“Forgetting is inevitable when you haven’t been recorded,” said director and filmmaker Georden West. In the face of that forgetting, it was an act of archival excavation that brought together West’s new film, “Playland.”
The film (which West calls a “haunted docu-fiction”) depicts one of Boston’s oldest gay bars, Playland Café, which was sold in 1998. West’s film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month.
“When we’re speaking about queer histories, we’re talking about erasure,” West said. “To me, that’s an exciting part of what we can do as artists, is imagine and reinvent and try to reconcile an absence.”
Playland Café opened in downtown Boston in the late 1930s. Now, 21 Essex Street — where Playland Café used to be — is a parking lot.
Though it wasn't intentionally a gay bar, it drew a diverse clientele where members of the LGBTQ+ community felt comfortable. As West explains, the bar “was really a space that encapsulated where gender variant people might have gathered throughout the 20th century. As a queer person myself and someone who doesn’t adhere very strictly to the gender binary in my presentation ... this seemed like somewhere that I would have been more welcome in.”
“Playland,” the film, arose from research done in tandem with The History Project, an independent record of New England’s LGBTQ+ history.
“One of the things that was really important for us for ‘Playland’ was not generating any new material in regards to oral histories or testimonies, but really highlighting what exists and showcasing what doesn’t exist and speaking to and into those silences,” West said. They utilized historical records from The History Project, as well as archival photographs by longtime Playland Café server Jim McGrath, to plan the film.
The bar’s closure, West said, serves as “a warning call to what the impacts of urban renewal, marginalization, disenfranchisement means for queer brick-and-mortar gathering spaces.”
West hopes the film will inspire further research into queer history and also for people to document their own stories now.
“When you’re living in times of such strife and oppression in general, it just feels commonplace. It feels like everyday life. And it’s only through looking back that we’re able to understand and recognize what large political landscapes we were traversing. ... I think it’s really a call to action to speak to what isn’t in the archive.
“Start archiving right now,” they said, “so that people in the future can continue to develop these modes of resistance that are so very necessary right now.”
