I set out to make sure the film was not going to fall into the category of trauma exploitation. It seemed to me that the essential question at the bottom of all of this was: "Can you be queer and Christian at the same time?" I met Maurice Tomlinson, a queer Jamaican activist, who was going down to Jamaica from Toronto to put on the first ever Pride Walk in Montego Bay and me being half-Jamaican, half-Trinidadian, I thought: I need to follow him.Īs I interviewed people in rural Jamaica and people of colour, the narrative started to focus less on conversion therapy, and more on the love of God and for God. What I encountered was that there was still so much homophobia in the church and in our communities that the conversion impetus and hatred of Christian queers was still so violently prominent. These factors prompted me to interview more Queer people about their struggles and victories over integrating the various parts of themselves in particular their love of God with being queer. As the discussion of pansexual, non-binary and the acceptance of a bisexual identiy became more mainstream in the last few years I felt an opening for myself to explore being able to claim all of me in a new way.
As the queer community felt quite binary in the 90's, I always felt like I could only be queer and secular, so I often forfeited my spirtual beliefs for my sexual identity. I had not really met anyone, with Caribbean roots especially, who was able to proudly claim both identities of being queer and Christian and that was something I personally struggled with in my life. Cutaways Director Tara Thorne would rather you feel strongly about something than nothing about anything