In 2003 I unknowingly embarked upon my accidental career as a filmmaker when I enrolled in a video production course at Berkeley City College. I wanted to learn how to operate a video camera in order to document the reminiscences of my father as he walked through Hyde Park, Chicago where he and my mother had grown up. The results were primitive, but I was glad I had gotten them on tape. He died of bladder cancer the following year. Video Production One taught me far more than how to operate a camera. It was an introduction to the art and technique of filmmaking. We made little movies, crewed for one another, learned about sound, lighting, even served as “talent” in front of the cameras. It was fun. And writing scripts, though alien and artificial as a literary form, came naturally to me. I had a good ear for dialogue. My final project was an overly ambitious short narrative using students from the BCC multimedia program, filmed at a friend’s house, and buried as juvenilia until its resurrection this month as the Shoga Treat, “Regendered.” Video Production One led fatally to Video Production Two. More of the same but extending and refining our knowledge. Also we had access, during class time, to a fully equipped studio. I already had a suspicion that I would become a documentary filmmaker. I had been a professor of African and African American literature the previous decade, before the constraints and politics of hiring for tenure-track positions drove me out of academia. Creatively and intellectually I was at loose ends, but documentary film promised a new outlet for the exercise of these interests. At age 54, I wasn’t contemplating a new career. I was twice as old as the typical film student. However what I had that they didn’t was life experience and a subject matter about which I had thought long and deeply. I had realized while still a professor that the Queer Harlem Renaissance needed to be excavated and promoted. (In 2003 this concept was relatively new.) My research had led me to “Prove It On Me Blues” by Ma Rainey, now widely regarded as an anthem of lesbian affirmation but barely known outside of blues histories at the time. I determined to shoot a music video, a cover of the song whose original 1927 Paramount recording was so shoddy that the lyrics were well nigh impossible to understand. Went out last night with a bunch of my friends. They must’ve been women ‘cause I don’t like no men. Now that I had my project, I had only to realize my vision without contacts, technical knowledge, or money. The first thing I did was to introduce myself to Ronnie Stewart of the West Coast Blues Society. To my delight, and for reasons I’ll never understand, he jumped on with both feet. It was he who made the music video happen. He knew the musicians and persuaded Donny Koontz (drums), Ron Joseph (bass), Spiderman Robinson (keyboard), and singer Tia Carroll to drive out to a home studio in Fairfield, perform the song in one take, and then mastered it for the video shoot. Now it was up to me and my video production class. I was friends with the directors of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, a Black gay couple, and they arranged for the use of costumes, black suits for the musicians, and the one prop, a 1920s microphone. Tia was outfitted in a splendid blue and gold dress. On the appointed day, everybody showed up at the studio, submitted to costume fitting, hair and makeup. Once the musicians were on the floor with their instruments, we students took them through four takes with three cameras, two stationary, and one in motion, a basic dolly we set up using a board perched on the arms of a wheelchair. We had to work quickly as we only had use of the studio for the length of the class period. However, by the time we broke we had plenty of footage. I asked another classmate, Carlo Kamin, to edit, and by the time he put together our music video, we were pleasantly shocked by how well it had turned out. Unlike “Regendered” which bore the ineradicable stretch marks of our firstborn, this sophomore effort appeared positively professional. I gave it a name, “Ma Rainey’s Lesbian Licks,” and sent it out on the festival circuit. It garnered 18 acceptances, including spots at the relatively prestigious Black and queer festivals, Frameline, the London LGBT Film Festival and the Pan African Film Festival. As you might imagine, this early success completely skewed my sense of what was possible in the film world. I tripped blithely from one non-commercial project to the next, ignoring licensing conventions that would have quickly ballooned the cost of my historical docs beyond affordability. I continued to excavate the Queer Harlem Renaissance, and because I was tilling relatively virgin soil, my acceptance rate in film festivals remained high (140 and counting). Once I stumbled on to narrative filmmaking, my ability to keep production costs reasonable flew out the window, but I had already been infected. Another story for another time. And so Shoga Films was launched. I didn’t know it at the time, but my little film endeavor would eventually grow to take the lion’s share of my time and energy. This monthly newsletter is but one of the results. I turned 75 last month, and I’m more prolific now than at any time in my previous life. I’m not sure anybody cares, but it keeps me out of trouble and an assisted living facility. Of course I was way to old to embark upon another career, but my life has gave me one attitudinal gift that has served me well — I don’t know when to quit. -- Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, A Catastrophic Start SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

