to do our best to make sure that they’re pornstars for this weekend in this movie theatre, not pornstars for eternity on the internet. So we get a lot of films from people who wouldn’t do this if there was an online component. A lot of it is really interesting, crazy, fun films [are] being made by people who might not make porn otherwise, but want to make a really good, funny film with a nod towards porn or erotica. What you’re seeing at HUMP! is really works of art that allow for fun sex, that allow for the representation of things, acts, activities, kinks that people wouldn’t necessarily think of as erotica.

SM: But why do people want to watch amateur porn? Why come to HUMP!?

The audiences at HUMP! don’t come to sit in the theatres and masturbate; there aren’t a lot of coats in laps rising and falling. People come to watch because it’s entertaining and interesting…they want to have a laugh, they want to be shocked. They come away from HUMP! with hopefully a little bit more than that.

We watch the audience to make sure that no one’s taking photographs or videos during the screening. This is what I see: for the first eight films, the gay guys are freaking out and thrown back in their chairs because they’re watching cunnilingus; the straight guys are like, “Wow!” because they’re watching hardcore gay buttfucking; vanilla people are like, “Holy crap!” because they’re watching hardcore kink porn. [Normally] when you sit and watch porn, you click on only what you want to see; you curate it for yourself. At HUMP!, we’re clicking for you; you don’t get to click.

And then this amazing thing happens: about a third of the way through the festival, everyone starts cheering for each film. People aren’t flinching or looking away; everyone’s loving each film. For the first handful of films, all anybody can see is what’s not their thing; all anybody can see are the differences. About a third of the way, or halfway, through, everyone’s seeing what’s the same. Lust is the same, passion is the same, humour is the same, attraction is the same. Those experiences are the same. All of [what’s] underneath the incidentals–[underneath] the kinks, the genders, the orientations–all of that is exactly the same, and all of that is more important.

About halfway through, you look out and you see that same gay dude who was very elaborately freaking out the first time he saw the cunnilingus. [By] the third time he watches it, he’s…cheering and laughing and clapping with everyone else. It’s beautiful.

SM: In an interview with Vice, you refer to the HUMP! experience as “the old-fashioned way” of watching porn. What does enjoying porn publicly bring to audiences? What sets it apart from more “conventional” enjoyment?

DS: It used to be that if you wanted to see a dirty movie, you had to go to a dirty movie theatre. You were kind of outing yourself as someone with an interest in erotica or dirty movies by walking through the door. You had to own it.

Then came VHS tapes and town got its little video rental store and a little corner of it would be erotica and dirty movies. Even then you had to out yourself by walking into the dirty movie section and choosing one and taking it to the counter. People tended to be mortified.

And then along came the internet–now we can do it in secret. Porn [became] something that we do all by ourselves, all alone. We lost that communal aspect of it, we lost that having to own it, having to walk through the door and say “This is something I’m interested in. This is what I want to see.”

HUMP! brings that back. You walk through the door and you’re saying, “I have a healthy and sex-positive attitude. I want to watch these dirty movies, and I’m not embarrassed or ashamed to be seen walking into this theatre to watch these dirty movies. We’re all in this together.”

SM: To my knowledge, at least, there is still no consensus within the scientific community whether porn and sexual violence are related. Can you speak to this controversy? How does HUMP! fit in here?

DS: There’s actually a really terrific article in Scientific American called “The Sunny Side of Smut” that I think demonstrates–and there’s a growing body of evidence that demonstrates–that access to access to hardcore pornography does not fuel sexual violence. In fact, I think the opposite. When you look at the stats for sex crimes and sexual violence, those rates have been falling for decades, just as rates for other violent crimes have been falling for decades. At the same time that those rates have been falling, access to hardcore pornography have skyrocketed. If viewing hardcore pornography and violent images lead people to commit sex crimes, then we would expect the opposite to have happened.

You can’t do a controlled experiment with this, you can’t lock people up all their lives and expose them to pornography and others not. But the evidence that we do have seems to indicate that what I remember people saying when I was in college in the ‘80’s–that porn is the theory, rape is the practice–just isn’t so.

I think the porn at HUMP! is often the antidote to porn that is negative, that makes people feel bad about their sexualities. The people who make films for HUMP! are making them for fun, they’re not being economically coerced, they’re not being forced. The films at HUMP! are people getting together with their friends and lovers [to] make a porno that they’re proud of and want to share with people. Not to feed their children, not to pay the rent, but to create joy.

