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 community. Drag shows were always part of the gay ecosystem, but, to my mind, they carried the scent of marginality and desperation absorbed during the wilderness years before Stonewall. I couldn’t imagine drag as defiant or empowering or as an act of reclamation. Not that I knew or talked to any drag queens. Effeminate behavior scared the crap out of me; I didn’t want to be associated with it. They’re freaks! That’s not me! Of course, this was internalized homophobia deeply inculcated by my straight upbringing, but I didn’t have the self-awareness to recognize the toxicity of scorning drag queens – something that I could share with my straight counterparts. The solidarity of bigots was itself a bulwark against any accusations of effeminacy that might be leveled against me. I wouldn’t dream of wearing a dress or make-up. My occasional attempts to act campy for the purposes of humor were just as awkward and pathetic as when straight men tried it. I had no sympathy for it and made no attempt to understand drag queens. I remember being asked by one, “Are you a Judy girl or a Barbara girl?” “Neither!” I silently screamed, but I knew what she was talking about. My butch persona was compromised! Of course, there were cracks in the wall of homophobia I had inherited. A beautiful male body could trump everything else. I briefly dated a dedicated gym rat in DC who was magnificently masculine until he opened his mouth or moved his body. We were riding bikes together one day, and I playfully shot him with the compressed air hose we were using to inflate our tires. He screamed like a woman. I met a handsome Latino man whom I bedded pretty quickly, and it was only afterward that I discovered he was one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These were anomalies - or so I thought. Then I learned about the heroic work the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had done during the worst days of the AIDS plague. Though I still rarely frequented drag venues or made any friends who were drag performers, I began to appreciate the rapier agility of a snap queen’s comeback. ("I'd slap you, but that would be animal abuse.") And then I discovered how deeply pleasurable it was to say, “Guurrlll, you didn’t!” As I settled into my gay identity, one of my liberating discoveries was: “I’m a faggot! I don’t have to worry about my masculinity.” Mediating influences also bore in on me from early classics of the stage and screen. Craig Russel, star of the Canadian independent film Outrageous (1977), astonished me with his mimicry of Judy, Barbara and multiple other divas. Like the rest of America, I fell in love with Anna Madrigal in the 1993 mini-series, Tales of the City. The following year brought The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and its humanization of drag queens and trans women. My God, even hunky super-masculine Wesley Snipes turned in a credible drag performance in To Wong Fu … (1995)! The Broadway musical, the gayest of all genres, made outsized contributions towards acceptance with La Cage aux Folles in 1983. La Cage introduced America to a screaming queen who was part of a strong and loving gay relationship. If his butch partner and straight son could accept him as worthy of love, why couldn’t we? Of course, Albin’s effeminacy was mocked and used for the purposes of humor, but he was ultimately a sympathetic character, not one who was doomed to a loveless old age or conveniently killed to satisfy some Hayes code nonsense. Albin’s gay anthem, sung in full drag, became our gay anthem – butch, femme, fluid. It didn’t matter. In the dark days of 2008 following the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which reversed legal same-sex marriages in that state for the next five years, I found myself in a crowd of angry queers led by the MC -- in drag -- to sing: I am what I am And what I am needs no excuses I deal my own deck Sometimes the ace sometimes the deuces It's my life that I want to have a little pride in My life and it's not a place I have to hide in Life's not worth a damn til you can shout out I am what I am And, yes, I teared up! I was a fag, and I could cry without shame. In short, I got over it. To be clear, I didn’t start wearing eyeliner or seek out the company of drag queens (my loss), but I had finally dug out the piece of internalized homophobia that hadn’t allowed me to recognize our commonality. If they were hated publicly, I was hated too. “A fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” as Truman Capote famously observed. When the San Francisco Frontrunners announced their annual Little Black Dress run a (coyly vague) number of years ago, I jumped at the chance to rummage through the local Goodwill. And, wouldn’t you know?, I found the perfect confection – minus the string of pearls that I couldn’t risk losing during the run. (And the shoes! O Mary!) But it was my seal into the sisterhood. How could I resist the allure of drag when I looked so fetching in my little black dress?

Langston Hughes published "Fire" in his first collection of poetry The Weary Blues . Here is the poem in its entirety. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I ain't been good, I ain't been clean — I been stinkin', low-down, mean. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! Tell me, brother, Do you believe If you wanta go to heaben Got to moan an' grieve? Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I been stealin', Been tellin' lies, Had more women Than Pharaoh had wives. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I means Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! The speaker echoes the traditional Christian understanding that sinners will go to hell and burn forever. With radical honesty the man acknowledges his evil nature and that fire is his inevitable fate. But he asks a question, "Tell me brother, do you believe, if you wanna go to heaven (you) got to moan and grieve?" The implication is that perhaps the life of constricted virtue leading upwards is not worth the price of foregoing pleasure and sin. In any event, the man has made his choice and accepts his place in the Christian afterlife. When Hall Johnson sets this text to music, he erases all doubt or ambivalence. He repeats the initial stanza again and again and replaces the glimmer of pleasure in the original poem ("Had more women/Than Pharaoh had wives.") with further confirmation of eternal damnation: "Tell me, brother, can't you see/Dem fiery flames wrapped all 'round me." The final extended high note on which the song ends can easily be sung as a wail of despair. Nugent introduces "Fi-Yer" realistically towards the end of "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" when his autobiographical protagonist, Alex, attends a classical performance in a church with Beauty. "Fy-ah Lawd had been a success . . . Langston bowed . . . Langston had written the words . . . Hall bowed . . . Hall had written the music." But the obsessively repeated lyric, "fire's gonna bu'n ma soul," becomes a leitmotif that sounds throughout the scenes leading to the openly gay embrace. The fire of damnation has become the fire of passion. Rusty Watson 's powerful delivery nicely plays on this admixture of exaltation and despair. Hall's so-called modern spiritual can easily be flattened to a fatalistic acceptance of damnation. Nugent places it in positive context, transforming (perhaps) the Christian trope of fiery damnation into the ecstacy of physical passion. Rusty frees "Fi-Yer" from its art song origins and injects his mastery of gospel into his interpretation. His final soaring "s-o-o-o-u-u-l," the note that pushes Alex into a spontaneous manifestation of his love for Beauty, is overwhelming -- yet ultimately ambiguous.