A White Jewish Woman In Rebellion Makes Queer Film History “They want to keep you in that little world where they can control you. That's where the money comes from." Norman Mailer, at the height of his fame in the 1950s, declared that the one insupportable persona for him was to be "a nice Jewish boy." His lifelong rebellion against his middle-class upbringing produced, amongst many other writings, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster." This 1957 essay is now something of an embarrassment as its championing of "Negro culture" was posited as a liberating defiance of the stifling morality and conformity of the Eisenhower era. Beatniks and hipsters took their cues from "the best minds ... dragging themselves through the Negro streets, looking for an angry fix." There was a distaff side to this as well, viz. Hettie Jones, Marilyn Hacker, and l'enfant terrible of independent film, Shirley Clake, nee Shirley Brimberg, daughter of a multimillionaire Polish-Jewish immigrant who made his fortune in manufacturing. Her most important films dealt with a seamy New York slice of Black life (The Connection, The Cool World, and Portrait of Jason.) She wrote, "I identified with black people because I couldn't deal with the woman question and I transposed it. I could understand very easily the black problems, and I somehow equated them to how I felt. When I did The Connection, which was about junkies, I knew nothing about junk and cared less. It was a symbol of people who are on the outside. I always felt alone and on the outside of the culture that I was in." Through her work with this Black demimonde, she got to know a fascinating Black raconteur, hustler, sex worker, and houseboy to the wealthy, who renamed himself Jason Halliday. She persuaded him to come to her room at the storied Chelsea Hotel. She filmed him for twelve hours, cinema verité style, as he raffishly, then bitterly recounts his life "gettin over on old massa" before dissolving into a throbbing dung heap of misery thanks to the alcohol and weed he consumed as the hours passed and the camera turned. At his messiest and most vulnerable, Clarke and her crew throw insults and accusatory questions at him, seemingly to make the pile of pain and self-pity writhe higher. The edited result became Portrait of Jason, the first feature-length film to put a Black gay character at its center. This was so radical and out-of-left-field for American culture and Black gay culture that.it barely made a dent and was thought to be lost for a number of years. It's been meticulously restored and can be streamed on Kanopy, but it doesn't really get the commentary it deserves and even less love. How can you love a train wreck? How can you love this pathetic, deluded, unhappy man who has no filter and rips himself open to a world that would hardly have found anything positive about a Black gay sex worker and servant? (Remember that 1967 was also the year that Sidney Poiter's super clean and handsome Dr. Prentice barely squeaked into the good graces of his white fiancée's liberal parents in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?) Does this stand at the head of Black queer representation in film? Can't we just fast forward to Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1987) or Marlon Rigg's Tongues Untied (1989)? The answer is "yes" if we make the argument that only films made by Black gay filmmakers carry sufficient authenticity to launch a tradition. (But then what do we do with Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning?) Life is messy; film history is messy. Portrait of Jason is not a blackface production -- to be simply condemned and "canceled." It raises serious and complex issues. The film itself exposes the artificiality and manipulation of cinema verité. The question of who controls Jason's story is a vexing and probably irresolvable one. And yet Jason does tell his story. He has wit and intelligence and gives us a glimpse into a world that would have been as foreign to white heterosexual viewers as a Martian landscape. In spite of his anger and self-pity, he gets some zingers in, for sure. "White people... they love you when you're down and out. Then they can help you. Makes them feel good." Although Jason recognizes his manifold failures, he rather touchingly believes he may have the talent and drive to become a cabaret singer. What he settles for, even after the gaudy breakdown on camera, is what the film gives him, his 15 minutes of fame. Of course, that too was a poisoned gift. He hoped the film would launch his career; it didn't. (Compare what Grey Gardens did for Little Edie Beale.) He became homeless later and felt abandoned by the same people who celebrated the film. "It made me famous and what did I get for it?" Portrait of Jason did nothing for Jason Halliday. On a macro level, it was a landmark of documentary filmmaking. As for gay Black culture -- an out version of which was all but invisible (and had been for decades) -- Jason Halliday had his snap queen moments, and they are part of the record. "I've been through it all, baby ... and I've still got my pearls on!" Is this Black resilience? Is this gay resilience? Is this intersectional resilience? O snap! --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in At 54, I Hit My First Film Festival Entry Out of the Ballpark SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

