Let Them Be Loved

As a young, autistic, queer person, I searched through my screen for a “how-to” on being a human in this world and found narratives of love, lust, anger, aggression, mental illness, attachment wounds and compounding evidence that those who existed as I did, as queer, as black, as Hispanic, as masculine, as ambitious, as out-spoken, as different, were not in for a life of balance and of peace, but of chaos and of war. My short film, “Let Them Be Loved” began as a film that I called a “love letter to my identities”. It was meant to show the beauty in the intersection of my queer, black, masculine identity while commenting on the complexity of what it means to hold a spiritual identity alongside them.

The film asks viewers to contemplate the question, can queerness live peacefully within spirituality? Is there a balance? Does God really make no mistakes? It shows the mother contemplating all of these questions while simultaneously accepting the love she has for her son as love that comes directly from God and knowing that, according to her beliefs, that God knew the plans he had for her child alongside her fears for him before she ever could have. Like the rest of my work, the film is also inspired by decades upon decades of strong BIPOC creatives and strong black women who have instilled in me that, despite the odds against us, black joy is possible and is revolutionary.