QFest St. Louis Interview: Elegance Bratton – Director of PIER KIDS

By Tom Stockman | June 17, 2020

The 2019 documentary PIER KIDS is part of the 13th annual QFest St. Louis, a Cinema St. Louis event. Order a ticket to this virtual screening HERE. More information about QFest can be found HERE.

In PIER KIDS, homeless queer and trans youth of color — caught up in the precariousness of survival and self-preservation — hang out at Christopher Street Pier, forging their own chosen family. Genuine and charming, these eloquent teens must contend with overwhelming amounts of homophobia and abuse. Over three years, the filmmaker records the lives of his subjects who, after being kicked out by their families for their sexuality, have become homeless on the same street where the gay-rights movement began so long ago. The Hollywood Reporter writes: “Bratton aims to shine a light on a community within the community, specifically the 40 percent of queer youth who are both homeless and people of color. Bratton, himself gay and African-American, knows this life first-hand. He was kicked out of his home after coming out, then lived on the streets for several years before joining the Marine Corps. The subjects of ‘Pier Kids’ live in a perpetual state of precariousness. In calling attention to their struggles, Bratton honors their endurance and celebrates their existence.”

Elegance Bratton of PIER KIDS, took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about the film.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman June 15, 2020

Tom Stockman: Congratulations on your film PIER KIDS. I watched it over the weekend and thought it was terrific.

Elegance Bratton: Thank you so much. 

TS: Let’s talk about you a bit. Apparently you’ve had quite a journey on your way to becoming a filmmaker. I understand you were homeless for many years. 

EB: Yes, I was kicked out of my house at the age of 16.

TS: What were the circumstances behind that? 

EB: I was gay and my mother gave me the ultimatum to start dating girls or else leave her house.  I packed all my stuff up into trash bags and I got on a train to New York where I followed three black gay men, or at least I thought were three black gay men, to Christopher Street. They introduced me to a place where I finally felt like I was at home. 

TS: So you lived there yourself on these piers where your film was shot? 

EB: Sometimes. As one character says in my film: the pier was a living room, a playground, an office, and very often I would use that public space to connect the dots and find temporary housing. At that time in New York there was a lot of 24-hour clubbing, so I would go to the pier in the afternoon, run into somebody, and we’d get a free pass into The Limelight or The Tunnel or a place like that. We would dance and party all night, then when the sun would come up, we would meet someone whose house we could crash in for the night, then I would go back to the pier, or maybe even back to my mother’s house in Jersey. 

TS: At some point you joined the Marines, correct?

EB: Yes, I joined the Marines in 2005. 

TS: What was that like for you?

EB: It was complicated. I was homeless and I called my mom and asked if I could come back home. She told me that if I was still gay I couldn’t be there with her and she suggested that I join the military. I was against that at first. I felt that she would rather me get blown up in the Iraq war then be a gay man in her house.  Then I woke up in a shelter the next morning and saw a lot of black men around me who had been homeless 20 or 30 or 40 years and realized that this was not meant to be my future. The Marine recruiter looked good in his uniform, so I figured if I could look that good in a uniform, they should sign me up.  So I signed up. It was someone in the Marines who suggested that I become a filmmaker.

TS: So you learned the art of filmmaking in the Marines? 

EB: I got exposed to the art of filmmaking in the Marine Corps, but you never finish learning that art. With every film you make, you’re always learning more about the art of filmmaking. I think PIER KIDS is my transition from being just a guy with a camera to someone achieving a form of artistic expression. I think that moment came after a month of filming when Crystal said to me that I had to be her friend in order to film her life.  The camera had to be her friend and I had to be on her side. She had to depend on me when she was hungry.  I think that really speaks to the way the film is made and it is informed every step that I have taken as a filmmaker since. 

TS: Did you get the idea to make this film because you had lived there? 

EB: After I left the Marines I studied Anthropology and African-American studies at Columbia University. We read a book called The Importance of Social Networks, a book written in the 1960s long before the Internet. In that book, the author talked about places where you form special bonds with people and through those casual, informal bonds and contacts, and much of the American dream is passed through those contacts.  The professor wondered if we could go someplace where social networking takes place today in person and of course I thought of Christopher Street pier.  Simultaneously, the semester was ending and I saw what a big deal it was for these kids to go back home after a semester of college.  It was like a parade with pets and stuffed animals and signs and parents. None of that was waiting for me after my first semester. The question was, who wanted me? Who was anticipating my arrival?  I was on the pier and looked around and had a ‘a-ha’ moment. Home is the place where one is most deeply understood and the pier was that place for me. This was my home. I started talking to other people who looked like me and asked them about their relationship to the space.  The movie started from there.

TS: When did you film there?

EB: A lot of that was during my undergrad time at Columbia in 2011 and 2012. But I did go back after I graduated and filmed more in 2016. 

TS: Did you have a crew, or was it just you? 

EB: I had myself and my husband Chester Gordon, who came on board in 2016 to help me finish the film.  Before that though, it was mostly me. The film’s editor Bernhard Fasenfest was someone I met at Columbia. He was a very very important part of the film.

