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Post by the Scribe on Jun 3, 2021 22:28:52 GMT
One of many films about the "invisible" lives that make up the world around us.
INVISIBLE - Trailer - Frameline45
Frameline
16.5K subscribers
INVISIBLE
DIR T.J. Parsell | USA | 2021 | 107m
Contemporary country music is finally coming out of the closet. Some of the greatest hits sung by the likes of Willie Nelson, Reba McEntire, Johnny Cash, and more are the work of gay women writing, producing, and persevering in a traditional corporate industry that requires most to keep their authentic selves secret. Featuring interviews with Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and Pam Tillis, Invisible reveals these talented women and their singular voices at last.
Invisible explores the collective and individual journeys of these talented women, who have created hits for country music legends Barbara Mandrell, Johnny Cash, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson, Reba McEntire, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton, and so many others. Author, activist, and filmmaker T.J. Parsell brings their hidden stories, songs, and stunningly beautiful voices to light in this affirming, personal, and sensitively produced documentary featuring stellar interviews with music icons Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Pam Tillis, Chely Wright (Wish Me Away, Frameline35), Mary Gauthier, and Ruthie Foster.
— LEAH LOSCHIAVO
Buying Note: This digital screening is available to view between Thu, Jun 17 and Sun, Jun 27. For tickets to the in-person screening at the Castro Theatre, please click here. We suggest watching it at 3:00pm PDT Sat, Jun 26. Be sure to also check out the related Frameline Talk "Women in Rock."
SPONSORED BY
The Brantley Smith Group | Merrill Lynch
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
The Curve Foundation
PREMIERE STATUS:World
DIRECTOR: T.J. Parsell
2021 | USA | 107m
GENRE: Aging/Elders | Coming Out | Discrimination | Gender | Lesbian | Music/Music Videos | Religion/Spirituality | Trans Men/Transmasculine | Transgender
SECTION: Closed Captioned | Documentary Features | Premieres | Streaming
Frameline45
June 10-27, 2021
Get Tickets: frameline.org/festival
Framelinewww.youtube.com/channel/UCTN_uaqFN_IkxQrF3Qj2ghQ
frameline.org/festival/film-guide/invisible-(streaming)    'Invisible' documentary -- IMDB pagewww.imdb.com/title/tt7379472/releaseinfo?ref_=ttfc_ql_2
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Post by chronologer on Jun 23, 2021 3:57:30 GMT
Frameline45 Q&A: INVISIBLE
Contemporary country music is finally coming out of the closet. The contributions of lesbian singer-songwriters are generally not the first thing that come to mind in the arena of country music, but some of the greatest hits in the genre are the work of gay women writing, producing, and persevering in an extremely traditional and corporate industry that requires most to keep their authentic selves secret for fear of committing career suicide.
Invisible explores the collective and individual journeys of these talented women, who have created hits for country music legends Barbara Mandrell, Johnny Cash, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson, Reba McEntire, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton, and so many others. Author, activist, and filmmaker T.J. Parsell brings their hidden stories, songs, and stunningly beautiful voices to light in this affirming, personal, and sensitively produced documentary featuring stellar interviews with music icons Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Pam Tillis, Chely Wright (Wish Me Away, Frameline35), Mary Gauthier, and Ruthie Foster.
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 28, 2022 22:04:12 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 28, 2022 22:09:40 GMT
How country music made gay women invisible
www.smh.com.au/culture/music/how-country-music-erased-gay-women-20220214-p59wcb.html
By Bernard Zuel
February 15, 2022 — 2.54pm
The trajectory of Dianne Davidson’s career as a songwriter and singer was up and up. She had played with, sung with and impressed Linda Ronstadt and pulled out of a Moody Blues tour early to begin work on her solo recordings back in Nashville. It was all happening.
Then that trajectory turned and she crashed and burned. Not because of the songs or her talent, but because her sexuality was making powerbrokers uncomfortable, then resistant, and finally, hostile.
Couldn’t she put it away, pretend … you know, be like everyone else?
Chely Wright performs onstage during the OUTLOUD: Raising Voices Concert Series at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum last year.CREDIT:MATT WINKELMEYER/GETTY IMAGES
“What am I supposed to do?” she remembers thinking, exhausted by the pressures in mid-’70s Nashville. “I’m not going to keep singing songs that aren’t true for me.”
So at 21, she quit the business, ending up doing office work, bringing up her child. Staying in country music wasn’t a serious or healthy option.
“I think it would have really destroyed me, whereas leaving was pressing the pause button. Not that I knew it at the time,” Davidson says. “My brother [who drummed with her] said to me, ‘you can’t stop, because I see how audiences respond to you’. And I said, ‘if I’m supposed to be doing it, why is it so hard?’”
Davidson’s story is one of those told in TJ Parsell’s film Invisible: Gay Women In Southern Music, about a group of songwriters and performers forced to choose between visibility and viability, professionally and personally, and the price they paid for that choice in what Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member Kye Fleming called “a man’s town”.
Diane Davidson, seen here with Linda Ronstadt, was forced to quit music at 21.CREDIT:
Alongside Fleming in the film are other regular hit suppliers for country’s big names — Jess Leary, Pam Rose and her songwriting partner Mary Ann Kennedy — as well as Chely Wright, whose career had already seen a No.1 single and a suicide attempt when her coming out in 2010 put a brake on further success.
In its focus on people often little-known beyond those who pay attention to the small print on their CDs and records, Parsell’s film has a feel similar to Twenty Feet From Stardom, the Oscar and Grammy-winning documentary about talented backing singers and background vocalists whose careers had been thwarted by being the wrong look, the wrong colour, the wrong sex at the wrong time for a generally conservative industry.
