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

This was not the world Emma Lazarus grew up in, but this was the world her Jewish identity moved her to embrace. You don't recognize the title "The New Colossus." You probably haven't heard of Emma Lazarus. But by God!, you've heard these lines -- and more than once! “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Odds are you didn't know that Emma Lazarus, almost forgotten now, was a famous poet in her day, an anomaly in the 19th century world of letters for being not only female but Jewish. And it was because she was Jewish that she was persuaded, somewhat against her will ("I don't work for hire") to compose a sonnet in 1883 as donation to an auction conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty." Bartholdi's statue had been completed in France for some time, but the deal was that the United States should pay for her pedestal, and New Yorkers were laggard in their response. From her biography, you would not have predicted that Emma Lazarus would become a vocal advocate for the Eastern European Jewish refugees who flooded into the country after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. *Those* Jews -- Yiddish-speaking, impoverished, medieval in clothes, appearance, and attitude -- impressed themselves as the template for Jews in America -- much to the dismay of the older, way more assimilated populations of German Jews who arrived in the 1840s and Sephardic Jews whose presence predated the Republic itself. Born in 1849, Emma grew up in a life of privilege as part of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family, a bona fide member of American Jewish nobility. (Her father, Moses Lazarus, reaped part of his fortune as a sugar refiner, which entangled his wealth in the institution of Caribbean slavery, but let us only make note of that and move on.) Emma grew up with little awareness or understanding of her heritage and successfully integrated into Christian society. Though she was personally spared from explicit discrimination, Emma was regularly referred to as “the Jewess” by her Christian friends. As she later wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am perfectly conscious that… contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us.” During the 1870s, Emma made her reputation as a writer on European themes with only occasional forays into condemnations of Christian antisemitism. The Russian pogroms unleashed by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II lit the match that inflamed Emma's Jewish identity. Eastern European Jews fled to America. Month after month, over 2,000 arrived at the New York processing facility for immigrants . They were penniless, desperate, homeless. Before long, Castle Garden was over capacity, and New York City officials opened an old hospital building on Ward Island to house them. Emma visited Ward Island and exposed their desperate living conditions. She volunteered for the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society and taught English. She donated money. She set up job training and education for the refugees. She raised money, both at home and in Europe. She criticized American Jews for not doing enough to support the refugees. And she was instrumental in the founding of the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York. On the literary front, she trumpeted her new-found ethnic identity by naming her 1882 collection of poetry, Songs of a Semite. So when, the following year, she was asked to donate a poem to aid the erection of "Lady Liberty," she wrote instead a sonnet to "the Mother of Exiles." That was not what the creators of the new colossus that was to stand at the entrance of New York harbor had in mind. Auguste Bartholdi had intended his work to inspire the ideal of liberty — a beacon shining out around the world. Emma's poem transformed the flame of liberty into a torch of welcome. "I lift my lamp beside the golden door." This was not the work of a day -- nor even a decade. The Statue of Liberty was unveiled in 1886; Emma died of Hodgkins Lymphoma, age 38, the year after. At the behest of a group of friends and civic leaders, a bronze plaque of "The New Colossus" was placed on the pedestal in 1903. In time the sonnet effected a complete shift of the statue's meaning in the American narrative. It glorified us as a nation of immigrants, a nation who welcomed immigrants. The fact that this literary miracle was brought about by "a Jewess" whose advocacy of her tempest-tost people trumped her class and privilege is inconvenient in these xenophobic times, but no attempt at erasure or historical revision can entirely snuff out the Statue's light. O! and as for the "queer," that is the subject of another day. 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

