The Inspection: Gay Black in the Military

Bratton grew up loving Spielberg’s escapist movies. “E.T. was a huge movie for me because I really identified with that kid,” he says. “Even now, my favorite movies typically have some sort of lost boys quality to them.”

In 2019, Bratton made the documentary Pier Kids, about a community of queer teens who connect on the Chelsea Piers.

Gay Directors by Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press).

In Bratton’s narrative debut, The Inspection, old-fashioned storytelling and “lost boy” merge into a tale of Ellis French, a homeless gay man, rejected by his mother, who finds a kind of surrogate family in the Marine Corps.

The portrait derives from Bratton’s past, when he was homeless and served in the Marines for five years (“three years as a ‘Combat Camera’”) during the “don’t ask don’t tell” period.

Bratton speaks passionately about the politics in America and how it’s impacted his life as a gay Black man.

The director watched a lot of HBO in the 1980s, making connections with popular movies. “At the end of the day, you know, with The Inspection, my new logline is, ‘It’s gay, Black ‘Rocky,’” he says.

His documentary Hellfighter illuminates even more of the Black experience in America. The story’s of James Reese Europe, leader of the 369th Harlem Hellfighters band, battle-hardened fighters and musicians.

Europe was the “first Black man to conduct a show at Carnegie Hall,” says Bratton, who will use animation and archival footage from the teens to the present day. He says: “There’s not a lot of footage of Black folks from that time period.” Herbie Hancock, Danny Glover and Drew Dixon are among the docu’s participants.

Concludes Bratton, “No matter what our political fates have been, in this country, what has always been guaranteed is that Black entertainers occupy a much more essential role in the representation of Black American culture and American culture overall.”