Southern Baptist Sissies

I was not expecting to ugly cry at a movie with such a silly title and Willam Belli and Leslie Jordan. Well worth the 2+ hour watch. I loved the stage setting and minimal cast. It felt like I really got to know the characters.

I was intrigued at viewing this movie. Since it also had an amazing rating here, I thought I should go out of my way to stream it. So I found a service where it was playing and sat down one evening to give this "amazing" movie a proper viewing.

I nearly immediately felt cheated. It's a horrible production. I'm not even sure if it is a true documentary or if these dudes are actors reading a script. It's THAT bad.

It became all too clear that the handful of written reviews are simply fake. And that seems to happen a lot with movies like this. It's really disappointing.

So, then I learned that the producers couldn't get money behind this poor production and went to crowd funding instead. It shows. It's very cheesy low budget and poorly put together. Really a huge miss.

Don't bother with this garbage.

There's an important message in this play, and the performers are all in top form, but there seem to be two plays taking place. The main play is , as the title suggests, about the lives of four young men growing up and the influences of their church on their lives. The second play, which seems to act as both comic relief and something to fill time while costumes changes occur, features two barflies commenting on their lives.

The four boys encompass the range of gay lives. Mark (Emerson Collins) is the defiant one who sees the hypocrisy in bible teachings; Benny (William Belli) embraces his queerness to become a drag queen, Andrew (Matthew Scott Montgomery) becomes a victim of his own personal demons, and TJ (Luke Stratte-McClure) denies his gayness and lives a forced hetero life. These stories are quite moving.

The barflies are an aging queen (Leslie Jordan) and an aging woman (Dale Dickey) who tell their stories and compare their lives while quietly getting drunk, night after night. There's a quiet desperation underlining their stories and only alcohol can brig relief.

Jordan and Dickey are just plain great, perched on their bar stools and trading gossip and quips while they hoist glass after glass. They could center a play all by themselves. Montgomery becomes the dramatic center of the sissies.

The cast also includes Newell Alexander as the clueless preacher, Rosemary Alexander as Andrew's frantic mother, Ann Walker as Benny's grandmother, Bobbi Eakes as Mark's bible thumping mother, and Joe Patrick Ward as the pianist at the bar.

Many of these actors appear in other works by Del Shores and people his sordid universe of eccentrics and zealots.

Being Southern, Seeing Sordid Lives and all the other great titles by Del Shores, I can't say enough about this film. I am an ordained nondenominational minister with a Doctorate of Divinity. And all of these films hit home. I would not hesitate to recommend this to any and all as would I would the film "Bridegroom" . That film is also an eye opener. Try the film, it has a lot of great laughs and a lot of friendly tears. There is a message there for any and all. I do a lot of counseling in my practice and can tell you of the way too many times I have had to talk a kid down off the ledge so to speak. It is a shame that some will chose death over homosexuality or Bi etc.

Being queer can be quite a burden and trying to be a Christian an even greater burden. Being queer while trying to be a Christian at the same time can often seem impossible.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this movie and at the start of it I almost stopped watching. It seemed it might turn out to be sort of a slapstick lampooning of Christianity with actors hurling Leviticus quotes at one another and mocking the preacher & his small flock of blindly loyal followers.

It was presented as a small stage production in a theater with very limited, unchanging stage props and a spotlight directing our attention. No beautiful scenery. No high tech special effects. Its success relied totally on the script and the actors. It was riveting and they were excellent.

There was comedy, some of it exceedingly funny. There was mockery, but it was aimed at those whose practice of religion perverts what God and Christ are all about and those who misrepresent what Christianity ought to be about.

And there is a lot of pain in this film. Sometimes the pain comes abruptly in the midst of the comedy, but it is the real pain known all too well by young queers trying desperately to understand who they are, what other people think of them and, especially, why it seems that God, "who so loved the world ..." seems to have forsaken them.

And for those of us who have already lived so many years trying to cope with the burden of being queer while trying to be Christian ( or Jewish or Muslim or … ) and sometimes wondering if we got it all wrong, this movie identified so many of the doubts, so much of the hurt and exposed a great deal of the despair & loneliness we have felt and did it with profound accuracy.

Most importantly, after putting us through some great comedy along with some heart-breaking drama, we weren't left in a heap of anguish and hopelessness or with a cynical disregard & dismissal of our beliefs, but with hope and with a realization the Christian message is truly about love even if many of the messengers and practitioners have got it wrong.

I'm sure some people will be offended by it, but for anyone willing to listen and especially for anyone who has or is trying to deal with it all personally, this was a great experience. The actors were superb and the setting was well chosen so as not to distract from the importance of what was being said. I plan to watch several more times. 10/10