One of the raps against porn is that it’s dehumanizing. Once a woman came up to me after watching a HUMP! screening and told me that she doesn’t really like porn. [Then she] said, “That was humanizing porn that I watched tonight, very deeply humanizing.”

SM: Do you have any advice for first time HUMP!-ers? How can they make the experience less awkward and more fun?

DS: Have a little pot, have a drink (but don’t get drunk, though!). We’ve had shows during the festival where people will go out and get drunk and then come to the show, and I don’t necessarily recommend that. We’ve had people throw up.

Just come with friends and don’t be afraid. In all those almost dozen years we’ve been doing HUMP!, we’ve only once had to ask someone to stop giving a blowjob during the screening; the genitals are going to be up on the screen.

One of the rules at HUMP! is no assholes in the seats, assholes on the screen. We have a very strictly enforced policy of no catcalling, no jokes made at the expense of the bodies, the genders, the sexual orientations, the gender expression, the kinks, the colours, the shapes, the size of the body modifications, the anythings of the people up on the screen. People will gasp and clap and react, but [there will be] no assholes in the theatre, [only] assholes on the screen.

HUMP! comes to Vancouver’s Rio Theatre on September 18 & 19. Tickets and showtimes available here.

An aerial rope is a surprisingly diverse prop. Accompanied onstage by only two plain white folding chairs, some sheets, and a small blue ball, the aerial rope ascends into the rafters, drawing the eye up and revealing a terrifying mass of negative space. In CLIMB, Esther de Monteflores commands that space with ease, twisting the aerial rope to her every need. De Monteflores’s range of expression with a singular rope is both impressive and stunningly beautiful, bringing meaning to the constant coiling and uncoiling of the rope. At times a cradle, a crutch, and at others a restraint, its tail end thumps against the stage like a unifying heartbeat.

De Monteflores’s acrobatics are accompanied by Meredith Hambrock’s brilliant writing in the form of voice over, bringing five different moments to life through movement, sound, and story. Hambrock’s vignettes are equal parts poetic, profound, and tragically hilarious. The decision to alternate narrators was refreshing for such a visual performance, though it did impede slightly on the cohesion of the different stories. Nonetheless, each narrative was compelling in its content and its interpretation by de Monteflores.

While the story for Adolescence was my personal favourite (it’s too good to be spoiled here), de Monteflores’s treatment of Old Age was nuanced, a delicate balance of vulnerability, delicacy, and grace. The choice to switch from aerial rope to slack rope here was apt. The switch over made for a fitting conclusion, though it would have been nice to have seen more slack rope throughout the performance, considering de Monteflores’s mastery of it.

De Monteflores’s physical performance and Hambrock’s story are strung together beautifully by Aaron Read’s score; the tension and drama of the string instruments function as a perfect parallel to de Monteflores’s use of the aerial and slack rope.

Another unexpected delight was the decision to keep de Monteflores on stage during costume changes. The choice makes sense from a practical standpoint, but also brought an intimacy to the actions. These moments turned audience members into voyeurs, enhanced by Hambrock’s eerie narration: “at any given moment you are being watched.”

For both veterans of acrobatics, and newcomers like myself, CLIMB offers a compelling, intimate, and lovably weird alternative to the way we normally experience stories and will certainly be a standout at this year’s Fringe.

CLIMB is part of the 2015 Vancouver Fringe Festival and can be seen at the Cultch Historic Theatre until September 20. Tickets are available online. For more on the Fringe, check out the festival website.

Vancouver won’t stop growing: expanding outward and spiraling back in, rebranding old neighbourhoods and finding names and spaces for new ones. New people are the overlooked catalyst for all this outward change. While a fresh condo development shoots up into our field of vision, a new city dweller slips easily into the periphery.

Zakir Jamal Suleman, director of The Belonging Project, is attempting to bring the experience of Vancouver immigrants to the foreground. Through a series of six video interviews, posted weekly to The Belonging Project’s website, Suleman and his collaborators address the question of what it takes to belong in our notoriously antisocial city.