TS: Did you feel safe filming on the pier? 

EB: Safe from what? 

TS: Crime, violence, the police? 

EB: It’s a complicated experience.  In terms of my community, there’s a code, and if you follow that code you’re pretty safe.  I lucked out when I made this film, because it was at the advent of social media,  so people thought I was making Love & Hip-Hop or something like that, like some VH1 reality show. In order to get exposure for themselves, people treated me very well because they thought I was the guy that could make them famous.  That’s not to say I didn’t have some conflicts.  The place we filmed was in a red light district.  After 9/11, it became illegal for more than two people to congregate on a street corner at a given time, And this is also a gentrifying area.  Gentrification is a code word for ethnic cleansing. That means if you are a person of color, and you were in a gentrifying area, very often you’re seen as something that devalues property and you’re under increased police surveillance. So I felt relatively safe from my own community, but we were all very much in danger by  an impatient and aggressive gentrification process with the New York City police being the foot soldiers of this abuse and oppression. 

TS: How many hours of footage did you end up shooting? 

EB: We shot 400 hours of footage. The editor Bernhard Fasenfest and I are soul brothers after this project. Being in the military, I recognized there’s a very rigid way that documentaries are made That rigidity was limiting at first in terms of emotional honesty, so I threw all of that out after Crystal challenged me to be my friend in my work. I was filming from an emotional state. I was in school Monday through Thursday, and then I would be homeless Thursday through Monday with all of these characters, whether that meant crashing with Crystal or riding the trains all night or walking the streets all night. I think that style is very clear in the movie. I didn’t know where it was all going to end. I didn’t even know if I had something in particular to say at first other than the fact that this is how we live. This is where we have been left to fend for ourselves. I very much wanted to put the audience into the skin of oppression, a first person point-of-view. The movie is like a homeless kid looking for family and trying to make friends. That being said, 400 hours of footage later, I was wondering how we could cut all this emotion into an experience that other people can feel.  That’s when I applied to NYU grad program, got in, and that’s where I learned how to edit my movie.  

TS: Was there certain footage that was really painful for you to cut out while editing?  

EB: Cutting a movie is its own emotional roller coaster. It took me years to get through this footage because it was so emotionally taxing to shoot. For example, when I was shooting it, Casper passed away. I didn’t necessarily process that loss completely because it was in the middle of everything.  I had to review that footage in the editing room. I looked at that footage hundreds of times and it took a while to get to a place where it wasn’t that raw.  I wanted to have every bit of Casper that I had filmed. I wanted to show every aspect of Crystal that I had fallen in love with and it became difficult to let go of certain things, or as they say in film school, “to kill your babies“. I started to understand that the beauty of this film is that it’s not exposition. In a typical documentary you get into statistics, and after that you meet the people, and maybe you feel something at the end.  PIER KIDS is living with them and as a result, it’s about the essence of who they are,  and the impact they have, but it’s not necessarily about every single detail  of their lives. So it was painful at the beginning to let go of some of this footage, but by the end it was a relief because I felt like I had gotten to the core of what made them so fascinating in the first place. 

TS: You’re the interviewer in the film, and you hear your actual voice, but there’s very little of that.  Was that a deliberate decision?

EB: Yes, one of my favorite movies of all time is BATTLE OF ALGIERS by Gillo Pontecorvo. What I love about that movie is how it feels like documentary even though it is it is a narrative film. The ballroom scene in PIER KIDS particular, while it’s not the focus of the film, definitely shows that influence on the characters who are and being caught between racism and white supremacy, and also homophobia and Christianity in our own communities. It’s a big behavioral science experiment where one is performing their identity in ways just to stay alive. That kind of tension that exists in BATTLE OF ALGIERS also exists in my film. It’s real people who are actually performative. I didn’t want to get in the way of them speaking about themselves, but I also wanted to be conscious of myself as a character and have that moment where we let go to allow the people on screen  to take over the narrative.  It’s something where I wanted to have the impact of a dramatic arc like Ali in BATTLE OF ALGIERS when he kind of commits to the mission of  ending colonial rule and the mission takes over versus his own subjectivity.  It was important for me to create a sense of reliability and once we see that trust, I can remove myself and allow these characters to speak for themselves. 

TS: Was there anyone who you approached on the pier to get involved in your project that didn’t want to have anything to do with it? 

EB: So many.  Remember, this is the red light district. When I first went out  with my military set up, with the big bright light and the huge boom pole, I was literally shining a light on people who may have been taking drugs  or engaging in sex work,  or just making out with someone. Many didn’t want to be seen or recorded doing these things. I needed to figure out how to reconvene and give myself a smaller footprint. So yes, there were people that did not want to be involved and there were others who were near the beginning of their transition from one gender to another.  For trans people, that is a very sensitive topic, going from who you were to who you are. Photographic evidence of that journey can be quite traumatizing and triggering.  So a lot of trans folk didn’t want to be seen on film until they had become more feminine, or more masculine.  But I think as the film continued to evolve, the community knew that I was there doing this work. So I met people who did not want to be on camera, but they have told their friends about me so I felt accepted by everyone. 