“It was a brilliant idea [from co-producer Bill Brimm] and it struck me on many levels. Here are two things that don’t appear to go well together: a very conservative industry and lesbians, or gay men for that matter,” says Parsell. “It also hit home for me that I spent 20 years in software, back in the ’80s and ’90s when I couldn’t be out; it would have been career suicide. And I know what that cost me.”
Bonnie Baker, whose first hit was in 1999 for star Chad Brock, had grown up the child of an unforgiving preacher in East Texas, playing music because it was one of the few things that “made me feel good”. Playing the game in Nashville by hiding her sexuality worked professionally, but ultimately undermined her craft and herself.
“Writing has to be honest … vulnerable,” she says, and “putting away gayness” diminished that for her. But the business is not set up for that. “It’s not just the people in charge; it’s what they think the audience will do and not do, and a lot of times they are correct. Chely said you’re going to lose half your audience and she was right.”
While hardly claiming Nashville, the male-focused country radio, and the equally conservative audience for it, has radically changed, Invisible finds many rays of hope. Some of it is in the comfort with which the hitherto secret now can be spoken, even laughed about; some of it is in a visit by Davidson to Ronstadt, now confined to home by advancing Parkinson’s Disease that has prevented her from singing. Davidson playing of a song of hers from nearly 50 years and Ronstadt naturally falls into the harmony she did back then.
Not surprisingly perhaps, after the visit, conscious of all that she had given up for so long, Davidson says “screw this, I’m going to make my own records”.
Invisible: Gay Women In Southern Music is screening as part of the Mardi Gras Film Festival, running February 17 to March 3
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 28, 2022 22:13:49 GMT
‘Invisible’ shines light on country music’s queer history
charlestoncitypaper.com/invisible-shines-light-on-country-musics-queer-history/
by Michael Smallwood
September 17, 2021
Charleston-native Beth Mevers got an up-close look at hidden forces that influence the sounds from of Music City as the executive director of a new documentary, Invisible.
Directed by T.J. Parsell, Invisible is a feature-length film about the gay women who have excelled in country music as singers/songwriters. The film follows the individual and collective journeys of the women (and one transgender man) who have navigated the male-dominated country music landscape to become influential voices and chart-topping recording artists while staying true to themselves.
“I learned a lot from doing this film. A whole lot,” said Mevers. “I had no idea that good old boy system up in Nashville still existed to the extent that it does. I mean, it’s alive and well.”
Queen Street Playhouse will host a benefit fundraising screening of the new film Sunday at 7:30 p.m., with a Q&A to follow.
www.footlightplayers.net/invisible
A few of the songwriters featured are giants in the industry. Kye Fleming, Bonnie Baker, Jess Leary, Cidny Bullens, Dianne Davidson and Chely Wright are just a handful who shared their stories for Invisible. Fleming is an inductee into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and has so many No. 1 hits under her belt that she forgets how many she’s written. Leary’s lyrics have become hits for Tim McGraw and Pam Tillis.
All the artists share similar stories of life-long fixations on music-making and dreams of making it big in the country music industry. They also share the heart-breaking reality that country music remains a difficult space to make a career as an openly gay artist. A familiar refrain from the film is artists coming to Nashville with stars in their eyes, but being pressured or told directly to hide their queerness to have a career. Some tried. Many chose not to. The decision forced many to shift initial career aspirations from performers to songwriters.
Chely Wright was one of the first mainstream country music stars to come out as gay, complete with a 2010 People magazine cover story. Almost overnight, Wright lost half her fanbase and was effectively blacklisted from country radio.
“Country music, of all the genres, that one is the most tied into radio,” Mevers explained. “You tick off the radio programmers or they decide they don’t like you, or whatever, they don’t play you and that’s the end of you.”
“In the very beginning, I kind of thought to myself, ‘Boy, I sure would love to be a fly on the wall when some of these good-old boys find out how much of their beloved music was written by lesbians,'” mused Parsell, whose work examines the frank reality of sexuality behind bars and in the music industry. “But then, of course, we go so much deeper in the film. And I think that, at the end of the day, it’s a searing indictment of the patriarchy of country music and I think it’s a reflection of a lot of what’s wrong in our country and the world. I think these women lay that out in a powerful way.”
Parsell worked as a software salesman for many years before making an artistic shift later in life. A gay man, Parsell speaks passionately about having placed that part of himself aside to frequently to close deals in his days as a salesman. It’s a connection that made Invisible a tempting proposition when the concept was brought to him three years ago.
“Even though I’m a gay man, and my producing partner is a gay man, we’re both men,” Parsell said. Being a story about women, Parsell wanted Invisible to reflect that in the crew as much as possible. “So, we thought it was important to hire a woman editor, and our cinematographer is a woman, a gay woman. That made a huge difference with our subjects, in terms of just making them feel safe and willing to share with us their pain and their journeys.”
“The women in the film really brought it,” said Parsell.
The documentary has already started its festival run. It premiered at Frameline in June and won the Audience Award. It has also played at Outfest in L.A. and Austin, and has an extensive circuit planned for the rest of the year and beyond. Sunday’s fundraiser at Queen Street Playhouse is a great opportunity for the local community to catch the movie at this stage.
The stories included in Invisible are a noteworthy, hidden history of the country music landscape, and make it a must-see for audiences interested in LGBTQ+ artists, country music, or music documentaries.
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