Suleman, a philosophy honours student at UBC, was inspired both by his own experience as a Second Generation Khoja Ismaili Canadian and by a 2012 report published by The Vancouver Foundation. The report claimed that one third of survey participants struggled to make friends in Vancouver, and fifty percent of recent immigrants felt the same feeling of social isolation. These results resonated with Suleman, who describes his own process of belonging in Vancouver as a complex one: “You are born here, but there are still questions–where is your culture and the culture you are living in, how do they mix, where is home for me, is it here or is it there…”

He conceived of The Belonging Project as a means to help Vancouverites combat this isolation and connect with one another. Video interviews are a uniquely immediate way to break through what Suleman calls “barriers to entry,” allowing website users to hear a stranger’s story in the physical space of their daily life. Whether you are watching on your laptop or your phone, the project website creates a virtual space for immediate intimacy. Suleman hopes that these online interviews can be more than an “abstracted story,” the goal is that “those connections be something real and something that…people can gravitate to just like a real conversation.”

The interviews are certainly real. The brave participants share a lot in their interviews: stories of depression and illness, as well as revelations about the joyfulness of finding connection. All the videos are six minutes long, a challenging timeframe to try to convey something “true to the complexity of the people we were talking about.” Despite the time constraints, everyone who worked on the project does an admirable job of covering as wide a range of experience as possible.

Tien shares his story with The Belonging Project

As important as the voices of newcomers are to the project, the experience of First Nations people in Vancouver is something the project is also intent on exploring. As Suleman says in the website’s video introduction, “Vancouver is built on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, so that means we are all from somewhere else.”

Ultimately, The Belonging Project aims to create a point of connection based on disconnection. Suleman explains that “we were trying to explore something that is, I think, common to everybody.” The irony of dissatisfaction is that it compels you to speak up: something Suleman has noted himself. “Think about complaining about the weather, something that people in Vancouver are champions at…I think that it is actually really great that people are dissatisfied, because you can use that dissatisfaction to motivate you [sic] to do something about it…One thing you can count on is that everyone is dissatisfied in some way.”

The Belonging Project is a model for turning discontent into connection, one that Suleman hopes will continue beyond the initial six video outline. A community gathering is planned for September 19th, a way of gauging the success of the project and attempting the tricky work of translating an online platform into real space. “We want to get people together, people who have been watching… all these stories, and get them into a room,” he explains.

As quickly as Vancouver is growing, it is still small enough for the idea of a community gathering to feel apt. By asking Vancouverites to “take a moment, grab a coffee, and meet a new neighbour,” The Belonging Project reminds us how close we really are to the people who share our city.

The Belonging Project will be hosting a community art show at Untitled Art Space (436 Columbia Street) on Saturday September 19th. The event runs from 6 – 11 pm. To find out more, follow The Belonging Project on Facebook or visit their website.

I fell down the hole. It happens. You go in with the intention of sending a quick Facebook message, then forty-five minutes later you’re still on the internet and you’ve ordered all eleven seasons of M*A*S*H on VHS from Amazon and you don’t even have a VCR. This time I was catching up on the news when I read about Harper’s Fair Elections Act. That naturally lead me to Googling assisted suicide and funeral chapels––you want to have all of your bases covered.

Eventually I found my way to the website of a funeral chapel in Prince George, BC. It was under the umbrella of Dignity Memorial, who, with over 2,000 locations, dole out franchises like McDonalds but with livelier atmospheres. The name of this particular franchise was Assman’s Funeral Chapel, because you can’t spell Dignity without A-S-S.

Immature delight aside, I’m all for the name. If when I die my family decides to have a memorial service instead of taking my ashes to Disneyland and throwing them into the air on the final descent of Splash Mountain like my will dictates, then take my body up north. The only person I want embalming me is Assman.

For more Portraits of Brief Encounters, visit the official website, Instagram or Twitter.

Katie So is bent over her iPad when I meet her for coffee on a rainy Monday morning. So is answering emails (“like always,” she sighs) which doesn’t surprise me, because the illustrator-cum-tattoo artist has already inked two of my friends and seems to be fielding more tattoo requests than she can handle. “I’m just learning about the tattoo business,” she says, “And I can’t say no to anybody, which I think I have to start doing soon!”

