Reality TV could use a dose of Life In A Box, the deeply personal, moving and musical documentary about the dissolution of the queer country duo Y’all. Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, one half of Y’all (the other is James Dean ‘Jay Byrd’), took on the task of documenting not only the final days of his band, but sadly the end of his relationship with musical and life-partner Jay. Sad as a classic country tearjerker, but also full of genuine moments of comedy and heartfelt joy, Life In A Box is one of the most original and unforgettable documentaries I have seen in a long time.

AfterElton.com: In your bio, you are described as an artist – writer, painter, theater artist, songwriter, performer. Did you ever expect to be adding filmmaker to that list?
Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer: The way the film came about was unexpected, but I'm not surprised to be a filmmaker. I've never been able to settle into one medium. When I was in high school, we had an assignment in an English class to imagine and write about what we would be doing in ten years, and I remember writing that I was a film director. It just took longer than ten years to get there.

AE: Was there one pivotal moment that sealed your decision to commit this chapter of your lives to film?
SC-DM: Not really. It was all serendipity, the way everything came together. The idea to make a movie came from a long-time Y'all fan, who had invested in or supported other projects we did in the past. He saw the Phranc documentary (Adventures in Plastic, I think it's called, about the Jewish lesbian folksinger who becomes a Tupperware lady) in Outfest in 2001, and he called us up and said, "There should be a movie about Y'all." So he enrolled us in a weekend crash course in the basics of shooting digital video, got us a camera and a computer to edit on, and we started shooting. There wasn't much planning--it all happened quickly. This was around the time that editing software and professional-quality DV cameras were coming down in price and getting easier to use. A couple years earlier, this project wouldn't have been possible.

We brainstormed a bit about what kind of movie it should be. The first idea we had was to make a narrative film of The Good Book, a Y'all biopic. But we couldn't do that on the road, and it would have been very complicated and expensive. Pretty quickly we settled on the documentary idea because we thought our life on the road was pretty interesting. Jay ran with the idea, decided it should be called Life in a Box. We already had a theme song. We didn't know what it would be about exactly, but we had a box full of blank tapes and we started taping everything we did.

Soon after Roger moved in with us, we'd made a commitment to each other to be dead honest in the way we conducted ourselves in the relationship. This was partly because of how complicated a three-way relationship is, but also I think Jay and I had been feeling a kind of low-grade dissatisfaction with our relationship and our career for quite some time, but we hadn't been able to talk to each other about it without getting defensive, so, once we made this promise to be honest about everything, it felt really good to start talking about it and getting things out in the open. By the time we started videotaping our lives, we were already in the habit of stirring up our deepest feelings. What was the question?? (laughs). I guess the short answer is "no."

Page 1 / 2 / 3 - Next