For their annual celebration of Black History Month, Hamptons Doc Fest and the Southampton Arts Center have teamed up for a screening of “I Was Born This Way” (2025), set for Saturday at 4 p.m. at the arts center.
Directed by Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard, the film, which had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, explores the life, career, and legacy of Carl Bean, a disco singer who became a clergyman and a pioneer in the L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights movement.
The program will include not only the film, but also an opening live performance by Jeff Roberson’s famous Nulife Gospel Singers from Long Island, and, after the film, a live interview with Mr. Pollard.
Bean, who died in 2021 at the age of 77, is interviewed extensively in the film, talking about his troubled childhood growing up in Baltimore, his suicide attempt, and his mother’s death from an abortion.
Moving to New York City, he became a gospel singer in the choir of Harlem’s Christian Tabernacle Church. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, switched to R&B, and formed a band called Carl Bean and Universal Love. Later in that decade he launched a solo career with Motown Records during the disco craze. “He was at his happiest when he was singing,” said his sister.
One of his most famous songs was “I Was Born This Way” (1977), a gay anthem that Questlove called “a song ahead of its time. . . . This one song started a revolution.” Lady Gaga says her 2011 hit “Born This Way” was directly influenced by the song.
After the demise of disco, Bean became a full-time L.G.B.T.Q. activist, co-founding the Minority AIDS Project in Los Angeles, offering free H.I.V./AIDS education, medical treatment, and support services to all people, regardless of age, gender, race, or other circumstances. It is still in operation. He also launched the United Fellowship Church in that city and became an archbishop.
In addition to Questlove and Lady Gaga, the film’s other interview subjects include Billy Porter, Dionne Warwick, Estelle Brown of the Sweet Inspirations, Iris Gordy of Motown Records, and the California Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
“It’s impossible to overstate the significant contributions that Carl Bean made to multiple communities, including LGBTQ, Black, HIV/AIDS, activists, and faith,” wrote Gregg Shapiro in his Bay Area Reporter review of the film. “To their credit, Junge and Pollard give Bean his due and provide viewers with an unforgettable portrait of a life well-lived.”
Mr. Pollard’s awards include Emmys, Peabodys, and an Academy Award nomination for Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls” (1997), which Mr. Pollard produced. Mr. Lee has called him “a master filmmaker,” and Henry Louis Gates Jr. has said, “When I think about his documentaries, they add up to a corpus -- a way of telling African-American history in its various dimensions.” In 2020 the International Documentary Association gave Mr. Pollard a career achievement award.
Tickets are $15, $10 for members of the arts center.