So helped open Black Medicine Tattoo last May with owners Joel Rich and Daniel Giantomaso, in exchange for mentorship from Rich. Vancouver born and bred, So has been practicing art since she can remember. “I always grew up in a really creative home,” she recalls, “So it was always like, everything, all creative materials were at my disposal.” Her move to tattoo work was motivated by her desire to progress her career as an illustrator. “I guess I was in a spot where I was just doing art and I wanted to…get it out there any way I could, and make money doing it,” So explains. “I met Joel [Rich] and he tattooed me. I asked if he wanted and apprentice but he [said] ‘Not really, but I’ll help you!’”

So says that attending an arts high school put her off the idea of pursuing visual art, but that she rediscovered her love of drawing during a gap year. She then registered in the Capilano IDEA Program where she realized that illustration, rather than graphic design, was what she was passionate about practicing. So was attracted to comics because they allowed her to combine her habit of creative writing with her drawings. She has since put out three print compilations of her work: Destined for Misery, Bad Boyfriend, and Attempts at Positivity. So’s work––narrative driven and punchline-heavy––is both hilarious and honest, and her ability to capture awkward moments, pathetic self-pity, and heartbreak is so accurate, it’s uncanny.“The comics kind of started almost as a way to laugh off my problems,” she says.

The magic of So’s work is that she manages to create scenes that are deeply personal but touchingly universal. Panels from Destined for Misery show a tired girl hunched over in identical positions eating dinner, sitting on a toilet, at a drawing table, and laying in bed. The cheeky caption reads “Slouch Life.” “I hated autobio comics, like: ‘I feel that way, too, but it’s just making me feel worse,’” she says, “So I guess I just wanted to approach it with an air of humour, and that was my reaction to the way I was feeling, and thats how I worked [my feelings] out. The problems are real but you should be able to step back and laugh at it a little bit and realize how ridiculous things are sometimes.” (See her panels in Bad Boyfriend to laugh out loud, and cry internally).

What makes So’s tattoo work so interesting is the dark edge that is present in her illustrations and comics. Shaggy vampire bats and dark haired ladies with cold eyes dominate her online portfolio. She can be both cutesy and gruesome in one drawing. Her somber aesthetic translates beautifully to blackwork tattoo. “I wanted to keep drawing for illustration rather than drawing for tattooing,” she explains. “It took me a while to get the effect that I’ve got in my illustration and bring it across tattooing. I definitely had to learn how to adapt designs for tattoos, because sometimes shapes of things aren’t going to work on somebody’s body. I still really wanna maintain my illustration style throughout tattooing.”

“Tattooing was one of those things I was like ‘I want to learn how to do this,’ and I just did it every day. I still have so much to learn but if you wanna get shit done you just gotta do it,” she says of her learning process. The transition to tattooing was creatively and financially necessary; it allowed So the freedom to pursue her art and make ends meet. “I’m proud that this last year was kind of when I took the plunge, like ‘Ok I’m gonna be an artist full time.’ I think I could have done it a long time ago if I had just done it but I was too scared that I wouldn’t have any money or anything. If you just do it, you figure it out and you force yourself to make money.”

I ask So what it feels like to put her hard work on someone else’s body. “I’m always scared when I finish a tattoo and I’m letting it go,” she laughs, “I hope they take care of it and I hope it heals well because it’s my art walking around. It’s nerve wracking, but also super exciting [to] see someone walking on the street…I’m like, ‘Oh I did that!’”

So’s wisdom to artists looking to take the leap into self-employment is to “just go hang out with people you think are cool and talk to them and tell them that you think they’re cool. Chances are they already think you’re cool, too.” Her final nugget of knowledge before we bundle ourselves up against the relentless downpour: “Please, get tattooed on a full stomach!”

Find out more about Katie So from her website, or find her on Tumblr.

In 2000, Bloomsbury Publishing released Sarah. The author of the novel was JT LeRoy, a teenager from West Virginia who had prostituted himself at truckstops, lived on the streets while addicted to drugs, and eventually became HIV positive. LeRoy credits his therapist, who urged him to write about his experiences, for the novel’s genesis. Two more books followed (Harold’s End, a novel, and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a short story collection), as did a slew of A-list celebrity encounters, photo shoots, magazine articles, and two feature film adaptations. The author himself cut an enigmatic figure; too shy to read his work at public appearances, his famous friends were obliged to read on his behalf. When LeRoy was seen, he was typically wearing a blonde wig and sunglasses, and rarely appeared without an entourage comprised of former outreach worker Emily (AKA “Speedie”) and her partner Astor. Eventually, LeRoy began identifying as transgender. In 2006, Stephen Beachy wrote an article in New York Magazine questioning LeRoy’s identity, and shortly after, a woman named Laura Albert revealed that she was the true author of LeRoy’s fiction. She gave phone interviews as “LeRoy” and orchestrated his public appearances. Too old to pass for a teenager herself, Albert had a younger woman named Savannah Knoop appear as LeRoy in public. Albert took on the persona of Speedie in order to accompany Knoop.

