By Peter Keough

Documentaries on George Michael, Janis Ian, and Jackie Shane look at musicians who grappled with the fear and consequences of expressing their true identities.

Wicked Queer Docs. November 15-22 at various venues; November 19-December 30 online.

Most people at some time have probably experienced a conflict between who they believe they are and what they are perceived by others to be, between the need to express their true identity and fear of the consequences. As can be seen in the films selected by the Wicked Queer Docs Festival, for those in the LGBTQ+ community that conflict can be particularly extreme, traumatic, and transformative.

A scene from the film George Michael: Portrait of an Artist

As the subject of Simon Napier-Bell’s conventional but illuminating George Michael: Portrait of an Artist (2023; screens November 15 at 7 p.m. at the MFA; streams November 19-30) recalls, when he was a kid he invented a persona named “George Michael” who could achieve his ambition of superstardom. He knew that Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, the queer son of a conservative Greek Cypriot restaurateur in a middle-class London suburb, would not be capable of this. “I created a person,” he says, “to realize my dreams.”

And so it was: George Michael would become one of the most successful, popular, and wealthy pop stars in history. More importantly, his music would bring joy, solace, and inspiration to millions of fans for over 35 years. But at what cost?

That’s one of the key themes in Napier-Bell’s otherwise discursive documentary. It became an issue early in Michael’s career when he hinted at the conflict between his public image and his private life in hit songs such as “A Different Corner” (1986). As the film’s bevy of musicians, music experts, journalists, media mucky-mucks (Piers Morgan?), and pop psychiatrists point out, its suggestive, somber lyrics alluded to this secret torment. “It’s the first time you can feel the sexuality of the man not just as a subtext but the context of everything he’s doing,” says one of the talking heads.

But not everyone was buying the subterfuge. “Are you gay?” Michael is asked point blank by an obnoxious interviewer in 1987 during the world tour for his huge hit album Faith. “No, I’m not,” he says. Then he adds that he doesn’t think it’s anybody’s business and it doesn’t make any difference to his music if he is or not. But it clearly made a difference to him.

Michael did not finally come out until 1998, when he was busted in a men’s room in Beverly Hills by an undercover cop who solicited him for sex in a clear case of entrapment. In a sense, this outing was liberating — after it he released the song “Outside,” along with a music video that mocked the arrest. The traumatic event seemed to free him at last, to allow him to embrace his identity as a gay man. But it also might have unleashed his self-destructiveness, not to mention the hypocritical vindictiveness of the tabloid press. The subsequent years saw a downward spiral of arrests, automobile accidents, and medical emergencies.

He died at 53 on Christmas Day 2016 — of “natural causes,” according to the coroner.

A scene from Janis Ian: Breaking Silence.

As seen in Varda Bar-Kar’s edifying but frustrating Janis Ian: Breaking Silence (2024; screens November 18 at 7 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre), the pop singer of the title was exposed early on to the kind of homophobia she could expect from show business, the media, and the general public throughout her career. In 1966 at the age of 15 she had released her iconoclastic hit “Society’s Child” about a forbidden interracial romance. And, though she had already faced down a posse of chanting racists at a concert, she was not prepared for what happened backstage at the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. During the lengthy wait to appear on the show Ian dozed off with her head on her female chaperone’s lap (because of her age a chaperone was required by child labor laws). This was witnessed by Bill Cosby and he later informed the media that Ian was a lesbian.

It was catastrophic. She was almost banned from TV. Though she had never been involved in sexual relationships of any kind at that point in her life, she received the repressive message. She survived this brush with scandal and her career continued with various ups and downs. “At Seventeen” was a huge hit in 1975, but in 1986 she got in trouble with the IRS because her accountant was cooking the books. She did not officially acknowledge her sexuality (though she was outed in 1976 by the Village Voice) until she revealed it in her hit 1993 album Breaking Silence.

Now, at 73, she is happily married to her longtime partner Patricia Snyder. Her 2022 album The Light at the End of the Line was a critical and commercial success but, sadly, her concert tour to promote the recording was cut short after she came down with laryngitis. It proved to be a permanent affliction. “I’ve been singing since I was two, sitting on Pete Seeger’s knee,” she laments. Now she is silent, but this film will no doubt help reacquaint audiences with her exemplary life and music. Too bad it is marred by ill-conceived, ubiquitous, and unnecessary reenactments of “events from Janis Ian’s life as imagined by the director for a richer audience experience,” as is noted in a postscript.

A scene from Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story.

Reenactments are also a recurrent feature in Michael Mabbo and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story (2024; screens November 16 at 2:30 p.m. at the MFA). But, given that almost no actual footage of the subject survives, this fabrication serves a genuine need. Moreover, the filmmakers have made use of a gorgeous, painterly rotoscope animation that is both subtle and incisive.

An electrifying Black R&B singer whose career shone brightest in the ’50s and ’60s and abruptly ended with her disappearance in 1971, Shane was born in 1940, in Nashville, in the Jim Crow South. Despite the oppressive surroundings, Shane never shied away from expressing her queer identity, outdoing her friend and rival Little Richard with her proclivity for outlandish makeup, hairstyles, and outfits, and soul-wrenching performances. Though claiming to never have suffered any violence herself, she witnessed enough in her hometown to leave, ultimately finding more nurturing environments in Montreal and Toronto.

So what happened to Shane? A storage room of artifacts and writings left to her nieces after her death in 2019 explains some of the mystery, as do the excerpts from telephone interviews that she conducted late in her life. But the greater mystery might be why she adamantly insisted on being who she was despite the consequences, among other things turning down a career-making appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show because he insisted that she dress properly and not wear makeup. Shane longed for fame, but she would not accept it if it meant surrendering her identity. So, to her loss and ours, she settled for obscurity.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).