My "daughter" and me perched on the edge of the abyss AKA Table Mountain, Cape Town In 2004, I rejoined the Peace Corps for a 10-month assignment in Namibia. When I arrived in the country and met the Namibian woman who administered the teachers' program, she advised me to run, not walk, back into the closet. Homophobia was so deeply entrenched in Namibian society that I couldn’t have done my job had my sexual orientation been disclosed. I had been an out man in the States for over 25 years. At the age of 54, it would have been extremely odd to present myself as single to my Namibian colleagues, so I converted my sister, a lawyer back in Berkeley, to my wife and her daughter, recently graduated from college, to my daughter. I had family album pictures at the ready and a plausible explanation as to why I had come to Namibia by myself. My lawyer “wife” was the breadwinner in the family, and she couldn’t forsake her practice. While establishing a state-of-the-art computer lab in a high school that served one of the poorest (i.e. Black) townships of the capital, Windhoek, I gained a modest renown as the only white man who lived and worked in these non-white areas. White South Africans would occasionally show up at the school for social or developmental initiatives. (Namibia had been a de facto colony of South Africa for 75 years, from 1915 to 1990.) Relations with these fellow whites were easily established but always fleeting. In one case, however, a South African educational consultant spent quite a few days at the high school towards the end of its academic year, and we became quite friendly. Piet, of Afrikaaner descent, was attractive, funny, liberal (for a white South African), and we were both family men! In his early thirties, he had recently married and hoped to start his own family in Sandton, a white suburb of Johannesburg. He already seemed to dote on my “daughter” simply through pictures. My niece, Maya, shared my last name, so that was one less discrepancy to explain away. When I told Piet that Maya and I would be flying out of Johannesburg after a month of touring his country, he delightedly insisted that we contact him when we got to town. And so we did. Piet and his wife, Magda, asked us to meet them at an Italian restaurant in Montecasino, a huge entertainment complex designed to replicate an ancient Tuscan village. We sat on the “outdoor” restaurant terrace overlooking a busy square. The “outdoor” terrace was actually indoors. The whole village was enclosed under an ersatz sky painted on the ceiling, light on one side sliding to darkness on the other. The weather outside was hot and humid, but in our Tuscan village, it was temperate and pleasant. Always temperate and pleasant -- and pretty much all White. Maya had already been playing the role of my daughter ever since we’d met up three weeks earlier in Cape Town. Explaining our real relationship (daughter of two lesbian moms and niece to a “guncle”) was too much and unnecessary information. Anyway, we had plenty of shared family history, and it was easy to bring off. As we were looking at the menu, I teased Maya that I was going to order a double portion of shrimp scampi for the both of us. (She hates shellfish.) “Stop, Unkie!” she protested good-naturedly – a gaffe, but our Afrikaaner hosts didn’t notice. Although Piet had seen some of the world, Magda, much younger, was clearly excited by this unusual outing. She’d never eaten Italian food, and when she asked the waiter what polenta was, he replied, “It’s like fufu.” This was the perfect response given the cultural context. We were charming and Piet was charmed. “My wife and I are hoping for a boy for our first child,” he told me at the end of our meal, “but if I had a daughter like yours, that wouldn’t be so bad.” “Not so bad at all,” I replied with light irony, winking at his wife. She reddened but smiled in complicity. When we parted at the end of our meal, Piet wouldn’t hear of splitting the bill. There was some hesitation on his part as we separated, and I caught a glint of desperation in his eyes but dismissed it as my daughter and I walked further into the gaudy recesses of the main casino. The next morning I woke to Piet’s email: Robert, I can’t tell you how much I was taken with you and your daughter. What a delightful pair, so much evident love between the two of you! I couldn’t say last night what I wanted to say and what you needed to hear. The thought of such wonderful people burning forever kept me up all night. Robert, you must accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior! As someone who cares about you and your daughter, I must speak out. Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."(John 14:6) I never wrote back nor replied to the few follow-up emails. What possibility was there for any true communication, any basis for friendship, no matter how sincere he was? He lived in a totalizing world view that brooked no contradictions. The Dutch Reformed Church is a stern and unbending master. The lies about our actual relationship might be forgiven if properly confessed and atoned for, but my being gay? In PIet’s eyes I was already condemned to the flames of hell. Accepting Jesus wouldn’t change that. Were I to die and find out that the Dutch Reformed Church had the afterlife properly pegged all along, I might feel some guilt having dragged my “daughter” into the fiery pits with me. She didn’t have to collude in my lies, helping ensnare the innocent affections of the Saved. I will plead her brief before the Throne of God, if I am allowed to speak. