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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (May 21, 1999)
36 J“ * * M r t • may 21. 1999 ▼ Boy, oh boy A young Portland filmmaker helps Cascade AIDS Project reach young men by C hristopher M c Q uain y motivation for the project in the beginning, and it still is, was to make a space, basically, for young gay men to express themselves on video and then compile it, representing the differences, and also the similarities, in how we perceive things,” explains Doug Hopper. Hopper, a 21 -year-old photographer and filmmaker, is in the process of completing his first work on video, a 30-minute documentary called Boy, in preparation for a May 26 screen ing to benefit the Cascade AIDS Project. He estimates that the completed version of the video will contain interview footage with 18 young, Portland-area queer men. One of Hopper’s main priorities for the pro ject was to collect as wide a range of view points as possible. “1 believe that we all kind of associate ourselves with people of like minds, there are those two levels to the project, which I think are really good.” Hopper gleaned roughly half the subjects for Boy from his contact with the Young Men’s Community Project and the other half through word of mouth, an advertisement in Just Out, and fliers posted in places where young gay men congregate, such as SM YRC, Outside In and the offices of Phoenix Rising Foundation. “1 didn’t pressure anybody [to participate],” he says of the process of finding people to interview. “Some people were less enthusias tic.... 1 certainly wasn’t going around haunt ing people or anything, but I did want to get a really diverse group of people. A lot of the people 1 already knew were willing— they’re pretty expressive, vocal, creative-oriented people— hut I didn’t want to just have that. 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So, 1 selected a really diverse group of young gay men to interview,” he says. The video was funded by Cascade AIDS Project with a portion of the grant it receives from Multnomah County to provide services for young men (defined by the county as ages 18 to 26). Geoffrey Bateman, Project Coordinator for C A P ’s Young Men’s Community Project, details how Hopper’s film— along with anoth er project, a June retreat— was chosen to receive financial support: “Two guys from the group had ideas for a project that would help build a community for young queer men, so we offered them some money to do their pro jects. Doug had an idea for a video, and we went with that idea. It wasn’t like a formal grant process. We had their applications and we reviewed them, and we thought this idea would work really well. “I thought [the video idea] worked on a couple of levels. One was that, in the inter view process, it was a good way to get lots of different young men involved who might not he involved in the [Young Men’s] program already. He wanted to go out and not just get people from the group, but from all over the community. And then once we’ve edited it and shown it, we can get a lot of folks in to watch it and see how they respond to it. So The people who were more low-key or a little more mainstream were maybe a bit harder to nail down. But even within that group of peo ple, there were differences.” Boy is separated into five different sections, each featuring interviewees expressing their personal opinions and feelings on a different subject of import to 20-something queer males. The sections are “ Image," “Sexuality,” “Discrimination,” “Social” and “Spirituality.” “1 basically sat down with the men, posed those issues to them, and recorded whatever came to mind. It’s sort of a...collage of responses about those different issues, where young gay men are coming from," Hopper says. Bateman hopes the video will have a life after the May 26 screening, an ongoing impact beyond just the younger queer male audience. “This first showing is really, I think, for the young queer men’s community, and then we’ll be showing it to another discussion group where it’s going to be all ages, so older men will have a chance to see it and respond to it, and then we’re going to use it at our retreat in June also,” he says. “Once we finish it we’re going to show it as many times as we can.” ■ F o r more information about B o y screenings , call Geoffrey Bateman at (503) 223-5907.
