Queer cinema is lucky to have a 'heartbeat' as loud as Stephen Winter

Here & Queer is an interview series hosted by Peter Knegt that celebrates and amplifies the work of LGBTQ artists through unfiltered conversations.

"I am the heartbeat of queer cinema in New York City," Stephen Winter jokes at one point during our interview earlier this summer. He's being facetious, but he's not wrong. 

Winter is a writer, director and producer who has touched so much of the LGBTQ cinema that has come out of New York and beyond over the past three decades. In addition to his own films — which include his seminal 1996 debut feature Chocolate Babies and the fantastic 2015 "historical re-imagining" Jason and Shirley  — Winter has worked creatively with Jonathan Caouette (producing his landmark documentary Tarnation), Lee Daniels (on Precious), John Cameron Mitchell (on Shortbus), John Krokidas (on Kill Your Darlings), David France (on How To Survive A Plague) and Xan Cassavetes (on Kiss of the Damned). 

We had the pleasure of talking to Winter about his career for an episode of Here & Queer when he was in Toronto earlier this summer for a special screening of the 4K restoration of Chocolate Babies at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. You can watch the conversation in its entirety here

Given its new restoration and its recent release on the Criterion Channel, Winter's film Chocolate Babies was top of mind during our conversation. The film follows a band of queer, self-described "raging, atheist, meat-eating, HIV-positive, coloured terrorists" who fight back against homophobic conservative politicians on the streets of New York City. It is a wild and extraordinary film, and more than deserving of its status as one of the great queer films of the 1990s.

"I was a kid when it came out," he says. "I was a kid when I wrote it as a kid, when I directed it, and I was a kid when it was released." (Winter was in his twenties at the time.) "I knew it was really good. And I also knew that the environment that indie film was in at the time was not quite conducive to it. Chocolate Babies didn't fit into that, and of course [there was also] systematic institutional racism and homophobia and transphobia. It fell through a crack and was overlooked and misunderstood."

But Winter always felt that it would come back in some fashion, and it never really went away.

"Everybody who saw it loved it. And even when it was hard to access, people would seek it out. And over the last few years, a younger generation of filmmakers and film fans have discovered it. It's now getting written up in books and people are writing papers about it. And it's wonderful because not only because I'm here to see it happen and all the actors are also here to see it happen, but the timelessness of the story speaks very much to today."

Winter says that the film was drawn from his experiences in ACT UP Chicago and in the Black nationalism community.

"[I was] just trying to be an active citizen and organizer and looking up to older people who had been around for a minute," he says. "How great they were, how vibrant they were, how angry they were, how much fun they could still have, but also how the intersectionality didn't always work out."

"Because that's the way oppression works. You know, they want to turn the dark-skinned people against light-skinned people, turn the femme people against the masc, turn the older generation against the younger generation, and sow those seeds of dissonance that the purpose of revolutionary organizing and all coming together in a community should be able to solve."

Winter shot the film in three weeks on Fuji Film.

"Fuji was better than Kodak for doing brown skin and Black skin," he says. "It also just makes things look gorgeous and sort of cotton candy-ish, and I wanted it to be pretty like that."

He also got himself involved in the Black queer theatre scene to find the film's performers.  

"Black queer people weren't getting TV and film work, but they were doing theatre. And once I explained what I was doing — making a comedy drama about HIV-positive Black and Asian drag queens who become political terrorists and kidnap a closeted conservative politician — everybody got on board."

"And by the way, every time I use that — that elevator pitch that 'it's about HIV positive Black and Asian drag queens who become political terrorists' — everyone always says, 'Oh, is it a documentary?' And I'm like, 'It should be!'"

Chocolate Babies is available to stream on the Criteron Channel.