Through the offices of the white scholar and collector of Harlem Renaissance texts Thomas Wirth, Fire!! was published as a textual facsimile in 1982. One year later, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” had its first anthologization in a gay collection, Black Men/White Men , put out by Black and White Men Together and edited by the group’s white founder, Michael Smith. This was embarrassing. Apparently “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” gained its earliest recognition from white men who were sexually attracted to Black men. It had to be discovered by other communities before it could make its way into the world. In 1986 Black queer editor Joseph Beam promoted Nugent as a literary forefather by publishing a then-contemporary interview in his groundbreaking anthology of Black queer writing, In the Life . It wasn’t surprising that the Black queer community was an early champion. Black activist and writer Colin Robinson discussed it in his inaugural edition of the first serial devoted to Black queer subjects, Other Countries (1987). It continued circulating in Black queer circles and received a significant boost in queer cred when, in 1989, the Black British artist Isaac Julien appropriated some its prose for the narration of the early queer art film Looking for Langston .  In the 90s, the burgeoning field of gay and lesbian studies swept “Smoke, Liles and Jade” into its fold, beginning with a reprint of the story in a 1991 issue of The James White Review . This early republication was followed up much later by the story’s canonization in T he Columbia Anthology and Gay and Lesbian Literature (1998) and The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures (2000).  The 90s also saw the resurrection of The Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement. The Harlem Renaissance Reader (1994) by historian David Leavering Lewis and Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1995) by professor Nathan Huggins, both of whom had written definitive books about the Harlem Renaissance, were published one year apart. Inclusion of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” was now de rigeur .  As the Black queer community gained in definition and visibility, essay collections ( The Greatest Taboo - 2001) and more far reaching literary anthologies ( Black Like Us - 2002; Ebony Rising - 2004 ) hit the bookstores. 2002 proved to be a banner year for Nugent’s creation. New York’s Public Theater commissioned Black queer playwright Carl Rux to write a play, Smoke, Lilies and Jade , using Nugent’s prose and characters in a revisioning of the piece. Most notably, Thomas Wirth, now Nugent’s literary executor, published the artist’s collection of writing and visual art under the title Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance . Nugent’s slender oeuvre was now available for perusal and analysis. But the movies, as usual, brought about the greatest awareness of the man and his story. In 2004 Black queer filmmaker Rodney Evans finally finished his feature-length narrative, eight years in the making, and put it on the film festival circuit. Brother to Brothe r proved to be an indie film barn burner.  It won best feature awards at numerous LGBT film festivals and received a Special Jury award at Sundance. By stretching the definition of “documentary” to the breaking point, the PBS series Independent Lens broadcast it to a nationwide audience.  Yet the documentary categorization was not out of line. Evans was painstaking in his research and accurately portrayed the stories and characters of the queer Harlem Renaissance, practically unknown at the time of the film’s release. Nugent is positioned as the connecting link between the Harlem Renaissance and post-Stonewall generation of Black queers, and part of what captivates and validates the young protagonist struggling with the familiar catastrophes of familial rejection, homophobia, and fetishization by white sex partners, is his discovery of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” The cat was out of the bag. In 2006 queer Black dancer Zane Booker founded the Smoke, Lilies and Jade Arts Initiative as a multimedia theater dance company in Philadelphia. The story was cited and analyzed in numerous academic books and articles, assigned for reading in countless university courses, lauded, adapted, idolized, transmuted into a cultural touchstone. No Black queer artist or intellectual could be raised in ignorance of its existence, whether they had actually read it or not. And yet . . . I would venture that the majority of the non-Black LGBT population does not know that the FIRST positive description of same-sex desire in American letters came out of the Harlem Renaissance. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of literature students, when asked that very question, couldn’t come up with the answer. If true, the reason doesn’t require much of an imaginative stretch. The Harlem Renaissance is Black; historical LGBT writing is white. “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” screws up the binary. Richard Bruce Nugent would have laughed at that. “You did what you wanted to do. Nobody was in the closet. There was no closet.”