Filmmaker Marjorie Sturm documents LeRoy’s bizarre story from emergence to death in her new film The Cult of JT LeRoy. After watching it at this year’s Queer Film Festival in Vancouver, SAD Mag had a host of burning questions Sturm.

SAD Mag: Can you describe the process you went through to make The Cult of JT LeRoy? I’ve read that it was a long journey from initial concept to finished piece.

Marjorie Sturm: Yes, indeed, it has been a long (and strange) journey. I worked on the film for five years over a twelve year span. I began in 2002 with the understanding that “JT LeRoy” was a real person when in fact I was filming Savannah Knoop pretending to be a fictional character. At that time, I worked on the film for close to a year. I re-opened the film in 2006 when it became the clear that “JT LeRoy” was a massive, global, literary/entertainment deception. I gathered up the majority of the interviews that appear in the film at that time. Post-production is where the film took a nose dive; I waited many years to find funding that would allow me to control the direction of the film.

If I had been willing to allow others (men) to ‘co-direct’ my film or ‘merge’ it, I would have been able to get my film done faster. Apparently, this is not a unique situation in the documentary industry. Filmmakers who aren’t established ‘brands’ and have limited access to resources, who have stumbled on to some form of “documentary gold,” (as my early JT footage could be construed) are pushed and cajoled with the sword of Damocles. I can see why people would surrender as it is a terribly frustrating situation to find oneself. However, I thought it would be short-sighted to go forward making a film that didn’t represent the topic in a way that I would have control over. Eventually, I got extremely lucky and found funding and a team of supportive people that helped me create the film.

I imagine that there are many great films sitting on hard drives waiting for a break.

SM: I also understand that you have a background in mental health. Did you recognize Laura Albert as someone suffering from mental illness? Does that in any way mitigate her responsibility for her actions?

MS: Mitigating responsibility because of mental illness is an extremely tricky situation. First off, there are all types of mental illness, and like many things, there is a continuum. One could argue every pedophile, rapist, con-artist, murderer on some level has mental illness.

JT LeRoy’s therapist, who appears in the film via a trial deposition, agrees that JT/Laura Albert is not psychotic and out of touch with reality. If someone is psychotic (schizophrenic, severely bi-polar), it would be easy to understand why that could mitigate their responsibility. Laura did her damndest to present a case for her mental illness during the trial over a period of eight days, and the jury quickly concluded that they weren’t buying it. However, no one is arguing that Laura is not a disturbed individual. And if people choose to have compassion for her, that is their choice, but it doesn’t mitigate responsibility for her actions. I don’t believe our compassion for a victimizer should ever outweigh the compassion we have for those they victimized, as it fuels them and allows them to abuse again.

SM: As a filmmaker, you don’t insert your thoughts and opinions into the film much. Can you talk about that decision? Were you surprised when JT’s true identity was finally revealed or did you have suspicions earlier?

MS: How much to insert myself into the film was a question that I contemplated quite a bit from the beginning. I knew I needed to be a voice in the film in order to give my early footage some context. As well, there were gaps to fill in the narrative. At first, I used all text but it was just too much reading and was seriously nixed by almost everyone who saw the earlier cuts. With a lot of discussion and help from the editor Josh Melrod, I feel like I struck a balance that I am pleased with. I really didn’t want this documentary to be an overly personal one. I think there is a time and place for personal documentaries and I love many of them, but this particular topic was much larger than myself. I really wanted to create an active viewing experience that left the viewer thinking and analyzing. Even reading the views that I am expressing here in this interview could potentially distract from the experience of the film.

There was always something weird and cagey about the JT gang, but I absolutely believed that JT was a real person. Even after I read Stephen Beachy’s article in New York Magazine, I thought JT existed and Laura just ghost wrote the books for him because he was uneducated. It wasn’t until I had some back and forth discussion with Beachy, where he made so many lucid points, that I really came around to understanding that the whole thing was an utter fabrication.