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. -- Robert Philipson SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Think one of these will save you from the neo-Nazis? In August of 2017, during the first year of The Pestilence when we all thought his election was a horrible fluke brought about by the electoral college, Charlottesville, Virginia hosted the coming out cotillion of newly emboldened alt-right fringe groups which had formerly lurked in the shadows: neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Watching the news coverage, I was shocked and confused by the nighttime rally of fascist-leaning young men bearing tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” With a population of 2.4%, American Jews might be able to replace the 7.5 million inhabitants of Washington State, but then our numbers are depleted. Even though I knew this was all right-wing lunacy, the math didn’t add up on any level. Finally, a MAGA-head explained it to me. It was a protest against the evil cabal of Jews masterminding the massive influx of Black and Brown people to dilute and displace white Americans, the precious core of our country’s greatness. It’s a canard known as the Great Replacement, first argued delusionally but somewhat coherently by the French writer Renaud Camus (no relation but, alas, gay) in his 2011 book of the same name. The gist is that with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations are being demographically and culturally supplanted by catastrophically fertile people of color through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the white birth rate. This conspiracy theory transfers easily to American soil, and when you’re looking for evil perpetrators of tectonic population shifts requiring vast resources and coordination, who ya gonna call? The Jews, of course! The obvious masterminds! This kind of conspiratorial thinking is endemic to right-wing and nativist movements the world over and down through the ages. It’s antisemitism, pure and simple (well, pure … not so simple). There’s a wealthy, genteel antisemitism in America as well – the discreet scorn and exclusionary practices of the WASP upper crust: elite country clubs, real estate covenants, unspoken quotas on how many Jews should be admitted to universities and white shoe law firms. And you certainly don’t want your children bringing them into the family! Trump actually isn't an antisemite as his use of his Modern Orthodox son-in-law illustrates. True to his transactional modus vivendi of “is it good for me?”, Trump doesn’t stand on antisemitic principle (like Richard Nixon, for example), but he will use antisemitic dog whistles to rally his base. However, Trump and the Republicans have discovered a whole new use for the antisemitism that most of them hold in their hearts. It has become a cudgel for whipping “woke” and pro-Palestinian organizations, notably elite universities, into line. As a Jew, watching attack dog Elise Stefanik outmaneuver Ivy League university presidents with crocodile tears shed for Jewish students (and then crowing about how she’d forced two of them to lose their positions) provided a revolting display of shameless hypocrisy! Like other Trump sycophants, she has no moral center. She would definitely be following orders in Birkenau in 1944. We know this. Her "defense" of us is disgusting! And of course, last month, the Trump administration followed suit, canceling $400 million to Columbia University, pausing $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, and placing more than $9 billion in contracts and grants under review at Harvard University – all egregiously antisemitic institutions, don’t you know! And the right-wing war waged against our most prestigious (but “woke”!) universities barrels onwards … in our name. Is it good for the Jews? Hell no! As a community, we should be screaming against this political equivalent of embedding ideological weaponry in civilian populations. But … antisemitism is on the rise. Do we want to make trouble for an administration whose support of Israel in the face of worldwide condemnation is more crucial than ever? It’s a ticklish subject at a ticklish time. We do not speak with one voice (two Jews, three opinions, as the joke goes), and American Jews in general have felt that working behind the scenes and within the system brings less trouble down upon our vulnerable heads. Will the polite behavior of 1944 prove to be any less effective in these times? Can we not trust Jared Kushner and Sheldon Adelson (lay a stone upon his grave!) to cement our solidarity with the ruling class? Surely they wouldn’t turn against us! Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'mei raba! --Dr. Robert Philipson SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Our previous #QueerHarlemRenaissance short, #CongoCabaret , depicted a gay-friendly cabaret described in the 1928 novel, Home to Harlem. I now want to turn my attention to the other important gay prose piece coming out of the Renaissance, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” SL&J was written by a talented young dilettante by the name of #RichardBruceNugent , the most openly gay writer of the Renaissance. His story is the first positive depiction of same-sex desire in American letters. For that reason alone it is remarkable, but it’s also beautifully written. As a rediscovered classic of early gay writing, it has been cited, mentioned and featured in all sorts of ways. Rodney Evans‘ film Brother to Brother. #IsaacJulien #LookingForLangston . #indiefilms #seedandspark When we shot "Congo Cabaret," we interviewed the actors about the project, and they all professed astonishment that there was a queer presence in the Harlem Renaissance. "I didn't know," was the refrain. We have clips from interviews with Karen Obilom (@karenobilom), Darryl Stephens (@darrylstephens), Russell Richardson (@iamrussellr), Julio Marcelino (@juliobyme), Kevin Daniels (@kevindaniels27), and Parisa Fitz-Henley (@parisafitzhenley. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