Ask even a well-educated reader of Harlem Renaissance literature who was the most prolific novelist of the time, and you’ll probably get a wrong answer. Furthermore, this same person published many personal essays, had a essay in The New Negro, and acted as a mentor to several younger writers of the Renaissance. And she’s pretty much unknown. Why? The answer is in the pronoun.  In the masculinist histories of the Harlem Renaissance, Jessie Fauset is consistently belittled, ignored, or relegated as subordinate to W.E.B Du Bois because she worked as a literary editor of The Crisis from 1919 to 1926. This is deeply unfair. Though she helped to usher in a crucial period of artistic flourishing, and was herself a vital participant in that flourishing, she was not destined to get much credit for it. Fauset wrote and published four novels during the Harlem Renaissance. None of them got much love, although notice was taken of her first, There Is Confusion (1924), mostly because so few novels written by African Americans had been published up to that time. Presumably to mark that achievement, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the editor of Opportunity , a journal published by the National Urban League and, under Johnson, one of the leading outlets for young black writers, set about to organize a dinner in Fauset’s honor. What he really wanted to do was bring together white editors and publishers as well as black intellectuals and literary critics to kickstart a Negro literary movement that would raise the profiles of such promising but still untested writers as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and promote the fame of Jean Toomer ( Cane ) and Claude McKay ( Harlem Shadows ) who had published earlier in the decade. Nobody was enthusiastic about There Is Confusion , and in truth it was a bad novel. (I gave up trying to read it after the first 60 pages.) The publication of Fauset’s novel provided the occasion to celebrate books by Negro writers but could not be positioned as exemplary. Johnson asked Alain Locke to be the Master of Ceremonies for what became known as the Civic Club Dinner, and the former philosophy professor and future editor of The New Negro smoothly steered the dinner’s course around its putative guest of honor and her unfortunate book.  Fauset was deeply hurt and angry. Years later, in 1933, she wrote a scathing letter to Locke declaring that he, with “consummate cleverness,” had managed, on that evening in 1924, to “keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was mean.” For the would-be midwives of what was first known as “the Negro Renaissance, the Civic Club Dinner was a brilliant success. Out of it came the idea for The New Negro anthology, and a host of African American writers eventually got published through this skillfully planned introduction to the white world of publishing, criticism, and interracial schmoozing. It set the table for the banquet of the Harlem Renaissance. Although Fauset went on to publish three more novels, the second of which, Plum Bun (1928) is purported to be pretty good, she is little read today, in spite of the rising profile of the Harlem Renaissance, and even less discussed. As a writer of fiction, Fauset had several strikes against her. She had little talent for telling a good story. Because she was half a generation older than the younger writers of the Renaissance, she was hamstrung by the Victorian writing that she had imbibed as a daughter of the light-skinned Philadelphia African American elite. And finally, she produced “women’s writing,” centered around love and courtship and marriage. No wonder she was destined for noblivion. Still, the role she played in the lead up to and early years of the Harlem Renaissance deserves more recognition than she gets. In his essential history, When Harlem Was in Vogue , David Levering Lewis wrote of Fauset, “There is no telling what she would have done had she been a man, given her first-rate mind and formidable efficiency at any task.” The distaff writers of the Harlem Renaissance were slighted then and continue to be slighted now. As a woman you have to be a really good writer – and suffer decades of neglect – to come out of the Renaissance with any reputation. Who can you name besides Nella Larson and the transcendent Zora Neale Hurston?

- A Slick South African Lesbian Romance Frameline 39 ended last week. The 10-day granddaddy of LGBT film festivals, always brings a rich array of queer-themed films and shorts from around the world. Africa is usually present with a handful of offerings – nothing on the order of what comes out of Europe and Latin America – but what comes is always interesting and usually, for Western audiences, educational. And Westerners might not be aware that the Republic of South Africa is a fully modern state, on the order of any country in the so-called developed world. Its film and TV industry is as technically competent and sophisticated as any of its Western counterparts. One need no further proof of that than the new South African independent film, While You Weren’t Looking, directed by Catharine Stewart. The film was financed, in part, by Out in Africa, the South African Gay & Lesbian film festival. As the festival proclaims on its website: South Africa led the world with its all embracing Constitution, granting homosexuals unprecedented freedoms and rights. This feature . . . takes a look at South Africa through the lives and experiences of a cross section of Cape Town queers. The film focuses on two sets of lesbian relationships. Dez and Terri, a mixed-race couple married 20 years and adoptive parents, they are the trailblazing lesbians of the New South Africa. But, have these freedoms guaranteed them happiness? Asanda, their 18 year old adopted daughter, is the poster child for South Africa’s diversity but describes herself as “an experiment”, being made up as she goes along. She meets Shado, an enigmatic Tommy Boy [butch lesbian] from Khayalitsha, a township on the edge of Cape Town, and a different picture of the New South Africa emerges. While You Weren’t Looking is nothing if not sophisticated. The cinematography is striking, oftentimes beautiful and self-consciously artful. Dez and Terri’s house is a gorgeous aerie of pool and balcony and exquisite furniture. The acting is uniformly excellent; the dialogue more than serviceable. It is thoroughly enjoyable to watch. And, being South African, there’s no lack of political discourse or overt examination of class difference. Interestingly, although Dez and Terri are a mixed-race couple, theirs seems to be a perfectly post-racial relationship, both rich and privileged and leading fabulous lives. But Dez is cheating on Terri, and much of the narrative’s drama hinges on that common bomb in domestic relationships. Asanda is so smitten with the lower-class Shado that she travels to the township to spend a candlelit sex-filled night with her. By didactic coincidence, neighborhood tsotsis break into the house the following morning searching for stolen drugs and Asanda is mugged and nearly raped. This sends her scurrying back to her pool and balcony. I am struck by the split between the personal and the political in this movie. Although the political is present, it is present through overt lecturing about queer freedom or references to South Africa’s gay and lesbian history. Some of the couple’s party guests wonder if their revolutionary impulse hasn’t been coopted by constitutional fiat. And there is a (white) professor of Asanda’s who shows shocking pictures of sexual behaviour (a dyke with a large strap-on) and opines that queering all binaries leads toward ultimate freedom. Yet the center of the film is the emotions and interrelationships of its principals – rather than its principles. Of course the romance of Asanda and Shado will founder upon the rocks of class difference, but the script opts for a spectacular, violence-filled break rather than life’s usually slow and unspectacular realization that this just can’t work. And the trajectory followed Terri and Dez is familiar to all who love Lifetime movies: a chance discovery leading to suspicion; suspicion confirmed; crisis (this one involving, to me, obscure symbolism about throwing dresses into the swimming pool); resolution. “Don’t leave me, Dez.” While You Weren’t Looking is, at heart, a romance. There’s nothing wrong with this. Not everything that comes out of Africa has to be focused on race, political dictatorship, the disaster of war, disease, and poverty. It’s good that the continent can produce lighter fare, even in the contested area of sexuality. While You Weren’t Looking inhabits the same class as the power lesbians of Capetown, one in which the personal can take precedence over the political. But homophobia, even though constitutionally condemned, is alive and lethal in the townships and tribal areas of the country. As a Tommy Boy, Shado’s life in the township is dangerous and defined by her class; the film is clear about that.

