Directed by Leilah Weinraub
June is Pride Month, and during it, the world transforms. Corporations dust off their rainbow-ified logos and eagerly post to social media, and palatable queer artists are paraded around as an act of celebration before July rolls around and the world straightens itself out.
On the whole, the wider acceptance, inclusion and attention paid to LGBTQ+ issues, causes and people is only a good thing and long overdue. But what is celebrated and shared in the mainstream is often only the glossy parts, the exemplary existences from the many subcultures the initialism covers. RuPaul’s Drag Race has won a million Emmys by adopting a game show format originally conceived for cis female models and preaching acceptance, self-love and community in a clean, tidy and yassified sound stage. Who could disagree with that?
Similarly, Queer Eye won America over with its happy-go-lucky Fab 5 central cast, who helped participants turn their lives around with life makeovers rooted in gay stereotypes: that they dress and clean up well, are passionate about interior design, and know how to gas each other up.
The rise to prominence of queer culture and lifestyle has seen it tokenized and sanitized for the masses, and something’s been lost in the process. Shakedown, Leilah Weinraub’s documentary about the rise and fall of a lesbian strip club in 90s L.A., reclaims some of that (literally and figuratively) dirty history.
It’s a heady dive into a scene that’s far from glamorous: situated in a rough neighborhood, it’s a “club” only in the loose sense of the word, as the stage is more of an area where the crowd parts to circle around, the dancers squirming on broken floor tiles, grime, and who knows what else.The music drowns out anything but the MC, who tells straights to head to the back and those with money to come through. There are no backrooms for lap dances. One room, one performer, one crowd.
Weinraub’s documentary doesn’t break the mold. It includes interview shots that begin before the interview does, with the camera adjusting focus and the subject settling in, as if trying to lend itself some honesty and easygoing energy, but the meat is vaporwave sounds laid on top of grainy VHS-recordings of the heyday. As exhilarating as the performances are, there’s an unexpected thrill in how unconscious of the camera the crowd is in the 90s, either blind or open to its capture.
Shakedown operates at eye-level. By this I mean it gets in your face with some very graphic nudity, but also in how it’s focused on the stories of the place and those directly involved. It interviews the dancers, getting into the release some of them felt stripping and the surprise they felt at discovering their own sexuality in the process. It talks to Ronnie-Ron, the owner of the club, to get the facts about running the place. We meet the personnel of the club, marginalized people who found a community in this place of acceptance.
Despite billing itself as a detailing of an utopic moment, Shakedown never steps away from it all and tries to provide a greater context, remaining instead with the immediate experience or painting a portrait of some of the dancers. How dancer Egypt freed herself dancing, and how empowering her dancer persona is. “Egypt’s a fantasy,” she says, echoed by her partner who says the person who enters the bathroom to get ready is a different person from the one who steps out to perform.
Because of that, Shakedown remains a slice-of-life commentary with its pleasures firmly rooted in the past. Even from the seat of the present, no thoughts are shared about the now vs. then, no real insights gleaned from people who were beset by naysayers as they tried to own their sexuality. Documentaries don’t owe us these moments, but with the level of access granted, it’s almost a letdown remaining a fly on the wall.
There was Pride before Pride™ and Shakedown tries to show us the former. A time before Pride as a movement and sweeping phenomenon into which we could read a variety of meanings, in Weinraub’s film we get to see it instead as something where people got to live their truth and be proud of what was immediate: their bodies, their sexuality, and each other.
Mikkel Frederiksen 