By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The 2023 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 25th to June 4th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

In the documentary Supporting Our Selves, director Lulu Wei looks at the history of Community One, a Toronto organization that was founded in 1980 as the Gay Community Appeal. The film charts how the group has evolved over the years as the city’s queer community has become more diverse, showing the important work that they continue to do with organizations like The 519 community centre and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Wei’s film takes us through the history of the group, which was started out of necessity by those within the queer community to help each other through Toronto’s bar and bathhouse raids, as well as the AIDS crisis. They raised money by holding private “Saving Our Selves” fundraisers that were held in people’s homes, and held annual “Fruit Cocktails,” which were popular fundraising performances with the emcees dressed as fruit (I remember seeing some Community One representatives march in these costumes at Pride last year, so it’s nice to get the backstory).

Wei interviews founders of the group including Harvey Hamburg and Rosemary Barnes, and shows how they transformed into Community One, mainly to meet the needs of the city’s LGBTQ+ community as it continued to grow and include more identity groups. This push for more diversity came from figures like leZlie Lee Kam, a queer activist from Trinidad who has long fought to make the city’s queer community more inclusive for people of colour, and is now focusing on finding support for queer seniors.

Wei balances this with the perspectives of younger folks like Jay Baldwin, who runs the Facebook group Disabled Queer and Fabulous and is advocating for more accessibility in queer spaces, and Christopher Nkambwe, a Ugandan refugee who came to Canada to live openly as a transwoman and is working to help other African refugees.

In her previous documentary There’s No Place Like This Place Anyplace, Wei focused on the history of the now-shuttered store Honest Ed’s, and explored Toronto’s increasing gentrification. While exploring a different subject, Supporting Our Selves serves as an interesting companion piece of sorts, with Wei already establishing herself as a needed historian of forgotten aspects of our city’s history.

Wei also touches on different flashpoints in Toronto, such as when BLM activists shut down the Pride Parade in 2016 to protest against the involvement of uniformed police officers, actions that are still hotly debated within the LGBTQ+ community (including by Hamburg and Barnes in the film). Told through an engaging collection of personal stories (full disclosure, there are a lot of familiar faces of people I’ve crossed paths with), Supporting Our Selves is an important document of Toronto’s queer history.

Screenings: Tuesday, May 30th, 6:45 PM at TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 (Centrepiece Gala); May 31st to June 4th at 11:59 PM – Virtual (across Ontario). Tickets can be purchased here.