I can do no better contextualizing the social origins for this accomplished documentary than quoting its first-time director, Jamal Sims. “[I]n1971, Ms. Shirley Middleton, a Jackson State University majorette, put down her baton and started thrusting her hips on the football field and started dancing to popular music. That style became what is now known as bucking. All of the HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges) majorette teams adopted this style and over the years made it more edgy and hip. The young men of the LGBTQ+ community in the South who went to the schools wanted to do the dance, but knew they couldn’t because of social stereotypes. They took it to the underground gay clubs, created teams, and created a community around this particular style of dance.” When the Beat Drops is primarily a group portrait of the bucking team, Phi Phi, created by the dance craze founder, Anthony. Immediately we are struck by how atypical Anthony is as a dance fag. He’s HUGE, well over 250 pounds. He not only pioneered the Black gay male style of bucking but drew like-minded men to him who also responded deeply to this athletic, socially stigmatized (for men) style of dance. Not only is Anthony large, he’s masculine, obviously very kind, and unapologetic about being gay. I suspect that Southern culture produces a kind of post-Stonewall identity that is more relaxed than its urban counterparts in other parts of the country. Unlike the ball culture of New York first profiled in Paris Is Burning, these J-Setters (a term also originating at Jackson State) are not necessarily transgendered, not homeless, not scrabbling on the streets to get by, not even effeminate, though some are. Lynell, one of the dancers profiled, is a college graduate who teaches high school band and has founded an organization to advance music and fine arts programs in high school.  Napoleon, another high school music teacher, also runs a non-profit to promote music education. These men have fears that if they were outed as J-Setters (which, of course, the doc makes inevitable), they might lose their jobs or the respect of their peers. Look at the picture at the top of this post. The mix of athleticism and the “feminine” uniforms is both disorienting and exhilarating. I was struck by the parallels and differences between bucking and MTF cross-dressing. Both are stigmatized by straight society and many of their fellow gays because of the embrace of femininity or certain aspects of it. But a man in is more constrained by her “role” than are the J-Setters. (In that regard, the community profiled in Paris Is Burning is far more homogeneous). However the courage they have in following their passion is the same. And as with all stigmatized communities, a sense of family and fellowship ensues. One of the loveliest scenes of the documentary chronicles a party at Anthony’s where members of Phi Phi banter and interact. Sims, a successful dancer and choreographer, wisely focuses on the dance aspect of this subculture, giving the bucking sequences, particularly in the climactic battle for national supremacy, enough time to delight and astonish. The unpleasant realities of Black life in America occasionally intrude – Anthony is shot in an attempted auto theft mugging; Flash’s aggro lesbian mother battles a crack addiction – but Sims doesn’t descend too deeply down these rabbit holes.  As a first-time documentarian, Sims has produced something that is polished, entertaining, educational, and witness to the diversity within the Black gay spectrum. They’re not all snap queens, tragic victims, or closeted players. As a group portrait, When The Beat Drops is supremely successful. Going against current documentary dogma, Sims doesn’t choose his characters and make sure they each follow an arc. And yet, he has fashioned a 90-minute portrait that sustains our interest and demands our admiration. As dancer/athletes these men are astonishing!

