Photo credit: Dean Carpentier
Gay rights activists are united in anger over the upcoming decision on marriage rights between states which will soon be debated in The Supreme Court. They fear for the worse. UNITED IN ANGER, a new flick addressing such issues, is a Jim Hubbard non-fiction feature about the original ACT UP New York. ACT UP is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. It’s an inspiring documentary about the birth and life of the AIDS activist movement from the perspective of the people in the trenches fighting the epidemic.
Dudley Sunders is a trans-disciplinary artist whose work explores the hidden lives of marginalized people in: performance art, video, fiction, documentary film and experimental folk music. His music will accompany the film. “I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, which had an unusual amount of arts for a small Southern city. It had the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and there was a ballet, there was an opera association,” he told Hollywood on the Potomac. “Not that I went to a ton of that stuff, but it was kind of all around me and so I knew that arts was in the realm of possibility for me. I was literally a child of the 60s. When I was a very small child, it was a fairly revolutionary time in the culture, and so when we’d go to the theatre I’d often see things that I think were maybe considered a little experimental. I got a sense that through art you could kind of imagine things that did not exist in front of you. The world as it was presented to me was not necessarily all that it could be – and that was kind of what culture told me; art was a way to travel and to create new worlds. That sort of feed directly into why I would be a member of ACT UP later. I would imagine that this impossible thing could be achieved.”
Photo credit: Dean Carpentier
“In ACT UP, I was generally tending to paint pictures and weave stories and images that were not particularly comforting. I guess I was always an oppositional artist. I was a part of the East Village art movement of the 80s and early 90s. That was kind of the signature issue with me in that the sound of my music is not hard to listen to at all. I like to make something beautiful. But in that beautiful sound, and in those beautiful chords and melodies, I kind of like to express some things that maybe have kind of an ugly beauty, that don’t go down so easy. Obviously, that can be kind of extreme, like in my “Love Song for Jeffrey Dahmer,” or it can be much more subtle, like in a song like “Mushy Headed Kid.” That’s a signature reaction that I’ve always gotten, where people are really kind of really smiling and getting really happy listening to the first half of the song, and then as they listen to it, a certain portion of them start to get a little freaked out by the picture that I’m actually painting. Generally, these are kind of portrait songs, or story songs, or I’m trying to create kind of states of … you know, stories that we actually don’t hear very often, people who we kind of don’t want to look at. Those are the kind of people I like to write about.There seem to be often sort of edgy people, or people who’ve fallen through the cracks. Certainly that was true in gay male sexuality. That was I guess, to a large degree, that still is pretty terrifying to the public at large. People get incredibly lost, and they don’t know how to find their way back.”
Photo credit: Dean Carpentier
Q: How did you get involved in the film?
A: “Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman came to me, who I’ve known for years. All my adult life, I’ve known them and Sarah Schulman is one of my closest friends and they knew that I had the experience. I’d been in ACT UP. I was in the ACT UP Oral History Project.”
“The one thing you definitely get out of this film,” Saunders concluded, “is that you see that very ordinary people came together and changed the world. You don’t have to be this extraordinary genius, or even a brilliant politician to do these things. You can look at it saying these are ordinary folks, as we used to call them in Kentucky, and it was coming together and working together that can change the world. Everyone who watches this should feel implicated. You have the power. You have more power than you realize. All these ordinary folks in this film did not graduate high school. They’re not all Ivy League geniuses. I can’t stress this enough.” Check out the movie here.
The Trailer:
