In 2007, queer representation was, in a word, lacking. What was available was decidedly whitewashed, offering glimpses of a simplified...

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

In 1997, a French/Guinean film set in West Africa opens, shockingly, with two young men kissing each other wildly and passionately in the...

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...

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...

- 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...

I can do no better contextualizing the social origins for this accomplished documentary than quoting its first-time director, Jamal Sims....

- A Slick South African Lesbian Romance Frameline 39 ended last week. The 10-day granddaddy of LGBT film festivals, always brings a rich...

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...

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...

Farrokh Balsara was born in Zanzibar’s Government Hospital on September 5, 1946 to Parsee parents, followers of Zoroastrianism. Farrokh’s...

When people ask where the name of my production company comes form, I flippantly reply, “Shoga is Swahili for faggot.” It’s a throwaway...

Think about it. Up until the defeat of pleasing tonality by exponents of modern music some time in the 20th century, classical music sat...

In the early years of the 20th century, the rhymed lyric expressing the feelings of the writer was the dominant poetic form in America....

Ask even a well-educated reader of Harlem Renaissance literature who was the most prolific novelist of the time, and you’ll probably get...

In terms of African American history, 1922 wasn’t particularly notable. Nor was there much to celebrate. A vigorous effort to outlaw the...

For those Americans who have sufficient cultural literacy to know about Josephine Baker, the clip we carry in our head is of a gangly...

The Charleston reigned supreme as the dance of the Roaring Twenties. There were other shorter-lived crazes, most notably the Black...

The literary lesbian output of the Queer Harlem Renaissance provides meager fare: a couple of windy, antique love poems by Angelina Weld...

Through the offices of the white scholar and collector of Harlem Renaissance texts Thomas Wirth, Fire!! was published as a textual...