If asked to identify the most prominent gay member of the Harlem Renaissance, those who are deeply familiar with the subject might respond "Richard Bruce Nugent" based on his sensationally scandalous prose poem, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" published in 1926. Far more prominent -- and visibly effeminate -- was Alain Locke, America's first Black Rhodes Scholar, Howard professor of philosophy, cultural critic and the most prominent of the Black publicists of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke's best-known achievement was collecting the material for and editing The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) which announced the arrival of African Americans onto the literary, cultural and intellectual scene. Not only did he publish early works of major Black writers to emerge from the Renaissance, then largely young and unknown, his own introductory essay, "The New Negro," framed the place of African Americans in the country in innovative ways that immediately entered the discourse. Some of these sprang from Locke's gay sexual orientation as Jeffrey Stewart points out in his magisterial 2018 biography "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke." Locke successfully labeled the burgeoning arts movement a Renaissance -- then known as the Negro Renaissance -- in full knowledge that much of the first renaissance's sensibility was homoerotic, if not overtly gay. To quote Stewart, "Locke also was sexually infatuated with young writers and wanted to make young male bodies the icons of the Negro Renaissance just as they had been idols of the Italian Renaissance." Of course others who adopted the term were not aware of its origin, but the name stuck, although later modified to the "Harlem Renaissance." Due also to the traditional desire of the older gay man for a younger lover, Locke idealized (male) youth and did all he could to promote the careers of such young artists as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, and Richmond Barthé. (He was also a misogynist and at best paid lip service to the distaff side of the Renaissance with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston whose brilliance overrode her gender.) Because of his focus on youth, Locke introduced the idea of generations into the discourse about African Americans. Young people were the "new" in The New Negro, another label that stuck, although not original to Locke. Locke, however, repurposed it in a way that pointed towards new horizons in cultural achievement, giving African Americans their own agency and no longer defined by the stereotypes and strictures of white America. Locke pursued a failed attempted romance with Langston Hughes in America and Europe. Ultimately rejected, he nonetheless came to recognize the validity of Hughes' artistic focus on Black outsiders. He made space for this in "The New Negro," a space soon populated and amplified by young queer writers.  Locke was straight-up gay, never questioning his homosexuality or masquerading as heterosexual. He provided moral support and intellectual justification for homosexuality to young men whom he felt were similarly inclined, particularly Countee Cullen, but he described himself as "paralyzingly discreet." He may have believed he was in the closet and probably was so in the public eye, but his sexual orientation was apparent to his friends and close associates. Although his homosexuality never brought personal happiness, it alienated him sufficiently from the crushingly masculinist writing and ideology of the older generation (particularly W.E.B. DuBois) to seed new possibilities for Black identity. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

By 1925, year one of the "official" Harlem Renaissance (at least as we define it), 22-year-old Countee Cullen was at the peak of his fame. From the time he graduated from New York's DeWitt Clinton High School, during his years at NYU, Cullen won numerous poetry contests, published in national magazines, and built a reputation that culminated in the publication of Color , his first volume of poetry. That same year he entered Harvard for graduate studies. Color was acclaimed by both Black and white America containing, still, some of his best-known and most anthologized poems. Its masterful use of traditional poetic form to express a contemporary Black sensibility, while not unique, resonated with both the literary Old Guard (W.E.B. DuBois) and acolytes of modernism (Wallace Thurman). Given his fame and widespread appeal, Cullen became a star of what was then called the Negro Renaissance, continuing to put out books of poetry (less and less admired as time went on), editing an anthology of Negro poetry ( Caroling Dusk ), writing a regular column for Opportunity magazine, and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to live and study in France. Leaders and promoters of the Renaissance loved Countee Cullen and displayed him as one of the New Negro poster boys. The anointing of Cullen as New Negro royalty seemed to be sealed with his 1928 marriage to the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, Yolanda. The fly in the ointment lay in Cullen's sexual orientation. He was gay and entered into relationships with (white) men, mostly short-lived, throughout his life. He was anguished about being gay as a young man, but Alain Locke mentored him into an intellectual acceptance and even sent some sexual partners his way. Cullen tried to return the favor by introducing Locke to Langston Hughes, but that foray into gay matchmaking went spectacularly awry. There's justifiable speculation that Cullen's attraction to Hughes -- they had become friends early on -- contributed to a mysterious break in their relationship. And, of course, Cullen's sexual orientation insured the rapid failure of his marriage to Yolanda. Try as he might to keep his gay affairs under wraps, other queer writers knew his sexual orientation. Thurman snidely referred to Cullen's wedding as a drag ball. In letters to her father, Yolanda all but said it outright, but W.E.B. affected a willful blindness--a common response to the "open secrets" of many of the prominent players of the Renaissance. (W.E.B. himself was quite promiscuous.) It's hard to know to what extent heterosexual Harlem knew or cared. Cullen was always discreet and in 1940 married a woman with whom he appeared to share conjugal happiness -- all the while carrying on a sustained affair with another white lover, Edward Atkinson. Did Cullen write of homosexuality in his poetry? Not in any overt way. One can certainly apply gay readings to some of his verse, but these are interpretations. When race is the topic, specifically the burden of being Black in America, it is front and center no matter how elevated his rigid prosody and formal language (though fast becoming outdated). Tropes of disappointment in love or sexual longing could be veiled in the misty allusiveness of the 19th-century Romantic poets he emulated. In our estimation, Cullen was a Black poet who happened to be gay. You'd have to dig for a deeper connection. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

On May 23, 1921, Shuffle Along opened in a ramshackle "theater" (more a performance space; there was no orchestra pit) in New York City. It was the first Black musical to play on Broadway in twelve years. In spite of the landmark successes of precursors, most notably Williams and Walker's In Dahomey (1903), syphilis had wiped out the geniuses of that first generation. Much to everyone's surprise, Shuffle Along became a monster hit, running for 504 performances and proving that white people would pay to see Black performers on Broadway . Because of the show’s popularity, the entertainment profession witnessed the return of Black musical comedies on a regular basis. It was, in the opinion of Langston Hughes who saw the production when he came to New York in 1921 to study mining engineering at Columbia University, the opening salvo of what would become the Harlem Renaissance. Part of what fueled the Renaissance, particularly the "Harlemania" that peaked for white slummers around 1927-28, was the success of Black performers on Broadway: now-forgotten stars like Lottie Gee and Florence Mills, who came to fame in Shuffle Along, and the less-forgotten ones like composer Eubie Blake. (Paul Robeson sang briefly in the chorus of an off-Broadway production.) Taking advantage of the opportunities opened up by these trailblazers, Ethel Waters (bisexual) and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson shot to even greater heights during the latter part of the 1920s. Josephine Baker (bisexual) landed a gig in a 1923 road production of the musical. At age 16, she entered into a brief affair with Eubie Blake. Although still rooted in the demeaning theatrical traditions of Blacks performing in blackface, speaking in an artificially grotesque "Negro dialect," and perpetrating minstrel stereotypes, Shuffle Along broke boundaries. It catalyzed the desegregation of theaters below 125th St.; it introduced a chorus line of Black women modeled after the Ziegfield Follies; it brought the snap and syncopation of Black musical styles to Broadway. Most daringly, it showed to Black people falling in love onstage -- a previously taboo subject -- and introduced several hit songs proclaiming the reality of Black romance. One of these, "I'm Just Wild About Harry," entered the Great American Songbook and went on to have a strange and varied career, performed in blackface by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney (Babes in Arms, 1939) and adopted as Harry Truman's election 1948 campaign song. In the latest iteration -- so appropriate for this pop confection in its queer Renaissance origins -- "I'm Just Wild About Harry" is given a same-sex spin by Morgxn in the 2020 gay romcom The Thing About Harry. It's kind of catchy. