July's Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman -- PUZZLES: When Hate Came to Town

A puzzle ends in a rainbow 

When economic pain is widely felt, hate crimes result -- 250,000 annually. The 53 minute documentary, PUZZLES, by Tami Gold and David Pavlovsky of Hunter College, NYC, is a small engrossing tale of the collision between poverty and homophobia in the charming coastal town of New Bedford, MA, a once-upon-a-time rich whaling and industrial hub. In February of 2006, the mixed gay and straight bar Puzzles suffered a hatchet and gun attack by a troubled youth on 3 bar patrons, shaking the community from top to bottom. (The perpetrator fled the attack scene and died by his own hand 3 days later in Missouri, having killed two others.)

You can smell the salt and the sea, tread the cobblestones, and witness the faded industrial past of this now blue-collar, rough-hewn, but engaging small city that has fallen from its heyday but remains close-knit and resilient. The filmmakers take you there.

The voices of a middle-age victim of Jacob Robida, the hatchet-wielding 18-year-old perpetrator, members of his teen gang, the Juggalos, and both gay and straight patrons of the bar Puzzles immerse you intimately into the ugliness of the attack and its ripple effect on the community.

It may seem that the film will focus only on the personal stories of the traumatized attack victims, bar patrons, and bereaved teens shocked by the violent act of their friend, Jacob, but the filmmakers spend the right amount of time on the reparative work done in New Bedford -- the fight back via words and community action. Special efforts by political leaders, police, schools, and the advent of Gay Pride events (above and below) have begun to heal wounds and improve harmony in the city. One bar patron explains that the event helped make things right for gay people in town who began to stop hiding. It is thought that 75% of gay residents were closeted at the time. Bob Perry, one of the 3 victims, had come out only a month before the attack at age 47.

The bar, Puzzles, and its successor, Rainbow's End, have since closed, but ten years later New Bedford has a different social climate. Bev Baccelli, a gay activist in the film from nearby Mattapoisett, commented to SouthCoastToday on the 10th anniversary of the attack: "Out of a tragedy like Puzzles, as horrifying as it was, comes change.....Gay people and straight people started talking to each other. Is it a perfect place?...No, but it's a lot better than...10 years ago."

PUZZLES is about as complete, poignant, and meaningful a story of hate and its consequences as 53 minutes allow, but it's worth referencing here to former openly gay House of Representatives members, Barney Frank and Gary Studds, (the latter deceased in 2006), both of whom represented New Bedford in Congress at different times; Frank and Studds add to the picture of a community not innately homophobic but subject to the pressures of poverty and hate propaganda.

Following the recent attack on gay bar Pulse in Orlando and to mark the 2016 anniversary of the Puzzles event, filmmaker and Hunter College faculty member Tami Gold has made available a free link to the documentary through July. So you can stream this film with no charge through the end of July, simply by clicking here.

The above post was written by 

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

In MATT SHEPARD IS A FRIEND OF MINE Michele Josue reopens/helps heal an old wound

Can it really be more than 16 years since the murder in Wyoming of an elfin-like kid named Matthew Shepard became national and then worldwide news? More than any other victim of a gay hate crime that I can ever recall, young Shepard became the face, body, heart and soul of gay victim-hood. He stood for it all. "Matthew always wanted to be famous," notes the boy's guidance counselor (himself a gay man), with sadness and irony, during the course of this new documentary. One can't help but wonder, after seeing MATT SHEPARD IS A FRIEND OF MINE -- written and directed by Michele Josue, who was indeed a good friend of the murdered boy -- what Shepard himself would make of the kind of martyr he has now become.

One of the many strengths of the documentary is that Ms Josue, shown at right, sees to it that Shepard becomes much more than mere martyr by filling in many of the blanks a lot of us did not know, unless we followed the case in enormous detail -- and even then I believe that the filmmaker has brought new facts, speculations and ideas to the table.

Josue manages this by bringing to that table a landfall of interviews, mostly with Shepard's family, to whom he was extremely close, and with teachers, counselors and his many friends. Everybody liked this fellow, it seems. So, too, might have his murderers, had they only gotten to know him a little longer and a little better. When they were sober.

For the first half of this 89-minute movie, we hear all about the boy-growing-into-young-man with accompanying photographs, most of them stills. We learn how his family moved to Saudi Arabia due to dad's work and how, because of lack of schools for the English speaking, Matthew was placed in a boarding school in Switzerland. This is where he met many of the friends shown and interviewed in the movie.

These kids (that's Matthew, second from right) took trips around Europe as part of their education, and they persuaded the school's administration to allow their trip to Morocco -- a trip that changed Matthew's life in ways you'll learn when you see the film.

Around the halfway point, we get to the murder itself, bits of which are told and shown, and then the remainder of the film tries to come to terms with what happened and why and what might be done to prevent more of the same. We see those idiotic demonstrators waving their signs telling us that God Hates Fags, and Ms Josue interviews the priest who spoke at length to one of Shepard's murderers, pre-sentencing. That priest's advice to the filmmaker, who is having a very hard time coming to terms with all this, proves illuminating.

Shepard's parents and brother seem a particularly kind and likable family, and when, post-"event," they become involved in the Foundation that now bears their son's name, we realize that this is where the film has been heading: into the territory of redemption. Fortunately, Josue doesn't over-do this angle. She simply offers it up as one of the alternatives involved in moving on.

Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine is a very personal documentary that becomes, over its full length, much more than that. It gives a young man who was mostly seen as victim the chance to live as a more full-bodied character, someone with whom we all might easily have become friends. The movie, from Run Rabbit Run Media opens at New York's AMC Empire 25 on Friday, February 6, then expands to Los Angeles' Laemmle Noho 7 on the following Friday, February 13. 

Update: as of November 3, 2015, the film is available via DVD 

and digital from Education Pictures and Virgil Entertainment. 

There's no excuse to miss out: 

This documentary is worth seeing.