- 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 forgotten. DeSilva, who famously returned to school at age 50 to study art history at Columbia University, recalled an afternoon visit to one of New York’s museums. Strolling through the galleries, he came upon a post-modern work that utterly confounded his sensibilities. Observing DeSilva’s look of perplexity and disdain, another patron – a significantly older man – approached and posed a single question: “Yes, but how does it make you feel?!” If I remember correctly, this incident happened before DeSilva had any thought of taking up formal graduate studies. The future benefactor of the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego, said that this moment immediately and forever changed his perspective on art, and his story has forever changed mine as well Still, as I prepared recently to revisit writer-director Marlon Riggs’ groundbreaking 1989 film Tongues Untied for the first time in 15 or more years, I found myself wondering what I would think of the film and not so much how I would feel about it. Could the concerns conveyed by the film now seem closer to pre-Stonewall perspectives than to perspectives that drive today’s queer discourse? It is one thing to look on the viewpoints of another age in a traditional documentary and judge them as artifacts of history. It is another matter to consider them in a film such as Tongues Untied, which is part documentary, part poetry, part performance art. Insofar as Riggs wanted his film to be a work not only of its time but also expressly for its time, would the film’s particular voice be one that could reach viewers from subsequent generations or would that voice seem dated? I prepared myself for disappointment, and I feared that my worry was appropriately placed when I re-encountered the performance-poetry device upon Riggs heavily relies and that seemed to be a staple of African-American stage work in the 1960s and beyond. I need not have feared. Jim DeSilva had shown me the way forward. Indeed, perhaps even the performance-poetry device has been more a distraction of the head than of the heart. Riggs (“Silence is my shield….”) wanted his film literally to free silenced tongues, so that they might speak of all-but-unspeakable wounds and speak to the fundamental strength and belonging of a people, so that in speaking these tongues might help all of us to heal. It is precisely on these terms that Tongues Untied succeeds. And, yes Riggs absolutely did seek to succeed for all people, understanding that no one person can be truly healed unless all are healed, that no one community can be truly healed unless all communities are healed. As I re-watched and remembered Tongues Untied, I swiftly transitioned from the head game of critical scrutiny to the felt conviction that the film succeeds admirably. In one hour, Riggs presents what for many gay African-American men, for many African Americans period, for many LGBTQ people period were among the defining hallmarks of a decade, from snapping and voguing to increased recognition of the prevalence and insidious, horrific impact of bullying, gay bashing, religious hypocrisy, internalized homophobia and racism, LGBTQ invisibility in African-American communities, and African-American invisibility in queer communities. And he presents all with a hip-hop cadence that was not then typical of films reaching large audiences, though it was commonplace in recorded music. Riggs shows gay African-American men living their reality, and here is the key: He does so never as an observer but always as both subject and object of the film. While gay African-American men supply the voices and the faces of the complex panoply that is Tongues Untied, what these men--and Riggs--experienced was emblematic of what countless others endured then and endure today. We may comprehend this universality more readily now than we could in 1989. There were surprises, too. It is 1989, and yet for the first three quarters of the film there are only oblique passing references to HIV. Then, after 45 minutes, deliciously provocative themes of lovemaking and eroticism that have been interspersed throughout the film explode into one of the most memorable of poet-activist Essex Hemphill’s many memorable lines: “Now we think as we fuck.” (Hemphill’s commentary, that of author-activist Joseph Beam, and Riggs’ own prose-poetry are consistently trenchant.) On this viewing, and from nearly the outset of the film, I found myself wondering how many of the men depicted in Tongues Untied are alive today. In 1989, to what extent did I consciously ponder how many of the men would survive another five, ten, or now 25 years? Riggs is reported to have learned of his own HIV+ status during the making of the film: “I discovered a time bomb ticking in my blood.” He would die of HIV-related causes in 1994 at age 37, and one cannot help imagining how Riggs’ HIV diagnosis may have changed the course of the film. Another surprise: the stunning physical beauty of the men. Many of the men embody non-traditional, non-conventional standards of beauty; yet the beauty is so utterly evident that I found it mind-blowing. Marlon speaks to it: “I was blind to my brothers’ beauty and now I see my own.” My feelings upon revisiting Tongues Untied were numerous. To be sure, I felt anger and sadness about how little has changed. I know that this film depicts the reality, virtually unchanged, of too many lives today. I also felt an ongoing multi-layered grief with respect to HIV’s impact. I also felt gratitude because of course there has been movement in our communities. Despite the layers of sorrow, I felt joy and exhilaration watching the film more than anything else. I felt these things because Marlon Riggs captured a world and time that might otherwise might be lost. Tongues Untied is a documentary in the most literal sense, and an important one. In commentary that is included on the Tongues Untied DVD edition that I watched, Black AIDS Institute founder Phill Wilson reminds us that in the film Marlon Riggs exposed himself when few others did. He took this step with the conviction that people cannot love whom they do not know. So let black gay men be known – let the world know us. The film continues to move and inform because Marlon, willing to let himself be seen, proceeded to create his film from a place within himself of the purest motives and intentions. Who can say what legacy Marlon Riggs might have created had he lived another 20 or 50 years? Yet Riggs is a man who in this film and in a tragically short career did reveal himself to a rare degree. Because he did this and enlisted others to do the same before the camera, more of us now know, can love, and often do love African-American men and women, gay men and women, transgender brothers and sisters, and in general more people of more creeds and colors. This fuller capacity to love graces and enriches us all.