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX0qh55aSR8 ) SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The steady blows of African Americans being killed with seeming impunity by white cops and racist vigilantes don't let up even during the time of COVID-19. On February 23, Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by two white residents of Georgia while jogging through the streets of their neighborhood. When a video of the murder went viral on May 5, condemnations from numerous religious leaders, politicians, athletes, and other celebrities forced an arrest of the perpetrators. There was outrage, there was hurt, but the streets remained quiet. On March 16, Breonna Taylor was gunned down in her apartment by plainclothes Louisville police pursuing a false lead in the infamous war on drugs. There was little reaction to Breonna’s killing until a Black Lives Matter activist posted about her death on May 15. There was outrage, there was hurt, but the streets remained quiet. On May 25, George Floyd was asphyxiated in broad daylight by a Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee on the black man’s neck while he moaned, “I can’t breathe.” Videos of the eight minutes of horrific inhumanity went viral, and the streets exploded. A population disproportionately ravaged by COVID-19 could take no more. No American remains untouched by this nightmare. There are two clear sides, and Shoga Films is on the side of the protestors. This time the protestors are not just African Americans. But ringing words of solidarity mean nothing. THERE IS ONLY ACTION! Black people do not have to be told this; allies and well-meaning sympathizers of other races must learn this lesson. Sympathy without action is a fraud; tears without action are insulting. There are many actions from marching in the streets; supporting Black Lives Matter; challenging, even as a white person, why there are no people of color sitting on the panel of the job you are interviewing for. Our action, as an organization, is a significant contribution to Black Lives Matter and the National Black Justice Coalition. There will be other actions, but this is our stake now. Those who do not act let the racist current of American history flow and flow and flow. There will be more murders, and no one who hasn’t acted in this time of clear choice can say, “I am not guilty." SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

It's been open season on Black people since this country was founded. During the 19th century, the worst of anti-Black violence was associated with the Southern plantation system, and the tradition of pointing to the South as the site of egregious racism persists to this day. But it's everywhere, and it's no surprise that the latest earthquake of racial unrest originated in what white Americans thought of as the "liberal" city of Minneapolis. The eleven years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, a radical, misguided attempt to insure a modicum of racial equality and restitution -- for the former Confederacy only, of course -- only stoked the thirst of white Southerners for revenge when they were once again ceded control of their states. Between 1882 and 1930, 2,314 Blacks were killed in the South by white lynch mobs. That's a lot of killing, especially when you consider that this was done in ones and twos. But there were larger race riots -- that is whites rampaging against Blacks -- as well: New York City in 1900, Atlanta in 1906. The Springfield, IL riots of 1908, where some 5,000 whites and European immigrants burned, looted, and destroyed, was so shocking to those who associated the city with the burial place of Abraham Lincoln that it led to the founding of the National Association of Advancement of Colored People. But the Red Summer of 1919 witnessed the most widespread and sustained violence against Blacks in the history of our country. From April to November, some 30 riots broke out across the U.S., with hundreds of accounts of beatings, lynchings and the burning of churches and buildings. As a result of the violence, the Ku Klux Klan also saw a resurgence. Many factors contributed to this, but one of the big ones was a pandemic. The country was dealing with a third wave of the previous year's Spanish Influenza. Last year marked the centenary of one of the bloodiest episodes of white America's racial paranoia, but who knows about it? Beyond a few news squibs and local segments for history buffs, nothing was made of it. A century ago, a pandemic-induced rupture of "normalcy" and fear created a wave of racial protest, but back then the current ran against African Americans. And so it seems appropriate that we underline the melancholy passage of anniversaries this summer and ask ourselves how and why this season of violence against Blacks got erased. Some important writers of the later Harlem Renaissance contributed their voices of protest. Claude McKay first tasted fame as a result of the publication of his poetry of Black rage, most notably "If We Must Die." W.E.B. DuBois editor of The Crisis, the house organ of the NAACP, consistently thundered against the injustice, the oppression, the violence. James Weldon Johnson, then a field secretary for the same organization, coined the Red Summer label which needs to be much more widely known than it is. "[I]t was almost an impossibility for me," he wrote, "to realize as a truth that men and women of my race were being mobbed, chased, dragged from street cars, beaten and killed within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol, at the very front door of the White House." SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

