Inspired by the themes of this year’s Mighty Real Queer Detroit biennial, I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections of the Contemporary Queer, is a program of LGBTQ+ documentary shorts curated by filmmaker Adam Baran. Drawn from films produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ll Be Your Mirror assembles an intergenerational portrait of queer lives in these increasingly perilous times.

You’ll visit the sites of early rights rebellions in Los Angeles and San Francisco, experience a punk rock fairytale in Florida, observe three elders grappling with their place in the world, and witness firsthand lives filled with beauty, joy, and hard-fought freedoms, balanced against backgrounds of isolation, climate catastrophe, racism, and transphobia.

Out of the Corner of Our Eye

• USA/2023 — directed by John Ira Palmer (11 min.)

Out of the Corner of Our Eye asks what queer space looks like—and might mean—today. This poetic documentary reflects on seven iconic, formerly queer spaces in Los Angeles that are no longer what they were, including a lesbian community haven, a research center funded by a pioneering trans man, and the custom-built home of America's first well-known drag performer.

How to Carry Water

• USA/2023 — directed by Sasha Wortzel (16 min.)

This punk rock fairytale doubles as a portrait of Shoog McDaniel—a fat, queer, and disabled photographer working in and around northern Florida’s freshwater springs. For over a decade, McDaniel's photographs have transformed how a fat-phobic society views fat bodies. The film immerses audiences in a world of fat beauty and liberation, in which marginalized bodies—including bodies of water—are sacred.

Compton’s ‘22

• USA/2022 — directed by Drew de Pinto (16 min.)

In August 1966, three years before the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, sex workers and drag queens in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood rioted against police violence at the all-night diner Compton's Cafeteria. There was no news coverage, and the arrest records no longer exist. Decades later, trans historian Susan Stryker interviewed the surviving Compton’s Queens, including professional drag performers and those who identified with terms like girls, queens and hair fairies.

Queenie

• USA/2020 — directed by cai thomas (20 min.)

Queenie is a 73-years-young Black lesbian who has lived in The Marcy Projects in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood since 1988; now, she’s ready to move to a building that meets her mobility, safety, and social needs as an aging elder. She applies to Stonewall Residences, New York's first affordable housing for LGBT elders, hopeful she’ll be able to live out her final days in a place she can call home.

The Girl That Got Away

• USA/2023 — directed by Lauren Veen & Ephi Stempler (14 min.)

After four decades playing tough guy roles, a Mexican American actor in San Francisco must choose whether to continue presenting as male or come out as female and risk losing job security and family acceptance.

Merman

• USA/2023 — directed by Sterling Hampton IV (10 min.)

A 58-year-old Black queer man speaks about his life as an emergency nurse, leather titleholder, and civil rights advocate.

Bigger on the Inside

• USA/2022 — directed by Angelo Madsen Minax (11 min.)

From an isolated wooded cabin, a trans man stargazes, Scruff-chats with guys, watches YouTube tutorials, takes drugs, and lies about taking drugs—feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Bigger on the Inside probes the boundaries between interior and exterior, to consider bodily insides as passageway and portal to the immensity of longing.

Presented in partnership with Mighty Real/Queer Detroit.