SM: In an interview for The Paris Review in 2006, Laura Albert tells a story from when she was 16 and called a child therapist from a Village Voice ad. She recounts pretending to be a 14-year-old boy. When she later revealed the truth, the therapist told her never to call him again. Albert observes: “He responded angrily instead of asking himself, ‘Why did this kid invent this story? What would make a child do such a thing?'” Do you view this as deflection on Albert’s part or is it a valid question that you see your film responding to?

MS: I guess I view it as a bit of both. It is indeed a deflection on Albert’s part, a way of not taking responsibility for her actions and blaming others. The glaring problem with the deflection is that Laura Albert is a full grown woman and not a child. We judge a child’s behavior at a different standard than an adult’s, or at least we should. Laura Albert pretends to, or doesn’t seem to, grasp that.

And yes, in a sense, my film is responding to the question, “What would make a child (a person) do such a thing?”

SM: Posing as male in order to feel safe and be heard emerges as a strong theme throughout the version of Albert’s life presented in that interview. To what extent do you think a sexist society contributed to Albert’s decision to create a male persona?

MS: On one hand, I don’t think there is a woman alive who doesn’t feel, consciously or unconsciously, the implications of living in a highly sexist society.

When I was six and seven years old, I had a repetitive dreams that I was a boy in a wheelchair. Night after night after night. I have a brother who is two years older, and I saw the permission that his gender gave him. I resented it, and felt handicapped. Or at least that’s my armchair dream analysis.

My point is, using sexism and the need for a male persona is a compelling tale, one that is hard to refute, and many women can relate to.

But, JT wasn’t just a male. He was transgender, before people even knew what that term meant. Does a heterosexual woman really need to pose as someone transgender in order to feel “safe and heard in this world”?

What she did, and in a sense it was quite savvy, was a create a much more sensational persona than her own identity provided. Hustler on the run, being pimped out by his mother, strung out on heroin, yadda yadda. Or middle-aged woman from middle-class background with an eating disorder.

SM: One issue the film explores is that of who has the right to represent pain. In some ways the recent Rachel Dolezal story touches on this. In both instances the cultural outrage seems to stem from individuals laying claim to pain that doesn’t belong to them. I felt your film made clear that Albert crossed a line with the fabrication of JT, but how clear is that line? How mindful of this sort of appropriation do writers need to be when writing fiction?

MS: My personal opinion is that writers don’t need to be mindful of this sort of appropriation when writing fiction at all. Not one iota. Fiction is a work of the imagination. I think we can write from the point of view of anything–a duck, a chair, the sky, other races, genders, classes, and so on.

The line is crossed and problems begin when we market our fiction as non-fiction in order to manipulate and gain sympathy. When we start picking up the phone and pretending to be that fictional character in real time. When our marginalized ‘fictional’ character asks for resources of time, money, and gifts.

Laura Albert did countless interviews in the voice of a little boy and the work was marketed as “autobiographical fiction” with a bio to match. She had the cover-my-ass forethought to put only the word ‘fiction’ on the back cover, but everyone thought Savannah Knoop was indeed JT LeRoy, who grew up at trucks stops in West Virginia and was pimped out by his mother. Really, the level of disingenuousness, gall, and relentless spinning is appalling when not laughable.

As far as Dolezal, I was really struck by the fact that not only did she pretend to be black when she was in fact white, but she actively prevented other white academics from speaking about race on the campus where she taught. Um . . . no.

SM: I thought your film did a great job of showing the emotional impact the deception had on those in contact with LeRoy, while also examining to to what degree those individuals might have been complicit. Do you have any sense of Laura Albert or Savannah having any empathy for those they deceived?

MS: As far as Laura is concerned, I have seen absolutely no empathy towards those she has deceived. In fact, the subtext is more, “How could they all be so stupid and fall for it? Savannah looks like a girl.

Till now, she seems committed to “not apologizing” as if that would be somehow backing down. It’s actually kind of fascinating in a sense, and on a meta-level might lead one to having compassion for her because what a fractured and sad way to live.

Of course, at any given moment, she may change course and decide to mimic empathy/compassion for others, but to the best of my knowledge, I have only seen those emotions reserved for herself.

