Director
Bo McGuire
Production support
From Director Bo McGuire:
“My name is Bo McGuire. I am the first grandchild of the late, great Evelyn Louise Blanton-Washington of Gadsden, Alabama. Now, even though I conjure her as a great historical figure, y’all don’t know her. Not yet. She is my mama’s mama, my Nanny, and I speak of her as royalty because she is—queen of my heart, my imagination. She was the savior of my young, incredibly queer life in the sometimes cruel geography of rural, working-class Alabama.
Growing up, Nanny had the only history I was interested in. Her ghost stories, her cornbread, her lipstick stained cigarettes—they were a legacy I longed to inherit. However, because Nanny refused to write a will, when she died all hell broke loose as my homophobic Aunt Sharon, (my favorite childhood relative by the way), schemed control of Nanny’s estate, locking my drag queen Uncle John out of the family home.
That one locked door turned into a petty war for objects, money and land fought in the trenches of the local court system. The battle lines were drawn across my mama’s heart, and I don’t take too kindly to that. As a queer Southerner, who can be both equally protective and skeptical of the South, Aunt Sharon stoked a fire within me to document the place and the people I call home. Through a series of stylized reenactments spun in with family VHS footage, Socks on Fire documents the fluidity of identity, personality, and performance in my hometown among my mama’s people.”