Elegance Bratton’s documentary about New York City’s LGBT homeless youth and the neighborhood they call home might be the next “must see” film — if it gets made.
Courtesy of Elegance Bratton
The trailer for Elegance Bratton's documentary "Pier Kids: The Life" opens with all of the voguing, duck walking and leyomi dropping we've come to expect from New York's gay ballroom scene. Just before the hardwon ferocity of the ball competitor's lulls viewers into a fall sense of ease, an image of a dancer landing a leyomi drop is spliced with an image of a homeless teenager sleeping on Christopher Street pier.
Courtesy of Elegance Bratton
Two decades after the debut of Jennie Livingston's iconic documentary "Paris Is Burning" but still in the afterglow of that film's influence, "Pier Kids is about the in-between moments when you're not at the ball, when you're not even at the pier," Bratton told BuzzFeed during a conversation about the project, Bratton's Kickstarter campaign to raise funding to complete its production, and how his own experiences as a once homeless teen who frequented those very same piers has colored his lens.
His goal, ultimately, is for the film "to help poor and working class families of color understand the gay and transgender youth who are inside their homes so they stop kicking them out onto the streets." Bratton's mother kicked him out of their Rahway, NJ home when he came out of the closet. Vaguely familiar with New York, based on his family's weekend trips to the city, the then-sixteen-year-old bought a train ticket. "I saw three black gay men get on the train. They were laughing. They were singing. They were dressed well. Just really, they were the life of that train car. And I sat there watching them like, "Whatever they're doing that makes them that happy and that gay, I need to do it." So, Bratton followed them and ended up at that Christopher Street pier. Years later, the writer and filmmaker is translating his experiences into a documentary that's both in conversation with "Paris Is Burning" but also more direct in its attempt to make sense of the way class and race dynamics act upon the city's LGBT community, especially its youth.