Start with a classic teen triangle. Tunde's bestie from childhood, the supersexed Marley, is sleeping with the Nordic-blond-god jock Soren. Shocker! Tunde is also sleeping with Soren on the down-low. So many melodramatic possibilities here! Tunde must tell Marley her boyfriend is gay. Marley must confront Soren. Tunde must pressure Soren to come out. Let's raise the stakes by making Soren's father a right-wing talk show host. What if we make Tunde Black! That raises even more possibilities for melodrama. If we make Tunde the only son of Nigerian immigrants, then it's obvious that the homophobic attitudes of the homeland will provide more conflict. No . . . we won't go there. Tunde's father is an extremely successful visual artist, cultured and cosmopolitan enough to accept (with some difficulty, let us admit) his son's coming out speech. "Marley said it would behoove me to . . ." (When's the last time you heard "behoove" in teen soap dialogue?) OK, so we turn away from the easy target of African disapproval and access a brief wash of Significance when Tunde's father explains that the home culture regards death as a transition from one sphere of existence to another. What about being black at school? Well this is a prep school, and everybody's rich. Though Tunde is apparently only one of two black students enrolled (the other is a young woman who shows up later on TV news as another police fatality), the endemic racism of American society is mollified to a certain degree by upper-class chumminess. (Soren isn't even a football jock. He plays lacrosse!) Soren's fellow jocks call Tunde "Wesley" (as in Wesley Snipes) and make the occasional reference to Blade. That's not much of a micro-aggression, but they don't know he's gay. So rich white privilege isn't skewered very much, but it does provide plenty of lifestyles-of-the-rich viewing porn, not to mention the visual pleasure of watching the sex scene between the Nordic god and the very black Tunde. The house that Tunde lives in is stunning, and the cars he drives are black and fast and expensive. Ah but here's where the rubber meets the road. Being black in America? Bad news, often fatal when the cops get involved. And they do get involved with Tunde time and time again. That's the daring conceit of The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, which I just viewed as Frameline's centerpiece film. Tunde wakes up to the narrator's VO informing us that he was born in 2002 and that on May 28, 2020, he "departed this life." During the course of the day (usually at night), Tunde is gunned down by white cops. But then he wakes up panicked on the same day and lives through the same teen triangle referenced above -- with variations. Sometimes he tells Marley about his affair, sometimes not. Usually Soren remains in the closet but in one variation, he presents Soren to his smiling parents as his boyfriend of six months. Hovering over the teen soap is the dread that Tunde will once again by murdered by racist cops. Each time it happens differently, and each time it is a shock. The movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September of 2019, before Covid, before the mass demonstrations sparked by the George Floyd killing of May 25, 2020. (The proximity of the historical and "fictional" dates is eerie.) Since white cops killing Black youth is a thematic evergreen, that element of the movie is unfortunately always timely, but seeing Tunde choked to death in a long, agonizing medium shot hit w-a-a-y too close to home. This is the fatal flaw of the movie. The teen soap constituting its plot -- especially in its privileged setting -- is so trivial when set against the visceral horror of getting murdered by white cops over and over again. It's Groundhog Day with a Black Lives Matter overlay, but in this version what springs Tunde from this recurring nightmare is his realization that his Nordic god of a boyfriend has feet of clay. Is he a racist? Probably, but that's not the point. He's a coward who won't come out to his father! There are many other gestures towards Deeper Significance. Our teen players share a film class together during which Tunde quotes film critic Arlene Croce on The 400 Blows: “You are no longer looking at the film – the film is looking at you" -- this in front of the famous final shot of Antoine Doinel on the ocean's edge. And guess what? The opening shot of Tunde Johnson is a similarly framed close-up of the Nordic god on the beach. Our cinematic adolescent angst credentials have been established. But Tunde is particularly angst-ridden. He pops Xanax (a plot point that goes nowhere) and apparently tries to drown himself in the ocean--saved, however, by the Nordic god. "I'm Black and gay," Tunde tells his therapist (more white privilege), "and even those two hate each other." Now, even though that blares THESIS STATEMENT, it's an interesting line. Unfortunately, like the monologue that follows wherein he claims that only Soren sees who he really is, the ramifications get lost in the narrative and conceptual mess that passes for a hip, cutting-edge script. The film has its virtues. Georgeous cinematography, check. Excellent acting by its lead, Steven Silber, check. Inoffensive Hollywood soundtrack goosed by hiphop sampling, check. Is it lipstick on a pig? That's too harsh. And it depends on which movie you're talking about. If it's the one about how the systemic racism of American policing triggers the murder of Black citizens, The Hate U Give (2018) is far superior. If it's the one about the difficulty of being Black and queer in a white world, the competition isn't so stiff. (There are many films with Black queer characters where race doesn't seem that central to their identities.) And the film comes by its sophomorism honestly. The writer, Stanley Kalu, was literally a sophomore at USC when he wrote the script that was chosen as the Grand Prize winner of the Million Dollar Movie Competition. One can take issue with its failure to balance its thematic elements or its all-too-visible striving for depth, but I couldn't have produced anything comparable (and perhaps still not) at 19. It's an honorable entrant in the Black queer movie sweepstakes. And it clearly answers the question so beloved of those who don't inhabit intersectional identities: Is it harder to be queer or to be Black? Being queer can break your heart, but being Black can take your life.

