Southern Pride
03 Jun 2019.
Sometimes, Malcolm Ingram lives in Toronto. For years he lived above the store above The Cellar in a cool apartment. “Did you see the fucking bullshit they’re doing to my building? I think they’re going to burn it down,” he said by phone from who knows where. 

A busy documentarian, he spends a lot of time on the road. Today he was promoting the Pride Month release of his latest documentary, Southern Pride, about two lesbian bar owners, one white and one black, trying to put together the region’s first-ever Pride march. “I spent nine months in Mississippi shooting the film,” he tells me. “In Biloxi, I lived in a casino most of the time. Off season it’s only fifty, sixty bucks a night. I was down there the whole time, and became part of the community.” It isn’t the first time the filmmaker was drawn to the Gulf Coast. He first went down in 2006 for a film called Small Town Gay Bar. “I wanted to go back to Mississippi and maybe shoot at the two bars I filmed at, but one burned down and the other became a church.”

Like a lot of angry artists, Ingram was inspired by Trump. “When Trump got elected, I got up the next day and decided to make a documentary about the South. I did a Kickstarter two days later and our first day shooting was the same day as the inauguration. We would never have existed if Hillary had won.” The film chronicles the dire situation of queers in that area. “The situation is dire everywhere,” he says of the States. But Biloxi was untried territory. The women and their staffs go through a lot of discrimination and inconvenience and lack of support, but they do prevail. “Those Prides are still happening. They’re in their third year.” What does he think about these queer pioneers? “This movie is all about women. It wasn’t intentional. It’s just that women lead the charge. I found that interesting.” 

This is Ingram’s fifth documentary, following Small Town Gay Bar, Bear Nation, The Continental, and Out to Win, about gay athletes. “I’m the furthest thing from a jock, so making a movie about queer athletes was a stretch for me. But I make movies about communities.” Next up, he just finished a documentary about his mentor, film director Kevin Smith. All he will say is, “Never make a documentary about a friend.” He also is working on a movie about sex star Jack Dixon. “He’s gorgeous. I want to take a barometer reading of gay male sexuality through this man. He has a very healthy attitude toward sex and I think there’s still a lot of education that needs to go on. The best way to educate is with a spoonful of sugar, and Jack Dixon is a whole lot of sugar.” 

Throughout it all, he maintains a certain independence. “I never went to the government for money,” he says proudly. “All my movies were financed privately.”