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

The Netflix adaptation of the August Wilson play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom , has been getting a lot of awards buzz this season, and deservedly so. The song, " Ma Rainey's Black Bottom ," written by Ma Rainey and presumably about the Black Bottom dance craze of the 1920s, makes joyful hay out of the obvious double entendre. "All the boys in the neighborhood/They say your black bottom is really good/Come on and show me your black bottom/I wanna learn that dance.” Unlike other genres of popular song in the 20s, the blues delighted in smutty double entendres and, in some cases, outright filth. Because it was a truly popular art form with little regard for middle class morality, blues lyrics made frank reference to alternative sexuality, domestic violence, massive infidelity, revenge, and all manner of social mayhem. Given their context, these double entendre songs were only mildly blue, and some achieved lasting popularity. Both Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter had hits with " My Handy Man ": "He shakes my ashes,Greases my griddle,/Churns my butter,And he strokes my fiddle." In contrast, Clara Smith laments the loss of her handy man in " Ain't Got Nobody to Grind My Coffee .” "When my daddy would love me, he was oh so good./He could even haul my ashes, he would chop my kindlin' wood!" We're not quite sure what's she's talking about, but it's not PG-rated. In 1928 Victoria Spivey visits her dentist, composer Lonnie Johnson in " Toothache Blues ," and there's a lot of moaning going on: "VS: I feel a funny little somethin' easin' into my cavity. VS: Mmm, ouch, ohhh , (giggling) I feel a funny little somethin' easin' into my cavity. LJ: That's nothin' but cocaine and liquor to ease your pains you see." When the Ethel Waters' record " Shake That Thing " threatened to break the million sales mark in 1925, The Chicago Bee newspaper felt compelled to rail, "this popular song is about the most vulgar, sordidly suggestive topic, indecent in connotation," although the lyrics explain that Shake That Thing is a song from Georgia. Three years later, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" must have given these guardians of public morality heart palpitations. Listen to Shoga's current song of the month, Bessie Smith's " Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl ," for more hiding-in-plain-sight prurience. "I need a little sugar in my bowl/I need a little hot dog between my rolls/You gettin' different, I've been told/Move your finger, drop something in my bowl." Good gracious! What would Aunt Sally think?!? SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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.” SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In the early years of the 20th century, the rhymed lyric expressing the feelings of the writer was the dominant poetic form in America. It was the direct inheritance of British romanticism, whose greatest practitioners, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, were immortalized in English-speaking countries everywhere. The Romantic poet was known to have a sensitive heart but rarely did he strike the tone of confessional poetry that became dominant in the American lyric from the 1950s on. Poetic language and poetic thought veiled the poet’s joys and sorrows. (Check out Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems” for classic examples.)   But the lyric poem, more than any other literary genre, invited the speaker to lay out her sorrows, and if she were “queer — a woman — and colored,” to paraphrase Marita Bonner, there were plenty of sorrows to choose from. The Harlem Renaissance published reams of poetry, much of it by women – not so much the case with other literary genres. Predictably, the best-known poets to emerge, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, were men, but women’s contributions were substantial both in quality and quantity, as anthologies of Black poetry from the period attest. Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Helene Johnson, and Gwendolyn Bennett ultimately created a space for themselves in the canon. And they could strum their lyres to lament the lot of womanhood (“The Heart of a Woman” by Georgia Douglas) or address in surprising ways the pathos of being Black (“Bottled” by Helene Johnson”), and of course all could bear witness to the joys and sorrows of Love.             Of heterosexual love, that is. But what if the desire that moved a woman’s heart to poetry was for another woman? Lyric poetry was the most inviting vehicle to express desire, but could poetry acknowledge a queer desire sufficiently camouflaged so that it could be presented to the world, or did it have to remain private, hiding its “shameful” secret in a drawer? We have only two women writers who wrote of their queer desires, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké. In 1931, Dunbar Nelson wrote, “Love and beautiful love has been mine from many men, but the great passion of four or five transcended that of other women — and what more can any woman want?” But this was a diary entry, not meant for public eyes, and so Alice chose the private path of discretion.             Angelina Weld Grimké was quite another matter. The only child of Archibald Grimké, the bastard issue of a white man and his Black slave, Angelina lived in thrall to her stern, high-acheiving father. Archibald had married a white woman from a prominent midwestern family, but the couple separated after three years. Angelina’s mother took her girl back to her family in the midwest, but the pressure of raising a Black daughter was too much for her, and she returned Angelina to her father four years later. Then she committed suicide.   This alone would have provided grist for years of therapy, had there been such a practice in the first decades of the 20th century, but add to that her lesbian orientation, and it’s a wonder she was able to write coherently, much less produce a steady stream of essays, plays, stories, and poems while living under her father’s roof in Washington, DC between 1902 and 1930.   Though presenting herself as a spinster to the outside world, the lure of the lyric drove Grimké to express her passion for women and subsequent frustrated longing in ways that weren’t so veiled. Poems that she never shared during her lifetime, such as “Rosabel,” were explicitly addressed to other women, but one remarkable example, “El Beso,” published in 1909 is not so difficult to decipher.   El Beso   Twilight–and you Quiet–the stars; Snare of the shine of your teeth, Your provocative laughter, The gloom of your hair; Lure of you, eye and lip; Yearning, yearning, Languor, surrender; Your mouth, And madness, madness, Tremulous, breathless, flaming, The space of a sigh; Then awakening–remembrance, Pain, regret–your sobbing; And again, quiet–the stars, Twilight–and you.   What’s remarkable about this poem is how modern it is for 1909. Blank verse; short, tense lines; no genders; no verbs; melodramatic language; nouns and implied action revealed starkly and briefly as though lit by a strobe. The story is clear: a same-sex kiss between the poet and her beloved; the intense pain immediately following the unexpected flare-up of passion. And why is the title of the poem in Spanish? This is the most transparent of fig leaves. Yet these anguished attempts to both tell and hide the story result in a jolt towards modernist expression that was unique for its time.   Outside of Grimke’s poetry – a body of work still yet to be collected, evaluated, and incorporated into queer literary history – there’s little more to say about this topic. The conventions of literary expression were too patriarchal, too constricting, too conservative (in terms of sanctioning only heteronormativelove) to allow for anything more.   “And madness, madness.” SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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.  SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts