The perfectly titled documentary “The Year We Thought About Love” follows a diverse troupe of Boston youth, as they create and perform sketches based on their own experiences for True Colors, a theater group that serves youth from 14 to 22 in the LGBTQ community.
As the young people develop a production to take to local area schools and communities, they explore love—romantic, familial, and religious. What is it like to feel romantic love, to discover the one you love, to have familial love or to lose it?
Scene from “The Year We Thought About Love.” (Courtesy photo)
Inspired by these and other stories in the film, the Women’s Alliance of the Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church is sponsoring a free community screening of the award-winning and acclaimed hour-long documentary on Saturday, May 7, at 7 p.m. in the Fellowship Building at 7 Elm St.
Without narration, the 2015 documentary directed by Ellen Brodsky lets the youths tell their own stories as they share their scripts and experiences. A transgender student is kicked out of her house; a gay son finds a refuge from bullying in his mother’s acceptance; a devout Christian faces the wall of his church’s homophobia; and a girl who models dresses on weekends prefers boys’ clothing at school.
Many dimensions of identity
As the troupe members navigate the joys, sorrows, and challenges of adolescence with the complex dimensions of identity, their voices reveal universalities underlying the unique layers of each person’s experiences.
The theater’s urban setting takes on additional meaning when the Boston Marathon bombs explode outside its building. The youths choose to fold their stories of love into the city’s process of healing.
The film’s website, www.theyearwe thoughtaboutlove.com, has an extensive resource list for LGBTQ youth and their families, friends, and allies.
Associate producer Pam Chamberlain and two or three troupe members featured in the film will be at the event to answer questions and talk with the audience.
In a phone interview, Chamberlain described the young people as artists and activists exploring and sharing their lives “from a point of strength and joy.” Adolescents and anyone who works with adolescents should see it, she said.
Kathleen Doherty, Bromfield’s Gay-Straight Alliance adviser since 1996, concurs. Doherty said she was excited when she heard the film was being shown and is hoping many Bromfield students, their families, and other community members will take advantage of the free showing.
Doherty said when she announced the event to a network of other Gay-Straight Alliance advisors, a colleague wrote back, “‘Fabulous’ doesn’t begin to describe it.”
True Colors cast member Trae gets the last word: “When you go to True Colors, labels are gone. They’re just taken away. They’re gone. And you’re just YOU.”
