It took four years, cost her friends and family and almost the roof over her head, but Queens based documentary filmmaker Selena Blake got her latest project done.
The film, “Taboo Yardies,” about homophobia in Jamaica, West Indies, and its costs to the island nation, is well worth the wait.
It’s a powerful collection of haunting images, each more powerful, and memorable, than the last: the anger in the voices of two pre-teen boys lounging on the steps of a darkened house as they disdainfully assert that gay men should be stoned; the middle-aged man who describes how he, newly arrived in New York, saw two men kissing near Penn Station and his amazement when his brother stopped him from looking for a brick to throw at them, saying “they don’t do that here.”
There is the painful story of a lesbian who tearfully tells how she has been the victim of “corrective rapes,” by men who believe such attacks will make her heterosexual. Police refuse to help her, so she in her anguish has taken to cutting herself and attempted suicide, the latticework of healed scars on her forearm visible proof of her efforts.
A mob beats and bloodies a “Batty-man,” island parlance for male homosexuals, in the street. Another man tells of someone setting his house afire.
Former Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding, in office at the time, gives an outrageous — but sadly not uncommon — viewpoint among conservative elected officials of any nation: defense of homophobia, comparing same sex sexual relations to bestiality and incest.
“I kept looking at my cameraman while the Prime minister was talking, thinking someone was going to stop the interview,” Blake said. “When we were leaving the country we put the tapes in separate bags because we were sure someone was going to confiscate them in the airport.”
Blake, 48, is writer/director of the documentary, “Queensbridge; The Other Side.” That film, on the history of Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, where she still lives, is included in the social studies programs at 50 New York-area public schools.
She announced plans for “Taboo Yardies” in 2008, expecting to complete the project in a year. But the project, which involved several trips to the island and others to California and Massachusetts to interview Jamaicans who had left the country, proved more daunting than anticipated.
Funding proved hard to come by – at one point Blake was almost evicted from her Queensbridge apartment for back rent, forcing her to take a job washing dishes and doing kitchen prep work in a company cafeteria.
