Gemmel & Tim

Year of release: 2022. Directed by Michiel Thomas.

There are many things one could say about Michiel Thomas’ documentary Gemmel & Tim. It’s a piece of investigate journalism, it’s an amplification of Black voices, it’s a heartbreaking story of friendships wrecked by drug addiction, it’s a scathing indictment of our political system; it’s a shocking example of our time our justice system worked for queer Black people and not against them. Of all the documentary’s many good qualities, I think the last is the one that strikes me the most.

Toward the end of the film, one of the activists interviewed states that the justice system has finally worked in that a major political donor who killed at least two Black men has been brought to justice. Given the amount of times America’s justice system has explicitly targeted minorities, imprisoned Black people for minor drug offences, and allowed white criminals to get away scot-free, one could be forgiven for thinking our “justice” system was designed to function that way. Gemmel & Tim highlights one hard-fought time when it truly served “liberty and justice for all,” and not just the wealthy elite.

The wealthy elite in Gemmel & Tim is Ed Buck, a republican donor in the ‘80s, who switched parties after evangelical Christians partnered with the republican party, and the GOP took a stance against homosexuality. To the extent that Gemmel & Tim focuses on Buck’s sexuality, he seems more of a power-hungry predator looking to exploit gay men, specifically younger, gay, Black men, than someone actually interested in a relationship with men. However, Buck is not the focus of the film.

The film’s focus is the memories of Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean, two young Black men who died of drug overdoses in Buck’s West Hollywood apartment. Both cases were dismissed by the police, despite California’s law that anyone who administers drugs that result in a lethal overdose is guilty of murder. One of the most sobering lines is from an interviewee who states that if a Black man had a white man turn up dead in his apartment, he would not be able to assuage the police with a short interview insisting the death was an accident.

However, Buck has been a major donor to the mayor of West Hollywood’s campaigns, so that grants him immunity despite the evidence to the contrary, which the DA dismisses as lacking any proof. In a truly shocking twist of events, which the film withholds until the third act, the way that Buck is arrested and found guilty is an even bigger reversal of usual trends in America’s justice system. It’s a fittingly dramatic climax to an investigation that initially seemed like it would yield no results.

The heart of the film is not the investigation into the criminal conduct of Ed Buck, but the testimonies of Gemmel’s and Tim’s friends who recount stories of their humanity, kindness, and tragedy of the drug addiction that started when they encountered Buck.

As the title implies, the documentary is Gemmel’s and Tim’s tragic story at the hands of a predator who was able to abuse the system. There are also interviews with victims who survived Ed Buck’s sexual and narcotic abuse. The entire documentary is a sobering sum of parts that begins as random anecdotes and crescendos to a climax of justice as an investigation mounts over several years. Justice may be slow, and regardless of how America’s legal system functions, the arc of the universe is one of morality and justice for the oppressed, which this documentary shows in a surprisingly dramatic fashion.