Pier Kids (Freedom Principle, PBS “P.O.V.,” 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Icon episode PBS showed a fascinating documentary in their P.O.V. series called “Pier Kids,” shot between 2011 and 2016 and centering around the legendary Chelsea Pier at Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The print-the-legend version of history is that the Queer rights movement in America started overnight in 1969 when police staged a raid at the Stonewall Inn in the Village, a club so skuzzy it didn’t even have running water, which was owned by a Mafioso who set it up because he had a Gay nephew and he wanted to give the nephew an enterprise that would keep him busy, supply him with potential boyfriends and get him out of his and the Mob’s hair. Actually the first known Queer rights movement in the U.S. was started in Chicago in 1923 and the beginnings of a continuous history of Queer activism was the formation of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, but as in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (whose writer, Willis Goldbeck, came up with the “print the legend” line that later become the title of a biography of the film’s director, John Ford), this movie started with a title proclaiming Stonewall as the birthplace of Queer activism and then went on to make the rather patronizing argument that white Queers became the dominant face of the movement and left Black Queers, particularly Black Trans people, and other Queer people of color behind. That’s a bit of special pleading I could have done without, since many of the participants in the Stonewall riots – including Puerto Rican-descended Transwoman Sylvia Rivera, whom I had the honor of doing a phone interview with which I published in Zenger’s Newsmagazine as a memorial when she passed – were people of color and/or Transgender.

The writer-director of this film, Elegance Bratton, was himself (I’m using the masculine pronoun here because, despite that flamboyant first name, in his post-film commentary he presented as a man) a “pier kid” decades earlier, homeless and sleeping on the pier (until he was rousted by the police, which happens frequently; George Orwell, reminiscing about his own homeless days in the book Down and Out in Paris and London, marveled at the obsession law enforcement has with moving homeless people around for no apparent reason, and it’s as true now as it was then. The imdb.com page on the film describes it as centering around three “pier kids” – Black Transwoman Krystal LaBetja (who said she took her name from a legendary drag queen of the 1970’s who fought back against police rousts and persecution in general) and young Black Gay men DeSean Irby (who came across as the most intelligent person Bratton interviewed for his film) and Casper, who died during the course of the shooting and whose memorial is depicted (the cops rousted the attempts of the pier kids to stage a memorial for him on the pier – it figures). Pier Kids was an uneven movie but also a quite moving one, especially in the sequence in which Krystal reunites with his mother and aunt, both of whom refuse to accept his female identity and insist on referring to her as “he” even though he’s presenting as fully feminine. “I know the baby that came out of my womb was my son!” Krystal’s mom declares.

But the film is really more of an ensemble-cast production, and though Bratton was shooting al fresco with amateur equipment and therefore some of the dialogue is hard to understand (and too much of what you otherwise could understand is bleeped because of the insane standards the government imposes on American broadcasting; so many of the things that got said in this movie were turned into hash by all the bleeps I found myself wishing Bratton would be able to release an uncensored DVD or Blu-Ray version), much of the message gets through. What’s particularly fascinating to me is the matter-of-fact tone with which the people discuss what they have to do to survive – including turning tricks for money (interestingly, they describe the risks of getting STD’s but not the equally significant risks of being beaten or even killed by “johns”) and shoplifting (or “confiscating,” as DeSean puts it). When he described how he “shops” – he fills up a cart with groceries, presents a value-less gift card for payment, then when it’s rejected says he needs to go activate it, leaves with his groceries and never comes back – Charles, who works as a grocery clerk, winced with recognition because he’s seen that scam pulled at his store and so he’s experienced it from the other direction. Charles was also shocked by a scene that took place at the Unity Fellowship Church in Newark, New Jersey, where he had gone for a church retreat a few years ago but had not visited the church itself and was surprised at what a nice, well-appointed and church-specific space they have. He didn’t see the space when he went there – they must have held the retreat off-site – but he was startled to recognize some of the people.

There was also a bizarre sequence early in the film with a white person on the pier who said he worked in the financial services industry and who gave Bratton a weird piece of point-missing when he explained that he doesn’t see being “homosexual” as a legitimate minority like being Black and he thought then-President Barack Obama had been stupid to say that he could have been Trayvon Martin. He attributed Obama’s election to his being Black (“Yeah,” I joked, “just like all the other Black Presidents we’ve had”). One wonders just what he and his (white, male) companion were doing on the pier – looking for sex, probably, with the weird patronization johns usually express towards their whores of whatever racial, sexual or gender identity. The film also made the point – which I’ve heard elsewhere – that Transgender prostitutes are generally the best-paid, probably because (at least this is my theory) their customers want to rationalize their Gay side by saying to themselves, “At least she looks like a woman, so I’m not really doing anything Gay.” And the film ends with a happy ending for Krystal, who actually gets married – and director Bratton accepts their marriage at face value and doesn’t try to explore just what the other party thinks of the relationship and whether he was attracted to Krystal because she’s Trans or in spite of it. Indeed, the thing I liked best about Pier Kids is the matter-of-factness of it: Bratton went there just to depict who these people are and how they live (his show begins with statistics that – if I remember them correctly – 60 percent of all homeless teens in the U.S. are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender and 40 percent of them are people of color). He didn’t come in like a sociologist to try to “understand” their community or “explain” it in social-science terms, and if there’s a plea at the end of the movie it’s for the rest of us to treat these people as our equals, talk to them and hear their stories. I was quite glad Charles and I were able to watch this movie, and to watch it together even though I think he was less impressed by it than I was.