On Friday, August 7, Kali O Ray, graphic designer extraordinaire and executive director of the San Francisco Black Film Festival, died shockingly and unexpectedly from a genetically inherited heart condition. He was a gentle, beautiful man in both body and spirit -- very much committed to the Black experience, living it as a baseline of strength and humanity. As a Bay Area filmmaker producing and directing documentaries, more often than not, on the Black queer experience, I was bound to run across Kali, and I did so shortly after he had moved back to the Bay Area from Atlanta in 2010 to shepherd the film festival that his mother, Ave Montegue, had founded. He had seen one of my screeners for a film that was playing across the bay and, at the Oakland International Film Festival, he approached me candidly expressing his ignorance of LGBTQ matters. He wanted to make sure that the SF Black Film Festival put out the welcome mat. I don’t know that he actively solicited my assistance, but from that point on, we were collaborators. It did not matter that I was white and gay; it did not matter that he was Black and straight. We bonded over film, over drinks at the Boom Boom room, over a shared love of jazz and Black history, over a mutual understanding of what constituted quality in art. For an underfunded, understaffed film festival, what Kali and his wife Katera programmed punched well above its weight. It drew young directors from all across the country and even from abroad. The festival hosted the best parties, the best music, the best bar scenes, and I was privileged to be a part of it. Kali made sure there was a representative feature film or block of shorts with LGBTQ material at each festival. He made a space for my own films and shared not only his film festival platform but his considerable talents as a graphic designer. He created posters for these films, refusing payment because we “did” for one another. But he was a personal inspiration as well. It was at Kali’s suggestion that I put together a program introducing a film representation of the Queer Harlem Renaissance that has gone on to a life of its own. For me, it was all exhilarating; for Kali and Katera, untold hours of overwork, exhaustion and putting out fires while the festival was in progress. Yet they did it not only for the love of movies but for the love of their community, Black artists across the world and as an affirmative statement -- “we are here; we will always be here” -- for the San Francisco community under siege. I mourn my Black friend, but if mourning is the price to pay for all the love and growth I experienced at his hands, then I mourn with a secret smile. Rest in peace, my brother. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

From 1919 when this Jamaican-born writer published a powerful set of poems in the left-wing little magazine, The Liberator, ClaudeMcKay became one of the most famous Black writers of the 1920s and 30s. He wrote in several genres but gained his earliest reputation as a poet. The publication of his searing sonnet, "If We Must Die," initiated this fame and the poem itself has gone on to a long, sometimes apocryphal afterlife. It also expressed a sea-change in the relations between African Americans and white Americans. In the face of white rampagers, lynchings and massacres, Black America would fight back. The impetus for the writing of "If We Must Die" was the endless series of race riots, lynchings, and civic unrest triggered by white America's fear of trained African American soldiers returning from World War I and the sharpened economic competition for jobs between returned Blacks and demobilized white soldiers. Though the "troubles" occurred throughout that year, James Weldon Johnson, a field secretary for the NAACP, coined the term for The Red Summer of 1919. Here's McKay's recounting of the poem's genesis from his autobiography. Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. . . . We stayed in our quarters all through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen. It was during those days that the sonnet, "If We Must Die," exploded out of me. Earlier generations of poets had lamented the plight of Blacks in genteel or indirect terms (e.g. Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask"), but McKay's poetry sounded a new note of defiance and an unvarnished depiction of white savagery. Published on the same page as McKay's famous sonnet is a searing "Roman Holiday" that takes no prisoners. Here is the first stanza: 'Tis but a modern Roman holiday Each state invokes its soul of basest passion, Each vies with each to find the ugliest way To torture Negroes in the fiercest fashion. Black Southern men, like hogs await your doom! White wretches hunt and haul you from your huts, They squeeze the babies out your women's womb, They cut your members off, rip out your guts! Small wonder that "If We Must Die" was anointed for fame. Furthermore, the poem's lack of racial specificity allowed it to be quoted by other underdogs in other times. There are apocryphal stories of Churchill reading it on a radio speech during the German Blitz and of it being found on the body of a prisoner after the deadly Attica Prison uprising of 1971. But McKay's militancy didn't stop with the passing of the Red Summer (though, interestingly, he was never so harsh or direct in his later fiction). When Alain Locke published a militant McKay poem in The New Negro (1925), he changed the title from "White House" to "White Houses," hoping to avoid the whiff of radicalism. This act of censorship severed the two men's friendship. " “No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects,” the affronted poet wrote to Locke, “when the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!” SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts