Did you ever start crying for the sheer joy, how exuberant atmospherics hold and love you? I'm a cryer these days. And badass blessed are my emotions because the memory of days—not too distant—when I couldn't cry at all are with me. I'm not forgetting. Given my newish aptitude, even unlikely events bring on tears. Can you say Beyonce concert? Backstory to the concert is a moment from my 20s.

Sitting in San Francisco's Castro theater, I am 25 years old watching Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1990) when the eye goblets start pouring, How can you not cry when House culture—drag queen gay men—honor themselves through fashion, dance, makeup, music and tendrils of fierce friendship. Observe that long sharp polished fingernails are no obstacle to social avenues for connecting lives, creating true family inside queer culture.

If you have interest on how “outsiders” (illogical for we are all life insiders) creatively navigate debilitating poverty, oppressive racism, and soul-crunching heterosexism, then check out Livingston's documentary. No fingernails will scratch, but bring a box of kleenex for the water-works.

Another joy that motivates the day—besides crying any ol' damn time I wish—is my number, the 58 years strolling this earth so far and how this longevity allows me to wander into phrases like, “a few decades ago...” Now that brings me deep belly laughs. I can remember some events like yesterday.

For Livingston's documentary screening, the theater is jam packed; 500 or more Castroers (truly, truly all walks of diverse life) vibing together in a theater where the piano player emerges on a hydraulic platform from beneath the stage. His playing in a tuxedo—just a few minutes to emphasize atmosphere that the show has begun—is so elegant and talented that the house applauds for a good while after he disappears. In this movie-theater setting, everyone is seen.

The actual stage has plenty room to set up a dozen chairs for a Q&A after the film. Theater interior design appears like a sketch from an 1800s artist's drawing pad: faux balcony seats protruding high on the walls, instead of paint the walls are draped in plush greenish brown fabric, antique flowers trellising there, and a vibrantly dark red 50 feet high velvet curtain sashays electronically on and off stage. Watching Paris Is Burning in these atmospherics is a spiritual experience I will remember for good. Can't that also be said about an open-air stadium music concert?

And the question, on tears' origins, posits who is watching whom and why? That is we cry to exude an interior feeling in response to what we see.

Consider gazes and how they might work in film making. When slasher movie series Halloween, Friday the 13th and others achieved immense popularity, we had some sense why the fandom. Behind the camera was often a straight white male director filming on the set (a music concert stage, if you will) the buxom woman ripped to shreds with a sharp knife. One gaze is the film director's then. And on the set how characters look at each other is more gazing. In this example, women will not have agency in looking because being gutted with a knife preempts the chance. The third gaze accounts for slasher film's runaway box office success because those audience folks were and are disproportionally straight white males 18 to 25 or so. Killing the feared female is a shared identity—whether conscious or unconscious—that director and his audience perhaps share alike.

Since the camera has such power to objectify women in this way, the fundamental opposite truth remains that the camera dignifies, subjectifies, and elevates human lives when a filmmaker makes that conscious choice. And this is the universe that Jennie Livingston operates in when making Paris Is Burning; a white lesbian woman stands behind the movie camera looking through her personal lens—radical empathy—to shoot the scene. The 1980s House culture, a ball room culture, often coined as going Vogue, has her first thorough intro for the entire world to learn. And the gazes of the gay men for each other that she portrays are truthful footage on lives lived in creative courage and political persistence. Can you perhaps recognize why the third gaze—all those 500 folks sitting in the Castro theater—are awestruck at so poignant a portrayal of queer vulnerability for gay men of color that audience tears simply fall, mostly joyful and often gut-wrenching sad.