As for Savannah, my sense is that she is conflicted emotionally about the whole thing. When the deception was first revealed, she gleefully traipsed around with Laura to parties and receptions. The news picked up on “The Hoaxers are Out on the Town” and it seemed like public opinion was working in their favor. People enjoy[ed] seeing mud thrown in the faces of The Establishment. Celebrities. The New York Times, HBO, Cannes, Hollywood. Without the personal, it is kind of a hoot.

Laura and Savannah fell out when Savannah wrote her book about her experience around “being JT.” I think she got a good taste of Laura’s wrath at that point, and perhaps that increased Savannah’s empathy for those they deceived? But I have read her book, and it really was about her experience and I don’t recall empathy for others or much [of a] sense of shame or guilt. It was about “her growth” as JT. Laura uses that one, too. We’re supposed to be elated about their psychological, individualistic “growth.” This type of consciousness is extremely, profoundly American.

Found out more about The Cult of JT Leroy at the film’s official website. Stay tuned for next year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

“I’ve always had a purpose to my creativity,” says Pomona Lake, a Vancouver graphic designer and artist. She found that purpose fast and early, when an image from a high-school art project went profoundly, monumentally viral.

This particular picture shows the back of a woman’s legs with her skirt pulled up. Running up her left leg is a sequence of markings, each labelled with a different qualifier, starting with “matronly” just above the ankle and finishing with “whore” just under the cheeks. It was a simple and scathing commentary on sexism – “I think that art came out of feeling my sexuality for the first time,” Pomona says, “feeling sexualized by external people,” – and it understandably took off.

Just 18-years-old, fresh into her first year of design at Capilano University, she suddenly became to thousands of people worldwide the face of young feminism. She was inundated with messages, both caustic hatemail and proclamations of support from likeminded supporters worldwide. She was interviewed by major publications like The New Statesman and cited in university classes across the globe. At one point it took her to Belgium to battle a racist group who co-opted the concept for their own agenda.

Few creatives get such an all-encompassing response to their work, especially as a teen. And even people decades older would have been hard-pressed to handle it with Pomona’s level-headedness. While the outpouring of support was empowering, she didn’t let the anonymous attacks faze her. “It’s really easy to see through the hate mail,” she explains. “They’re just scared.”

Although she’d been declared an expert, the unexpected success of the photograph was what actually sparked Pomona’s activism. At the time the piece came out she didn’t even identify as a feminist, she was just working off her own experiences. “I realized I was completely ignorant and needed to know things,” she says. She embarked on a serious self-driven education, focusing on feminism but spiralling into other areas, and hasn’t slowed since.

Today Pomona makes a point of offering her design services to deserving people and companies that otherwise couldn’t afford them. During business hours she works at Yulu PR, which she describes as “the Robin Hood of PR firms.” Off the clock she helps out worthy causes.

Through her work she hopes to change the flawed and unbalanced system of capitalism by gaming it from the inside. It’s not that she thinks the system is run by some cat-stroking, monocled super villain. She just recognizes that most people are looking out for themselves – “everyone’s just dumb, not evil,” – and with a little readjustment life could be a lot more fair for everyone.

She’s a proponent of “liberating funds,” using money earned through her work in responsible ways like shopping at small, local businesses, finding alternative ways to meet needs, and re-investing in the community. It’s all part of her life mission, which she’s honed down to this: “To open eyes and ears and bring people together.”

She pauses for a second, thinks, then nods. “And fix bullshit.”

The great American novelist, Herman Melville, once wrote “I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me” (Moby Dick).

This famed American adage has resonated with me for many years, as I’m sure it has for many others. Melville’s words reveal a man who loved to celebrate life, and render its moments of ecstatic beauty into clear, carefully crafted prose. This fine artistic tradition of transforming a prosaic sperm squeezing moment into something truly imaginative is what motivates many modern artists who, like Melville, seek gratification in the elevation of the seemingly mundane into something powerfully transcendent.

For the photographers at BurnAfterShooting, the transformative power of art continues to underpin their weekly forays into Vancouver’s seedy underbelly. With a penchant for light erotica and general horseplay, these supple young artists aim to show that the best cameras are the disposable ones. Tune in to catch the finest snaps from the sordid, booze soaked streets of metro Vancouver. While these pictures won’t break the internet, they may break your sense of common decency.