In “The Sons of Tennessee Williams,” the documentarian Tim Wolff tracks a half-century of the gay civil-rights movement through the lens of Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans.
Starting in 1959, groups of gay men began discreetly to charter social clubs called krewes, transforming the momentary license and briefly relaxed laws during Mardi Gras into public explosions of an underground culture. Like the camp tradition of which it partakes, the krewes’ lightly debauched and thoroughly colorful balls were both an irreverent spoof of aristocratic tradition and a deadly serious protest against social injustice.
Stage shows presented to formally attired audiences typically culminate in the coronation of a king and a queen, a pageant that pushes the performance of drag to baroque heights. Costumes approaching the architectural dimensions of parade floats have occasionally grown wider than the runway itself, and the annual one-upmanship has been matched by an equally excessive attention to detail, with each sequin and ostrich feather as lovingly placed as on any work of high couture.
As the film cuts back and forth between the present day and a historical survey of gay culture, its tone wavers between dutifully somber and irrepressibly funny, as when one participant describes his reaction to a police raid: “I immediately thought, ‘My responsibility is for the queen.’ ”
The talking-head testimonials succeed one another so quickly that it becomes difficult to track individual personalities, a structural problem that works to dissolve unique stories into the collective memory of an era destined to remain slightly out of focus.
