In today’s political climate, it’s hard to imagine that people can evolve, or change their points of view. But for Daresha Kyi, it’s imperative to believe that they can.
“People are capable of change,” the filmmaker said. “I’m really banking on that.”
This belief comes in part from seeing how it happens firsthand. In the new film “Mama Bears,” Kyi dives deep into a Facebook group of the same name, made up of mothers fighting for the rights of their LGBTQ+ children.
The film focuses on three women connected to the Mama Bears group – Kimberly Shappley, Sara Cunningham, and Tammi Terrell Morris. All three grew up raised to believe in conservative Christian values, which dictate that you pray for the souls of queer people rather than accept them for who they are. Now, Shappley spends her time advocating tirelessly for the rights of her trans daughter. Cunningham has started an LGBTQ+ focused non-profit called Free Mom Hugs. And Morris has accepted her own identity as a queer person and is working on her relationship with her mother.
How did these three get to where they are? “Mama Bears” tells their stories and how with the help of a Facebook group and some deep soul searching, they were able to change their minds.
“That’s what I’m hoping this film will do, is help people change, and grow, and evolve into more loving beings,” Kyi said.
Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Kyi about the experience of making the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To get started, I’m interested in your background. What in particular drew you to this topic?
Daresha Kyi: I am a member of the LGBTQ community and have been my whole life, so this is my community I’m discussing, my rights that are at stake. I’m not trans, but I am a member. So when I learned about the Mama Bears, I instinctively knew that this was important – that it was a story that would resonate with a lot of queer people, specifically people who grew up in the church. And most Americans have grown up in some sort of religious community, many of which are conservative, and have felt the pains and slings and arrows of being targeted by those communities. So when I learned about the Mama Bears, I was deeply inspired by the courage these women show to choose love over everything.
Did you grow up in any kind of religious community?
Kyi: When I was very young, I went to a Southern Baptist church. My whole family went – my great uncle was a pastor, so all our family was in that church on my mother’s side, and I wanted to go. But I left the church at a very early age. My mom had left the church, and didn’t really believe in Christianity.
How did you come across the Mama Bears Facebook group?
Kyi: I came across the Mama Bears through an article in the Huffington Post with Kimberly Shappley talking about how she went from being a Tea Party Republican to winning an award as the LGBTQ activist of the year because of her love for her daughter and the support of the Mama Bears. She mentioned that there were 2,000 moms in those private Facebook groups supporting each other on that journey to acceptance.
When you’re making something like this, how do you go about contacting someone and asking them to be involved?
Kyi: Well, they were all either Mama Bears or members of the Mama Bear community, in the case of Tammi [Terrell Morris]. So I contacted them all through the organization through reaching out to Liz Dyer, who runs one of the Mama Bear groups, and having her put out the word within the group.
I met Sara [Cunningham] because she was coming to New York on her first Free Mom Hugs tour. That was our first shoot, with Sara, at The Home For Hope shelter for unhoused LGBTQIA+ people [in Philadelphia]. She was also giving out hugs at Stonewall Inn, and so that was our very first shoot for “Mama Bears.”
Then I met Liz, obviously, through Mama Bears. Tammi had posted in Mama Bears, and that’s how I met her.
Obviously these women and their families have similar experiences, but I also felt that each family had a very different sense about them. Especially in the story with Tammi, there’s not necessarily a “happy” ending, particularly with her mom – it’s not unhappy, but there is some complication there. When you were trying to figure out how to tell that story, were you trying to find families with those different experiences?
Kyi: It was definitely an intention not to have the same story over and over again, to have diversity in the stories that are told. Especially in terms of, you know, one mom has a gay son, one has a gay daughter, and one has a trans child, so I wanted that kind of diversity. It could have gone another way if the story had been compelling, of other people that I found. But it just turned out that those were the three stories that were told.
In terms of Tammi and Tenita [Lewis Artry, Tammi’s mother], I think that Tenita’s storyline is one of the most important, because she is the parent to me, who represents where most parents of LGBTQ kids who are from a conservative, Christian background will wind up. They won’t wind up marching in the streets, they won’t wind up giving out free hugs. But if they can just quietly, unconditionally love their children, that could be enough. So her message, that you don’t have to agree with your child to love them unconditionally, is vitally important to me, and I think to all of us in the community.
Her story struck me as well, particularly the bit at the end where Tenita drops out of filming. Tammi said that she was worried that her words would be misconstrued, or she would come off as a villain. She’s definitely a complex figure, but I don’t think she came off as a villain. I wonder how that sort of snag affects you when you’re filming? How do you roll with that punch?
Kyi: Well, it’s not not a punch to me. To me, that’s a very legitimate concern. I think that when you share your life story with someone, there is an implicit trust there that is not always honored. So that was a possibility for her, I could have done that. But that was never my intention. So I respected that, you know, I respected her reasons for dropping out. Of course, I kept pushing, trying to get her to come back, but she wasn’t able to.
