Rich and Poor

The Portland Film Festival brought us two brilliantly-crafted documentaries about life as we have never known it. The Incomparable Rose Hartman is about success in photographing and hobnobbing with the high and mighty in NYC. The Check It is about gay and transgender young people of color. The disparity of lifestyles in the two films reflects what’s going on in American culture and what I’m thinking about today, as our city recoils from the murder of a young black man by a white supremacist who intentionally ran the man down and killed him with his Jeep truck; and by the forced migration of nearly a thousand unhoused people who have been camping illegally along a 21-mile nature corridor through an affluent neighborhood. The police and park rangers are currently, as I write this, “sweeping” the area of people who have nowhere to go, people who will now be forced to wander the streets searching for a place to urinate, to wash, to sleep. 

Walking out of the theatre into these streets makes our minds whirl. Hartman elbowed her way into crowds around Mick and Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Jackie Kennedy, and she made a living selling her photographs. The gay youths formed a gang they called The Check It, to defend each other from bullies and violence in Washington, D.C. and to create a family because many of them had no family they could rely on. What both Hartman and the CheckIt have in common is attention to style, image, poses and pretenses: with the "real" and the "unreal." Some of the gang members joined a fashion workshop, and now the group has designed a line of T-shirts as a way to make a little money and help each other out. It is a privilege to hear their stories and to travel the dark streets of D.C. beside them. You can order a CheckIt T-shirt here. I’ve ordered one as a holiday gift, and I bought a copy of Street Roots today, with a very fine essay on what the city can do about people who are unhoused, written by Israel Bayer, who is one of my local heroes.