If we fast-forward thirty years, the effervescence that sheer dramatic costume brings to highly-skilled dance performance—that shining light to Vogue—we are now in a movie theater where the audience count is one, and that would be yours truly. Hawai'i Island life has been a solo adventure and this predicament is so one early Friday afternoon screening of Renaissance—Beyonce (and the movie has been showing for several weeks). What I lacked in shared audience hooting and hollering, the documentary rebalances in the uplifting motivation that results from three gazes; how the director frames what is seen. how the stage is set for those standing there to gaze at each other and how the concert audience views Beyonce and her entourage performing.

And the fourth gaze is my own watching these filmic reactions. Despite some lonely Hawai'i years in that theater yesterday watching this two and a half hour documentary, the most amazing feeling of the feels did go there, including plenty tears, and I am grateful. I am watching ecstatic faces watch Beyonce and then Beyonce watching them back and all the stage dancers are watching each other with love and respect and the camera is watching all these life-validating gazes.

The film directors made conscious choices to frame faces. Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of faces in any and many of the 56 concert locations the Renaissance tour traveled. People's faces receive the documentary film's focus. Film technique delivers film message: audiences are the show, the most important effect to witness Beyonce's powerful lyrics and vocals, the honey made for Queen Bey.

The faces are watching Beyonce and they react: tears, shouts, shocks, screams, dances, hugs, kisses, sings, and so much more, so very much more. I could just watch the audience faces as an independent documentary. The camera catching exact moments when Beyonce captivates the crowd. And I too sitting in a movie theater, audience of one, but still I feel like I am standing with the crowd. Seeing beyond-exuberantly joyful people is a very good sight and theirs and my tears of joy did happen, thankfully.

The documentary opens in the first few minutes with Beyonce saying that she is trying not to cry as she sees so many amazing faces. If Beyonce be the Queen Bey then glad I be to join the hive as yet one more millionth bee. Audience count was 2.7 million as the tour completed. Thousands and thousands of faces.

While growing up, Beyonce's Uncle Johnny was a gay black man who learned to sew when Beyonce's mother taught him. In the Knowles family, fashion was preeminent. Beyonce wears a dress her uncle designed specifically for her. Wearing this on stage, she comments to the crowd that her Uncle Johnny needs recognition, and the crowd roars in appreciation. Queen Bey and her beehive share a detailed backstory of culture.

One that celebrates every imaginable body appearance as simply exuding beauty for honored on the Renaissance concert stage is every size, shape, gender expression, hair color, race, age and many other descriptors that are only limits. Beyonce's crew mirrors the audience in physical creative expression—as in, absolutely all are welcome in this dance house.

The documentary is a sight to be seen and barely fits description. Too much realness going on (writing is real yet one-step removed). Beyonce owning her female sensuality as political power (as definition who gets what and when, where and how. Don't forget the strategic word—as in, why), revolutionizing full-circle 360 degrees around, the music world not entirely flattened through its historical misogyny. The faces in her audiences are so wildly free because her lyrics sing to each and every person joining the music—her lyrics representing individuals giving powerful voice for many commonly disenfranchised through mainstream music lyrics. Beyonce writes and sings and produces music for her beyhive.

In the documentary's closing scenes she admits bashfully, “I guess my bee hive gets me.” How could we not? She made an album titled Lemonade. Who in this backwards maladjusted f'ed up world has not been handed a basket of spoiled lemons? Queen Bey decides to make lemonade from that discrimination, prejudice, oppression—and how delicious the return to social justice is.

The documentary's last edit has the camera box Beyonce in as she eats a sandwich after a performance. Zero makeup, exhausted, even startled that some random camera has appeared, she flips irritation when the filmmaker asked, “How do you feel?” Taking a few full bites and throwing back a smidgen of stink eye, she brings the Bey: “I feel liberated,” she declares.

The gentle suggest that I share is anyone watching this documentary is most likely going to sense liberation, too. Grateful. Recommend you see this documentary any which way that is possible. Go there. And while sitting before the screen (wherever that arrives) consider gazings: camera director choosing the frame's focus, how the people on the stage look at each other (with love), and how I and you as audience gaze at the screen, also with love.