She initially stayed in a youth hostel in London, but that proved expensive.
But some of the tens of thousands who have fled the city in the past year left with little more than the clothes on their backs. Many people assume Hong Kongers are as monied as their city’s banks. “Of course I miss ,” she says, from the dining room of a bed and breakfast in Blackpool, a down-at-heel British seaside town, where, to her surprise, she has ended up. She left her husband and daughter behind. But in April this year, terrified that the Chinese Communist Party could seize control of her hard-earned savings and throw her in jail, the retired primary-school teacher fled to Britain. Although she has travelled, Hong Kong has always been her home, even as she grew more vocally critical of an increasingly repressive Chinese Communist Party. Ming didn’t expect to become a refugee in her sixties. It sheds fresh light on seventies New York, blending popular culture with the avant-garde glamour of Brown’s underground stages.
The documentary benefits from interviews with Brown and her close associates New York notables such as Andy Warhol and Taylor Mead pepper the footage. It visits gay bathhouses, porn cinemas and her grandmother in Florida. The documentary shifts seamlessly between Brown’s boisterous onstage presence and her quieter personal life. But her story will appeal to those who celebrate the queerness, promiscuity and flamboyance of the subculture she embodied. Brown, a classically trained performer, has fallen through the cracks of public attention since her death in 1989. It provides a snapshot of the rugged and outrageous New York of the 1970s and an intimate portrait of the eponymous singer. The film returns to the silver screen on Tuesday at New York City’s Metrograph theatre. Rosa von Praunheim, a queer German documentarian, released “Tally Brown, New York” in 1979.
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