Quenton Allan Brocka (born 1972) is an award-winning American television and film director based in West Hollywood, California. He has directed and written a number of feature films while creating an animated television series for the Logo cable network. He also writes a column for The Advocate. Brocka is of Filipino heritage and is openly gay.
Brocka was born and spent his childhood in Guam. His family moved to the mainland United States, settling in Parkland, Washington where he attended Washington High School. He earned a degree in communications from the University of Washington in Seattle and went on to get a masters in film from the California Institute of the Arts.
His uncle was Lino Brocka, a famous LGBT film director in the Philippines. His mother didn’t know Lino, except to say he was in the film industry. His father didn’t know his brother well and the family never went to the Philippines so Allan never got to meet him or find out much about him.
It was in Guam where Brocka first discovered film. At the age of eight he discovered it was fun to create simple slide shows from photographs with a soundtrack. At age nine his mother, a saleswoman for Panasonic, brought home a video camera and Brocka began creating short films and sketch comedy. He found an early fascination with science fiction but after seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and some John Waters films as a teen he realized sexuality was a legitimate subject. Also, while living in Seattle, he directed a queer public-access television show for several years.
In 1999 the first of Brocka’s films seen by the public was the animated short Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple In All The World, an irreverent story of a lesbian couple and gay couple who dislike each other, but decide to have a baby together. The short was done as a school project that Brocka then submitted to Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. It went on to show and won awards at seven different film festivals.
Brocka went on to create another short, Roberta Loved, a story of a morbidly obese woman who is fired from her job and learns she will die. Roberta Loved won another set of awards, and Brocka learned that his audience was willing to be disturbed by his subject matter, whether through humor (as in Rick and Steve) or drama (as in Roberta Loved and Seventy).
His next works were iconic documentaries of popular culture, Porno Valley, a reality show featuring pornographic actresses from Vivid Entertainment and Camp Michael Jackson about the encampment of fans and media outside the court trial of pop-music star Michael Jackson.
Brocka was approached by Ariztical Entertainment to create low budget gay romances and he agreed, but then insisted on making interesting casting choices and writing that was more than just throw-away entertainment. For the first film, Eating Out, Brocka reached out to American Idol contestant Jim Verraros, who had never previously acted, as a co-star. It went on to win several awards, including 2004 Best Feature at the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
His latest picture, Boy Culture has won more than a dozen awards at film festivals around the world, including Best Writing at the 2006 Outfest and Best Feature Film at Festival del Mar in Spain.
The Logo cable network later picked up Rick & Steve as an animated series, which began airing in 2007. Brocka also performs some of the show’s voices. (Wikipedia)