Click here to learn more about On the Downlow and to view clips of the movie.
Q: How did you get your start in filmmaking?
A: In college and graduate school, I did documentary filmmaking [Radcliffe College, then Yale University] … Later I became interested in experimental filmmaking … B/Side was a return to documentary …
Q: Who were your mentors?
A: There were not many mentors for me … I was originally a lefty documentarian, but that was probably the most mentoring quality … the avant-garde was a community, too, as was the Collective for Living Cinema … Joan Didion has written that if you’re small and a woman, you’re not threatening and people will open up. It’s true!
Q: What inspired you to make this film?
A: On the Downlow was a commission … I visited and shot footage in Cleveland in 2003 and made a short about the subject titled, The Party … At the party, there were about 200 people there, 95 percent were black, most were gay and bisexual. I was seeing a swathe of the gay black scene in Cleveland … Eventually I received initial funding for the feature documentary and went back in 2005. Arthur Jafa [Daughters of the Dust and Crooklyn] knew my work and came onboard.
Q: What surprised you about the men you met?
A: They all surprised me in different ways. Tony’s experience in jail was intense, something imagined from fiction, but harder to hear right there in front of you. Ray, who appeared as a young thug, surprised me by going for femmes [drag queens or femme queens] altogether, being desirous of men even if he liked the “pretty face.” Billy’s surprise was his comment that the “best sex was with my baby mama” [mother of his children]. He lives with an older black man. Kerwin’s surprise: a secret girlfriend “Tanya” that we didn’t know about. It came out when he spoke to Robin at the lake. This is the first documentary on the DL.
Q: The men in this film seem to have a private and public self.
A: To do a film on Downlow or DL is an oxymoron, a contradiction of terms: how to bring out what is underground. It seems there is the private life lived in a semi-public scene: at parties, on the web, at clubs.
It is as Billy maintains: “Contrary to popular belief, being gay is not something you can turn on and turn off when you feel like, as far as the motions go and what you actually like.