TS: Has the pier changed much since you shot this original footage?

EB: Yes. It’s even more gentrified now than it was then. Again, gentrification is a code word for  ethnic cleansing. We determined that  they want a new population of people with money to move in, to revitalize something that has deteriorated.  If you look at my film and compare it to something like PARIS IS BURNING , Which was shot essentially in the same location, you can see how different the pier looks from the mid-1980s than it does today . The difference is part of the agenda. They think they need to solve the problem of having queer and brown people in public spaces. It’s remarkably different. One of my major locations in the movie was a little café area on the Pier.  When I started making the movie, it was a free-seating area. Anyone could sit down, roll a blunt, have something to eat, converse.  Then someone decided to build a café in that space and now you can’t sit at those tables unless you buy something. But drinks and food is so expensive that it becomes cost prohibitive so they’ve lost a good 40% or so of public space. To be honest, I walk by that business and it doesn’t appear to be very successful.  There’s maybe a handful of people there, so it feels intentional, an act of aggression to remove  our people and make them less comfortable. There is all sorts of corporate and capital intervention that make it harder for queer people of color to congregate. 

TS: Let’s talk about Crystal. She is the closest thing you have to a main character in your film, and I thought some of the most powerful moments in your film involved her.  There’s a sequence where Crystal flies to Kansas City to meet up with her mother and aunt who can’t embrace her lifestyle, and it’s a very honest scene . Talk about Crystal’s mom and aunt a little bit. 

EB: One of the most important things about this film for me was that I had been kicked out of my house when I was very young. I didn’t even really have a chance to have a conversation with my mother about my sexuality.  I don’t think my mother nor myself had the tools to have that conversation. This film very much comes from that desire to make something for young people and their families, particularly black folks, to have a conversation around sexuality and gender that we have not  necessarily been taught to have.  The modern gay rights movement has accomplished a lot of incredible things. Just today to the Supreme Court ruled that it is now illegal to fire someone based on their sexual preference, and it was mostly conservative court.  It’s a sign of progress in our society. However, the modern gay rights movement is one very much built out of, first of all, a Jane Goodall-type approach, a so- like-us approach where we are just like straight people. We want to get married, we want to buy a house.  We want to have our version of what you have and by circumstance that means that queer people and poor people and people of color get sidelined. The way that they live is often not seen as an aspirational goal for the movement, one to project its into the main stream world. That kind of trickles down into Crystal’s household because the gay rights  movement is not in the ghetto.  It’s not in the hood, it’s not where black people or Latinos live.  It’s more common on college campuses and on the coast and as a result, Crystal being a mid-western black person from a working class background, her mother did not have the tools to understand when she was  being oppressive and triggering  and when she was being loving.  I think it’s important to show people themselves through this art form, particularly in the form of documentary film.  I wanted to make a movie where it articulated the points of view of my mother, who really loved me. 

TS: Let me interrupt you there. Is your mother still living? 

EB: No, my mother unfortunately was recently murdered.  

TS: So sorry to hear that. Was she aware that you had become this successful filmmaker? 

EB: I’m pretty sure she was. Crystal’s mother and aunt loved their child deeply but they are on their own to figure out how to accept who they are, and I wanted to depict that process in real time in hopes that other people who might watch this that are in that same place. This may shrink the distance between loving someone and accepting someone. 

TS: Your movie ends on something of an upbeat note, with you revisiting Crystal who’s in a marriage and seems happy.  Are they still together? 

EB: Yes, they are very much still together. Crystal is a Midwestern Christian conservative girl. She is not a liberal lefty type of person. She wants to be married and have kids. That’s intentional too, as I think that very often when we see poor blacks in documentaries, the idea is they have some sort of exceptional gift that is meant to inspire the audience. They often have a performative gift like basketball in HOOP DREAMS. I want to I want to make a film that says love is exceptional, that love has the ability to transform. And it is beautiful and exceptional that Crystal has found love and that love gives her the peace to continue to fight for her own existence.  There are a lot of people out there who are not going to go through the journey that I went through, being homeless and such, it’s not easy to do, but for all those people, we shouldn’t forget about them. We shouldn’t act as if by existing in their truth that somehow they are failing themselves and our society. In reality, if they are able to share the love and give love and feel love, then they are teaching us what we really need to learn, and then we can just love each other for who we are. 

TS: I like that your film ends so positively. One last question. What is your next project? 

EB: Oh, I’m working on a lot of things. The most immediate is that I have a documentary coming out  about the Harlem Outsiders. I’m in the midst of finalizing and finishing that.  The Harlem Outsiders were the first black regiment to fight in World War I and they were also the first black musicians to bring Jazz as it to France, starting a pipeline of cultural exchange that still exists.  I’ll be shooting my first fiction feature film this fall called THE INSPECTION.  It’s loosely autobiographical, about a homeless man who joins the Marines to change his life, but then must conceal his attraction to his Drill Sergeant in order to survive boot camp.

TS: Sounds interesting Elegance. Good luck with that and PIER KIDS and all of your future projects.

EB: Thank you.