WE LIVE HERE: THE MIDWEST
This week, TV editor Maira Garcia and Screen Gab editor Matt Brennan recommend two portraits of queer life in America, one contemporary, one historical.
Running at under an hour, Hulu’s “We Live Here” provides a series of snapshots of LGBTQ+ families living in the Midwest, who weigh in on what it’s like to live in small communities where acceptance isn’t always a given. Among the couples featured are Mario and Monte, a Black gay couple with a baby girl living in Nebraska; Katie and Nia, an Iowan transgender/queer couple with five children; Russ and Mark, a gay couple in Ohio; Courtney and Denise, a lesbian couple living on a Kansas farm with a son; and Debb and Jenn, a transgender couple who co-parent two daughters in Minnesota.
and Mario in “We Live Here,” top. Colman Domingo in “Rustin.”
The common thread among the families is their normalcy — they’re people working jobs and raising kids — and they might just happen to be your neighbors, which is really the point of this documentary. In some places, change and acceptance of gender and sexual identity can feel like a challenge, but in sharing their experiences, these families are simply trying to nudge the needle forward.
RUSTIN
Bayard Rustin mentored the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II, lived a relatively open gay life in midcentury America, recorded an album, appeared on Broadway and organized the 1963 March on Washington. Despite his remarkable résumé, though, his role in the civil rights movement has often been treated as a footnote in the stories of other men. “Rustin,” written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”) and directed by George C. Wolfe (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”), is here to correct the record. Featuring the extraordinary Colman Domingo as its charismatic, impassioned subject, the film makes Rustin the fulcrum of a turning point in the movement, marshaling the fractious energies of the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLC and labor unions to stage the largest peaceful demonstration in U.S. history at the time. Perhaps most satisfyingly, “Rustin,” acknowledging that organizing requires, well, organization, paints its lead character as both political radical and logistical genius: Its climactic moment isn’t the famed “I Have a Dream” speech, but a rousing description of the buses, port-a-lets, chartered flights and peace officers required to give King his unforgettable platform. (M.B.)