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At 54, I Hit My First Film Festival Entry Out of the Ballpark
Shoga Films creator Robert Philipson reflects on his successful first film festival submission "Ma Rainey's Lesbian Licks"

Shoga Films
Jun 104 min read


A Fruitless Attempt To Save My "Daughter" and Me From Eternal Damnation
Robert Philipson attempts to save him and his daughter from eternal damnation

Shoga Films
May 194 min read


Hating Nixon -- A Family Tradition
Born in 1950, I knew about Richard Nixon from the dawn of consciousness -- and he was synonymous with Evil. I inherited my contempt of...

Shoga Films
Apr 36 min read


"The Pit Bull of AIDS Litigation"
Alice Philipson - Berkeley based solo practitioner, 1987 In the 1980s, queer lawyers were still reluctant to come out publicly. They...

Shoga Films
Mar 163 min read


Black Rebellions I Have Known: The L.A. Episodes
Watts Rebellion, Los Angeles, California, August 13, 1965 Having grown up swathed in unrecognized white privilege (i.e. The Fifties), I...

Shoga Films
Feb 194 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...

Shoga Films
Jan 85 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...

Shoga Films
Dec 4, 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...

Shoga Films
Nov 6, 20243 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...

Shoga Films
Oct 3, 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...

Shoga Films
Sep 11, 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,...

Shoga Films
Sep 7, 20244 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...

Shoga Films
Jun 5, 20243 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...

Shoga Films
May 1, 20244 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...

Shoga Films
Apr 3, 20243 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...

Shoga Films
Mar 6, 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...

Shoga Films
Feb 8, 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,...

Shoga Films
Jan 10, 20244 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...

Shoga Films
Dec 7, 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,...

Shoga Films
Nov 1, 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...

Shoga Films
Oct 4, 20234 min read
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