Posted on June 9, 2015 by Emilie Friedlander in Fader Fader, By Emilie Friedlander A quarter century after Paris Is Burning swept the independent film world with its verité depiction of life in the New York ballroom scene, the docks down by Christopher Street, off Manhattan’s West Side Highway, are still home to New York’s largest population of homeless LBGTQ teens and young adults of color. For the past four years, Elegance Bratton has been making a documentary with the people who live there. His in-progress first feature, Pier Kids: The Life, follows three homeless youths—DeSean, Krystal, and Casper—as they struggle to find themselves, and a place to spend the night, on the same streets where Bratton once stayed. Pushed out of his home as a teen himself, the filmmaker spoke to The FADER about the twin epidemics of homelessness and HIV in New York’s queer community, as well as the loving second family he found on the piers.
