SF Gay Men’s Chorus Documentary Arrives On Various Cable TV Streaming Services

The SF Gay Men's Chorus needed hired security when they took a tour of the Deep South in the immediate wake of the Charlottesville unrest three years back, but get your Kleenex ready for the feature documentary Gay Chorus Deep South that captures their tumultuous trip.

Back in early 2017, the world’s first ever openly LGBTQ choral group, known locally as the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, decided to do a tour of the red-state deep south thinking this would promote some unity in the ugly early days of the Trump presidency. Boy did they have another thing coming, as the White nationalist rally in Charlottesville roiled the nation just weeks before they set off, requiring a much larger security detail than they thought they’d need. They made it unscathed, despite nasty threats at many tour stops, and a documentary about the tour is just now hitting your on-demand streaming options.

Gay Chorus Deep South is now available for streaming on demand if your cable service has Logo or PopTV, or if you use Sling. It's scheduled to remain available on those platforms until February 15, and there’s also a live broadcast of the film at the very suboptimal hour of 9 a.m. PT on Wednesday morning, December 30 on something called PlutoTV.

“There’s three choruses in this film,” director David Rodrigues said in an NPR interview this week. “There’s the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, there’s the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, and there’s the voices of the south. They play an equal role in kind of bringing the story together.”

The film has been very well-reviewed, and won the Audience Award at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Peter Debruge writes in his Variety review: “Rather than simply preaching to you-know-who, director David Charles Rodrigues — an equal-rights advocate who draws from his own ‘other’ status as a (straight-identifying) Brazilian American — succeeds in humanizing the individuals on both sides. If anything, the big surprise of the film is how its progressive-minded main characters, the 300 or so San Francisco singers who’ve struggled most of their lives to make peace with their identities, do most of the growing here.”

This film is a weepie, alright, but there’s another cause for needing a hankie. One of the film’s subplots is about chorus member Jimmy White, who reunites with the homophobic father who had years before disowned him. We’re sad to inform you that Jimmy White was lost to cancer on February 9 this year.

Related: This Is Giving Me Life Today: SF Gay Men's Chorus Serenades Healthcare Workersn [SFist]

Image: Gay Chorus Deep South