I will say that she has come a long way since. Tammi and Shadae [Miles] are getting married, and she’s buying their wedding cake. They’ve had private screenings of the film for their entire family at her suggestion. She taught me, what I knew intellectually, but she taught it to me emotionally, and that is that this journey, it’s just that. It’s a process, it’s a journey. It’s not straightforward, it’s not a line, it doesn’t always go in the same direction. People don’t do exactly what you expect them to do, but they change and they evolve If you allow them the grace and the space to do that. So I’ve learned that you have to have respect for where people are. You have to meet them where they are, and respect them and love them where they are, just as much as you’re asking them to love you. One gay man that I interviewed, who didn’t make it into the film, said – it took me years to come to terms with my sexuality. Why would I expect my parents to come to terms with it overnight? And that seems fair to me.
We spend so much time with these people, and there’s archival footage, and different footage from different points in their lives. How long were you working on this, and what were the steps in putting all that footage together?
Kyi: We had our first shoot in 2017. We finished it in 2022. So it was a five year journey. We shot up until 2020, and then we edited from 2020 to 2022. It was another journey – not straightforward, some steps behind, some steps to the side. Fundraising is always fun, and difficult, and challenging. We were blessed to get the funding we needed. But you know … the first year and a half we got $500, which I was grateful for, but it wasn’t a drop in the bucket. This filmmaking thing is not for the weak. This is not for the weak.
Yeah, five years is such a long time.
Kyi: And another year of traveling with it, and now the impact campaign, so all of a sudden, it will be at least seven years of my life that I’ve spent with these stories, with this film.
Watching the film, I was trying to look for certain themes. I think there’s a lot of talk about failure – this idea of failing at being a Christian, or failing at being a parent. Were you thinking about any themes that sort of connected these families together, whether it be that one or something different?
Kyi: That story of feeling like a failure, I think that’s common to the human condition, right? We all struggle with feeling like failures at different points for different reasons, and in different areas of our lives. My editors – Hajer S.I. Salem and Kelly Creedon – and I, we were looking for themes – connective tissue. We wound up cutting the three “Mama Bears” stories separately, so that we could see what their beginning, middle and end was – what their arc was, where they overlapped, where they were redundant, who covered any redundancy better, so that we could leave it to that story and take it out of the other story. That was quite an interesting process, putting an ensemble piece together and just trying to make sure that every character’s story was full, developed and felt complete.
Is that a normal way to edit something like that together, an ensemble piece? Or is that out of the norm?
Kyi: I don’t know. This is my first ensemble piece. [Laughs] I can’t tell you how anybody else does it, all I can tell you is what worked for us. Trying to cut the piece without doing those character arcs was impossible for us.
You’ve touched on this throughout, but for a lot of these families, it feels like they had to get to this very dark place before things got better. Obviously, it’s terrible to have to go to that dark point, and I think you do those moments in their relationships justice. But I was wondering, what do you hope comes out of this documentary for families who are maybe going through something similar?
Kyi: One thing I want to say about this dark place, if you have ever read Joseph Campbell, he talks about the mythology of the hero or the heroine, and the hero’s journey. Often, it’s like a prerequisite. You have to go through the dark night of the soul, where you sort of get rid of all of the things that you once believed to be true so that you can find things that are more true, or that are deeper truths. That requires soul searching, that requires loss, that requires growth. That only happens when you hit that place, right?
The other thing I’ll say about these families is that it isn’t just the darkness. It’s having skin in the game. When you live in a bubble, like a lot of conservative Christians do – you live in a bubble where everyone talks like you, thinks like you, dresses like you, believes what you do – you have this false belief that there are no queer people in your community. But what is actually true is that what you have is a community that isn’t safe for queer people to reveal themselves to you. You may be surrounded by LGBTQ+ people and never know it, because it’s not a safe environment, right?
Confronting that, and realizing that things are not as you thought they were – that maybe there are some deeper truths behind what you’ve been told, maybe there are some lies that you’ve been told, maybe there’s some things that you need to define for yourself – it’s quite a process. That’s initially what attracted me to these women, was knowing that they had the courage to go through what is called the dark night of the soul. Which is why I consider them heroic, because they were able to really dig deep and really come up with love – the core essence of everything, love, right? – and find that this, above all else, was what was guiding them, was what helped them to come through to the other side.
So for me, there’s nothing greater than love, and there’s nothing greater than a mother’s love. These women are the embodiment of motherly love. They show us what’s possible when you allow your heart to crack open. I’m hoping that families who are watching this film, who are struggling with this, will find their way – will see some of their own journey in what journeys these women have taken. Will recognize their language, their thought processes, and what they have to go through. And will find hope, and will see that there is light on the other side. There is love on the other side, and there is above all else, healthy children on the other side. Because that’s the goal. We want less LGBTQIA+ children to be abandoned, rejected and scorned by their families.
The film premiered on PBS on June 20 and is currently available for free online.