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By Saundra Sorenson
Queer Documentary Film Festival
Thursday, June 2 – Saturday, June 4
$75 All Screenings | All Ages
queerdocfest.org

Clinton Street Theater
2522 SE Clinton Street

Clinton Street Theater hosts the only Queer Documentary Festival in the United States this week. This four-day event offers up the entertaining and the informative (and, more often than not, both). QDoc gives us a well-curated look at the issues of coming out, from the very intimate first steps (India's I Am) to the harrowing prospect of being an international face for your experience (Becoming Chaz).

Several selections aim to illustrate the often tenuous relationship between gender and sexual identity and art. In music, we have The Life & Near Death Story of Patty Schemel, the story of Hole's iconic drummer; The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, a look at the daily intimacies of a music impresario and his partner. From stage, legendary Johnny Arias joins the crowd for a performance and screening of Arias with a Twist. Fittingly, the festival contextualizes deeply personal stories with documentaries that delve into the cultural movements that surround them: On These Shoulders We Stand, chronicling the earliest days of gay rights in Los Angeles, and a look at a more recent movement in Inspired: Voices Against Prop 8, along with a host of others.

Here are a couple favorites we were able to screen ahead of time:

Arias with a Twist (2010), a near-irrefutable argument that performance art doesn’t always suck. With a Twist chronicles the powerhouse collaboration between golden-throated drag performer Johnny Arias and classically trained puppeteer Basil Twist. The two fuse their passions to create a revue that can best be described as burlesque with marionettes (the stage show opens with Arias in Bettie Page attire singing Led Zeppelin under the watchful gaze of extraterrestrial judges — and that’s just the overture). But in chronicling the stage spectacle of “Arias,” director Bobby Sheehan creates a making-of feature in the best sense of the term: With a Twist is a story not only of the cooperation between two exuberantly good-natured creative types, but also an illustration of how “Arias” is the product of its creators’ upbringing.

Arias blossomed in the Big Apple’s “performance for performance’s sake” art scene in the ’70s — a movement marred by an AIDS epidemic that claimed too many of Arias’s co-conspirators — while Twist took a disciplined path of study before getting playful with avant-garde puppetry. The effect is far more playful than pretentious. Thursday, June 2, 7 p.m., followed by a party with a performance by Johnny Arias at 9:30 p.m.

Becoming Chaz (2010), equal parts celebrity gawkfest and informative feature that follows one of the most public faces of gender transition: Chaz (born Chastity) Bono. There is no better way to illustrate the complexities of the trans experience than to show Chaz, son of a celebrated gay icon, struggling for acceptance from his mother Cher; interestingly, he seems to find more on-screen support from his stepmother, a Republican congressional representative.

Still, Chaz is unflinchingly honest as he invites cameras to follow him through hormonal transitions and, more graphically, through top surgery in order to reshape his chest to better fit his gender identity. Becoming Chaz gets far more intimate as it delves into the five-year relationship Chaz has enjoyed with his girlfriend Jennifer, a recovering alcoholic who initially seems as uncertain about the procedure as the film's intended audience. Becoming Chaz has received some criticism from the trans community for taking a too-simplistic look at issues of gender identity, and in all fairness, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato do lean too heavily on ¬Å“then and now¬Â Chaz/Chastity photos that serve more as a spectacle than as a demonstration of Chaz's journey.

But Chaz's story, and his endearing and at times shaky camera presence, isn't just for entertainment (as sparing clips of his mother Cher might suggest). It's a profile of a man trying to reconcile with what are at times his own troubling assumptions about gender. Sunday, June 5, 7 p.m.