by NOEL RIEDER

What do you do when you have a couple of short documentaries about gay men who’ve found sanctuaries of tolerance? Easy: you put them together in a double bill and show them at a local arthouse cinema.

The first of the pair, Des hommes et des dieux, follows a group of Haitian gays who’ve turned to Voodoo in search of acceptance. It seems many gays in Haiti are embracing Voodooism, where dogma is eschewed in favour of a more free-style spirituality. Voodoo spirits themselves go in drag: female “loas” seem to particularly enjoy possessing the bodies of men during rituals.

Director Anne Lescot’s editing, however, suggests that it isn’t just about finding comfort in numbers. She inter-cuts the scenes of rituals (involving trance states, howling, dancing and bathing in blood) with poignant interviews of HIV+ men. As they express their hopelessness, the montage implies their interest in Voodoo is actually the result of having nowhere to go, no voice to express their terror.

The second documentary, Juchitan des folles, offers a lighter, more optimistic take on the same theme. It opens with a story about Juchitan’s patron saint. Don’t ask, but he apparently once carried around a bag filled with homosexuals he intended to disperse throughout Mexico. All was well until he got to Juchitan, where the bag split and all its “fags” spilled out.

The story is meant to explain Juchitan’s large gay population. The documentary, though, does a better job of it, suggesting simply that Juchitan has attracted gay men because of its renowned tolerance of alternate lifestyles.

Juchitan is portrayed as an oasis of tolerance in a desert of old-school Catholic zealotry. While the documentary never calls the town a gay nirvana, it supplies ample evidence to that effect. In Juchitan, it seems, even hard-boiled straight men calmly consider switching teams, and no one bats an eye when gay men adopt children. Move over, Amsterdam. :

Des hommes et des dieux and Juchitan des folles open at Ex-Centris on Friday, Feb. 28 in French-subtitled versions

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