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God Loves Uganda - Religioius Extremism in Action
Modern African nations are largely creations of Western imperialism. Once the colonial powers and their administrative authority...

Shoga Films
Dec 1, 20224 min read


The Green Book- Isolated Queerness
The Green Book, a narrative feature about a lovable, casually racist Italian American lug driving the effete, supremely talented,...

Shoga Films
Nov 30, 20224 min read


"Looking for Langston" - The Peerless Ancestor
The 2017 edition of Frameline, the San Francisco LGBT film festival, screened a gorgeously restored copy of Issac Julien’s Black queer...

Shoga Films
Nov 25, 20223 min read


Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - Marginal Bisexuality
August Wilson's early masterpiece " Ma Rainey's Black Bottom " debuted on Broadway in 1984. The play broke revolutionary ground by making...

Shoga Films
Nov 23, 20223 min read


Major! - A Black Trans Woman Fights For Justice
As I entered the screening of the recently-completed documentary Major!, presented by Spectrum Queer Media and part of Oakland’s 2016...

Shoga Films
Nov 20, 20223 min read


Moonlight - Oscar's "Best Picture" Game-Changer
The breakout film of 2016, Moonlight, can be described in two words: instant history. For the first time, we see a film with African...

Shoga Films
Nov 19, 20223 min read


The Obituary of Tunde Johnson - A Teen Soap With BLM Overlay
Start with a classic teen triangle. Tunde's bestie from childhood, the supersexed Marley, is sleeping with the Nordic-blond-god jock...

Shoga Films
Nov 18, 20225 min read


Pariah - A Narrative of Black Lesbian "Firsts"
Pariah means outcast. The film, Pariah, follows the development of Alike, a seventeen-year-old high school student in Brooklyn struggling...

Shoga Films
Nov 15, 20224 min read


Paris Is Burning - When Ballroom Culture Hit the Screen
Jennie Livingston’s groundbreaking documentary, Paris Is Burning, was filmed in the 1980’s, hit the festival circuit in 1990, began DVD...

Shoga Films
Nov 5, 20224 min read


Lyric and the Queer Harlem Renaissance Part 2: The Men
It is an odd, little discussed fact that ALL of the best-known poets of the Harlem Renaissance were queer: Claude McKay, Countee Cullen,...

Shoga Films
Oct 31, 20224 min read


Quincy and Deondray Gossfield Celebrate Queer Black History in “Smoke, Lillies and Jade”
In 2007, queer representation was, in a word, lacking. What was available was decidedly whitewashed, offering glimpses of a simplified...

Shoga Films
Oct 30, 20227 min read


Langston Hughes, Asexual
Langston Hughes has long been fiercely claimed as gay by the Black LGBT movement, although there is no hard evidence that he was...

Shoga Films
Oct 26, 20222 min read


Rafiki - a Tale of Forbidden Lesbian Love in Kenya Breaks No Ground
In 1997, a French/Guinean film set in West Africa opens, shockingly, with two young men kissing each other wildly and passionately in the...

Shoga Films
Oct 20, 20223 min read


Salome's Last Dance - The Gratuitous Black Hunk
Enough said, right? Or maybe you were looking at the boobs? Well, let me put this in a bit of context, since the context brings in an...

Shoga Films
Oct 10, 20222 min read


Stories of Our Lives - A Wondrous Kenyan Surprise
If you had told me that the best, most artful film to come out of East Africa so far was an anthology of shorts about the difficulties of...

Shoga Films
Oct 5, 20223 min read


Tongues Untied - A Gay Black Man Revisits His Cinematic Roots
- A Gay Black Man Revisits A few years before he died, the visionary arts philanthropist Jim DeSilva told me a story that I have not...

Shoga Films
Sep 30, 20225 min read


When the Beat Drops - A Complex Group Portrait
I can do no better contextualizing the social origins for this accomplished documentary than quoting its first-time director, Jamal Sims....

Shoga Films
Sep 20, 20223 min read


While You Weren't Looking - A Slick South African Lesbian Romance
- A Slick South African Lesbian Romance Frameline 39 ended last week. The 10-day granddaddy of LGBT film festivals, always brings a rich...

Shoga Films
Sep 15, 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...

Shoga Films
Sep 7, 20223 min read


Whatever Happened to Clara Smith?
Chances are you’ve never even heard of Clara Smith. It’s confusing that there were so many Smiths amongst the crop of divas that...

Shoga Films
Sep 1, 20223 min read
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