The Green Book, a narrative feature about a lovable, casually racist Italian American lug driving the effete, supremely talented, hyper-articulate Black musician Don Shirley (“inspired by a true friendship”) on a musical tour of the unreconstructed South in 1962 hits all of the necessary marks for interracial feel-good Hollywood schlock. It is told from the point of view of the White Savior, Tony Lip, who teaches the aristocratic Dr. Shirley (three doctorates – count’ em, 3!) about relating to “his people” through listening to Little Richard and eating fried chicken with his hands. The white character’s understanding of racism and his humanity is enlarged through his interaction with the unjustly treated Black man, witnessing the cleaned-up-for-Hollywood racism of the South from the vengeful brutality of white cops to the genteel hypocrisy of the upper class. There’s also a lot of humor in the Odd Couple racial role reversal, and I laughed out loud more than once.  The leads, Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali, are a pleasure to watch, and, of course, the film is art directed (those robin egg blue Cadillacs!) to within an inch of its life. Oscar bait for sure. Other critics have taken the movie to task for its moral shallowness, so I needn’t repeat their insights. (One of the best is from Brooke Obie in Shadow and Act: https://shadowandact.com/green-book-film-review-white-savior ). What I want to focus on is an element so lightly adumbrated that most critics don’t even mention it, Dr. Shirley’s homosexuality. Of course we know that Dr. Shirley is a pouf the minute he enters his sanctuary atop Carnegie Hall (where else would a classically trained musician live?) to meet his future protector and driver. His apartment is filled with exquisitely curated art and tchotkes from his world travels; he’s dressed in the robes of an African prince; he sits on a throne-like chair atop a dais.  He either is an African prince or another overly precious homosexual. Hollywood doesn’t leave much to the imagination, and the popular conflation of “effete” with homosexuality is blared through trumpets – well, actually through a penchant for Chopin rather than Little Richard (another pouf!). Fortunately Ali is such a fine actor that he adds the welcome color (pun intended) of rigid dignity, perpetually wounded pride, and sorrowful isolation to the tired trope of  The Tragic Black Man Too Good For His Environment.  What The Green Book – named after The Negro Motorist Green Book detailing restaurants and hotels where Black travelers could find rest and refreshment in some security – focuses on are the multiple slings and arrows Dr. Shirley must endure as a Black man. (The Damron Men’s Travel Guide didn’t begin publishing until 1964; that would have been a different movie.) The only direct depiction of his homosexuality is – of course (after all, the script was written by straight white men) – his shamed cowering in a Southern jail cell with a white playmate, both of whom were busted at the YMCA. In their helplessness (and seated together on the floor no less!), they make a pathetic interracial pair. But then homosexuals were pathetic, at least in 1962. Although Dr. Shirley is clearly a superior being, we get no sense that some of the inner sadness radiating from his stick-up-his-ass affect might stem from his being a homosexual in a world that, back then, stigmatized homosexuals even more than Black people.  After saving Dr. Shirley, yet again, from his arrest for indecent behavior, Tony Lip explains, with some embarrassment, that as a bouncer at the Copacabana Club he’s Seen It All. No judgments here! And barely any acknowledgement that life as a Tragic Black Man might be somewhat harder as a Tragic Homosexual Black Man. Or . . . and here’s a radical thought! … there might be some joy in it too! Maybe there’s a boyfriend somewhere, or a circle of like-minded musicians. But Dr. Shirley is portrayed in the movie as ISOLATED. In one of the most effective, beautifully rendered speeches of the film, Dr. Shirley exposes some of his pain to Tony in a volcanic blast. “Too Black for white people; too white for Black people; not enough of a man.” It’s the only glimpse we have of his inner life as a homosexual, brief and predictably sad. At the end of the movie, on Christmas Eve, Dr. Shirley is shown sitting in the empty splendor of his “castle” while Tony is welcomed into the homey hubbub of his Italian-American famiglia (cue The Sopranos). Loneliness gets the better of him and he belatedly shows up at Tony’s apartment to accept the invitation that he at first refused and where, of course, he’s welcomed with open arms by these thoughtless racists who refer to Blacks, in Italian, as eggplants. (Eggplants!) Of course, now they can say, “One of my best friends is a Negro.” But you can bet the farm that Tony Lip didn’t tell his wife and relatives that the visibly Black Dr. Shirley was also a homosexual. That might have might have moderated their friendship-trumps-racism good cheer. Bet on this one for several Oscar nods.

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 being gay and lesbian in Kenya shot in black and white, I would have been incredulous. In fact, I’m still a bit incredulous. Stories of Our Lives was produced by The NEST, a Nairobi multi-disciplinary art space and collective made up of ten artists. Among these is Jim Chuchu, the director of Stories and a bona-fide homegrown genius. The artistry and assurance of Stories is breathtaking. The stories themselves are common fare, which makes their resonance even greater. A gay tea picker, in love with his straight best friend, ultimately leaves the farm where they are both working to escape the pain of seeing him flirt with women. Half of a lesbian couple pretending to live as sisters, explores her nighttime fears of community violence and fantasizes about turning into a man to ward off attacks from the neighbors. A young man is beaten up by his violently homophobic friend who sees him leaving a gay club. The stories filmed are only five out of the over 200 that were collected by the NEST and will come out in a book of the same name as the movie. What is remarkable is that Jim Chuchu doesn’t appear to be gay nor is the NEST collective an LGBT organization. On its website, the NEST proclaims, “We … find ourselves exploring, dissecting and subverting the layers of how Africans are Seen and Unseen, what Africans Can and Cannot Do, where Africans Can and Cannot Go, and What Africans Can and Cannot Say.” One of the things that Africans cannot say is “I’m gay” or “I’m lesbian.” (Bisexuality and transgendered identities are still off in the future.) In general, modern African culture is hostile to Western conceptions of homosexuality that have nurtured the difficult identities of those who find themselves attracted to members of the same sex. Kenya is no different in that regard, though not quite as murderous towards gays as its neighbor, Uganda. But, in spite of its artistry and the acclaim the film is garnering in the West, Stories was rejected for distribution and screening by the Kenya Film Classification Board, on the grounds that the film "promotes homosexuality, which is contrary to national norms and values" of Kenya. Executive producer George Gachara was subsequently arrested for filming without a license. Nonetheless, the film is out there, and it is a thing of wonder. Shot in black and white on a single DSLR camera with amateur actors on a budget of $15,000, its artistry should put to shame all of the Martin-Scorsese/Quentin-Tarantino wannabees coming out of film school with their highly burnished technical education and wealth of resources. This is the power of art, birthed by social engagement and made beautiful through an unerring aesthetic. Though not gay and lesbian themselves, the NEST has created the most piercing and eloquent piece of gay and lesbian advocacy to come out of Africa. As of this writing, Stories premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has screened at a handful of others, including San Francisco’s Frameline, where I caught the first of its two screenings there. In my own casually Western arrogant way, I went in expecting something that was well-intentioned but hobbled by lack of funds and technical experience. Boy, was I humbled!

