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First Person Essays

Shoga Films
Jan 85 min read
My Mother Scotches A Communist Smear Campaign
Raising her family in a newly-created suburban neighborhood on a Pasadena mesa during the 1950s, my mother always knew she was a square...
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Shoga Films
Dec 4, 20243 min read
Unplugging from Christmas
Christmas is upon us, and I glide through the capitalist frenzy and social anxiety with frictionless insouciance. I buy no Christmas...
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Shoga Films
Nov 6, 20243 min read
A Basset in Paris
Lady Hamlet and her humans, 1961 It wasn’t easy for a dog used to the freedom of the San Gabriel Mountains to accommodate herself to the...
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Shoga Films
Oct 3, 20244 min read
Aliyah Holds No Allure For Me
The young ulpanist in the rose greenhouse. Aliyah. In its Biblical context, “aliyah” is a Hebrew word meaning “to rise up” and...
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Shoga Films
Sep 11, 20244 min read
My Ashkenazi Blinders
Four Jews The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and...
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Shoga Films
Sep 7, 20244 min read
I Translate Black Nationalism For the State Department
The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and offensive,...
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Shoga Films
Jun 5, 20243 min read
The Three Stages of Gay Acceptance
Folsom Street Fair 2019 --- not bad for 69 Way back in 1981, I was living in Washington, DC, with my first lover. I was only three years...
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Shoga Films
May 1, 20244 min read
A Sunday Painter
In 1954, Jean Guyard, a Frenchman working as a civil servant in the tax department of the French Republic, married my cousin Marion...
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Shoga Films
Apr 3, 20243 min read
Poetry Lite
I'm a poet And my feet know it. They’re longfellas. This sophomoric ditty illustrates the dilemma of a poetic practice which cuts...
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Shoga Films
Mar 6, 20244 min read
"She's Just Like One of the Family"
Doris and Alice enjoy a Footsie Wootsie at the San Joanquin County Fair In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family...
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Shoga Films
Feb 8, 20244 min read
The Making and Unmaking of A "White" Africanist
Me and Ebrahim Hussein In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures , "the premiere journal of...
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Shoga Films
Jan 10, 20244 min read
My Coloured Friend
Some of the staff of Hage Geingob High School. Guess which one is the Coloured. First of all, note the British spelling. Second of all,...
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Shoga Films
Dec 7, 20234 min read
I Uncover the Queer and Jewish Undercurrents of a Documentary Classic
The raffish director strikes a casual pose in front of the Queens Film Festival banner Grey Gardens , if you must know. And if you don't...
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Shoga Films
Nov 1, 20234 min read
My Zionist Phase
As a mid-century Jewish American child, I was enrolled in the Zionist project without my knowledge or acquiescence. I was born in 1950,...
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Shoga Films
Oct 4, 20234 min read
Fear of a Little Black Dress
When I was coming out in the Stone Age of the 1980s, drag was not well understood (at least by me) or widely accepted, even in the gay...
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Shoga Films
Sep 7, 20233 min read
"My Son, the Fegeleh"
One blanket statement we can endorse about American Jewish boys and men is that we are neurotically attached to our mothers. Since our...
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Shoga Films
Aug 2, 20234 min read
My Aborted Jazz Career
One of the Victorian legacies of the middle-class homes of the 1950s which bespoke of aspirations to gentility was the piano in the...
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Shoga Films
Jun 6, 20233 min read
On Aging as a Gay Man
On the right! Look at the guy on the right! That’s me at age 69. The physical specimen with his arm around me is Adam, my personal...
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Shoga Films
May 3, 20233 min read
Growing Up Clueless
And when I say "clueless," I'm talking specifically about African American culture. I grew up in Pasadena during the 50s and 60s. There...
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Shoga Films
Apr 5, 20235 min read
My Poet
Of course he wasn't "my poet." He was my friend who was also a poet. I'd had other friends who wrote poetry and who had even published...
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Shoga Films
Mar 1, 20233 min read
My Cousin Marion: Unsung Hero of the Guerilla Documentary
At the age of 30, my mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, met and fell in love with the famous left-wing Dutch documentary filmmaker...
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Shoga Films
Feb 1, 20234 min read
My Cultural Gaffe: Criticizing the Use of Swahili in Kwanzaa
Around 1990, I had recently returned to America from a year of dissertation research on East Africa's most famous playwright whose plays...
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Shoga Films
Jan 9, 20234 min read
Distant Echoes of the Holocaust
During December of 1977, I found myself intensely nostalgic for the remembered rituals and celebrations of the American Christmases I had...
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Shoga Films
Dec 7, 20223 min read
XMAS
We were talking about Christmas, about the Christmas tree, and we never called it a Chanukah bush. I must have heard that somewhere...
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Shoga Films
Sep 7, 20223 min read
My Dinner Chez Josephine
In 2013 I was in New York to screen one of my films at the Harlem International Film Festival. While there I learned that one of...
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