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 intriguing mix of gay history, personal history, and literary history. In 1981 Oscar Wilde (that's it for the gay history, folks) wrote a one-act play in French, Salome, based on the Biblical narrative of Herod's stepdaughter attempting to seduce, then demanding from the besotted Herod for whom she has danced the Dance of the Seven Veils, the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Wilde wrote a strange and stagey text lensed through particularly vaporous fin-de-siecle aesthetic movements: Symbolism, Pre-Raphealite sensibility, Decadence. There's a reason that Salome never gets produced. Now for the personal history. The famous nude wrestling scene in Ken Russell's Women in Love shocked me with film's power to arouse and move. In 1969 sex-positive depictions of eroticism between men were few and far between. Ken Russell went on to a long and controversial career filled with sometimes glorious, sometimes wretched excess. One can see why he was drawn to staging Salome, which he presents as a play-within-a-film set in a Parisian brothel. Wilde's boyfriend/lover Lord Douglas is cast as John the Baptist and is the object of much high-flown verbal slobbering on Salome's part. Salome's Last Dance definitely scores high on the wretched excess spectrum, but that can have its own pleasures. (I like Boz Luhrmann, thank you very much.) So what's with the Black executioner and his strategically placed sword? John the Baptist's executioner didn't make it into the gospels, so Ken Russell, British by birth and training, was free to let his imagination roam. And a super-hunky Black executioner would certainly make an impact. Of course, it's a non-speaking part. As I've written elsewhere, schlock reveals a culture's fixations and phobias with the least artistic screening. This is high-class schlock, but it does show that the Mandingo fantasy has its counterpart on the Continent. With the long history of the British in Africa, this needn't be a borrowing from American culture.

In 1997, a French/Guinean film set in West Africa opens, shockingly, with two young men kissing each other wildly and passionately in the front seat of a car parked in the countryside. Dakan told the story of an impossible homosexual love ultimately triumphing in a traditional, deeply homophobic society. It was predictably banned in its home country, made a bit of a splash on the film festival circuit, and disappeared. That’s too bad. It deserves to be remembered far more than the current iteration of this same old same old currently depicted in the Kenyan film, Rafiki. Rafiki is the Swahili word for “friend,” and the film charts the predictable path of a lesbian relationship that blooms between the daughters of two competing local politicians in a lower- working/class outskirt of Nairobi. The plot arc is familiar: the first timid steps toward passion, girlish courtship, consummation, closeted relationship, discovery, forced separation, eventual (though, from a script standpoint, unbelievable) reunification. We have seen this story told over and over in the West and now Africa. Which isn’t to say that Rafiki isn’t engaging and fun to watch. The film is professional on all levels. As a director Wanuri Kahiu makes a competent Western-style movie with some nice color choices, particularly pink ‘cause, you know, this is a girl story. Sammantha Mugatsia plays Kena, the butch, shy-but-super-intelligent daughter of a convenience store operator. As a first-time actor, she does a fine job with her role, but Sheila Munyiva, enacting Ziki, her effervescent femme love-interest, spurts out of the predictable aspects of her role as much as the colorful locs on her head. Her performance alone makes the film worth watching – along with the fascinating backdrop of a hybridized African society that has lost most  (though not all) of its traditional folkways. As a co-writer of the script, one loosely based on a prize-winning 2008 short story by the Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko, Kahiu is less successful. (Even though only 12 pages, the story is way better, broader in scope, and much more African than Rafiki.) The film’s story is well-worn, “redeemed” by an implausible coda that ignores the continued impossibility of a public lesbian life where homosexuality is punishable with up to 14 years in prison. (Also, predictably, the film has been banned in its home country.) I sat through the truly clichéd sequences – especially the carnival-fun montage and the gauzy make-out scenes – waiting for the bracing jolt of life brought by those characters not overdetermined the requirements of the plot: Kena’s flawed-but-undestanding father and the wonderful township gossip, Mama Atim. The greatest disappointment of the film is its choice of sappy Western music to evoke a romantic atmosphere – this from a continent that reverberates with original musical genius of its own. But let me not be too negative. The movie will do its cultural and political work in places where it’s allowed to be shown. It’s no great work of art or film, but it has its merits and gives Western audiences a window into a (somewhat cleansed) African society that most are unfamiliar with. Personal note: I lived in Tanzania for a year in 1988 while researching a dissertation on a mostly-untranslated Swahili playwright. Although my Swahili is gone now, I did witness, from afar, a non-Western style of men who identified as women. This type of person was referred to as a shoga, and that is the origin of the name of my production company. One lone, miserable shoga is cameo’d, and mocked, in the film. A silent kinship is established between him (?) and Kena when she sits alone, after being publicly reviled and further rejected by the traumatized Ziki. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to forge a friendship or alliance between the two. In the best Hollywood tradition, Kena finds personal--and only personal--redemption in the unearned fantasy of a happy ending.