Chances are you’ve never even heard of Clara Smith. It’s confusing that there were so many Smiths amongst the crop of divas that dominated the Classic Blues era of the 1920s: Bessie, Mamie, Trixie. Yet Clara Smith had been a top headliner on the Black vaudeville circuit before she settled in New York City in 1923, recorded an impressive 122 tracks for Columbia Records, was outsold only by Bessie Smith and was equally as famous during her heyday. She had her own sobriquet, Queen of the Moaners, and was occasionally backed by such recording luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Don Redman. Furthermore, as I discovered accidentally and well after I had made my documentary “T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s” (2010), Clara Smith should have been amongst their number. At the age of 28, while performing in St. Louis in 1920, Clara met the 14-year-old Josephine Baker, already stage struck and one year married to (and separated from) her first husband, and they became “lady lovers,” as the relationship was then termed. When Clara moved on from St. Louis with her vaudeville troupe, The Dixie Steppers, she took Josephine with her and thus began Baker’s stellar career. The Stepper’s manager, Bob Russell, wasn’t enthusiastic about hiring Josephine as Clara’s dresser, but as one of Russell’s friends on the circuit put it so pithily, “Clara was a big draw, and anyway, better a steady date than a fight in every city.” The relationship was short-lived. Josephine soon made her mark as a comic chorine and eloped with her second husband, Billie Baker, in September of 1921. Clara Smith was also bisexual. In 1926 she married Charles Wesley, a sometimes baseball player, and there’s no indication that the marriage was a fake one. They lived together in Harlem until the early 1930s when Clara unofficially left the marriage and moved to Detroit. Her years in Harlem were fantastically successful. She opened the Clara Smith Theatrical Club in 1924 which stayed in operation until 1932. She was well paid as a singer, and she starred in a string of her own shows in the late twenties. Thanks to Carl Van Vechten, she was one of three blues singers to be introduced to white audiences (along with Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters) through a feature in Vanity Fair. Clara died of heart failure at the age of 43 in 1935. She had not lived large, had handled her professional and financial affairs well and without great fanfare – no spectacular scandals (Bessie Smith) or deeply closeted lifestyes (Alberta Hunter) or flaunting queerness (Gladys Bentley). Outside of close friends and associates, people didn’t know about her lesbian trysts, and her connection to Josephine Baker wasn’t made public until the 1975 publication of Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart. By 1975 – well before then – Clara Smith was all but forgotten. She didn’t have a long career, as did Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter; she hadn’t created an iconic persona as a representative of blues people, as had Ma Rainey; she didn’t possess the powerful voice or delivery of Bessie Smith. Amongst the queer blues divas of the 1920s, Gladys Bentley also skirted oblivion, but her “bulldyker” persona insured her resurrection – more as a lesbian trailblazer than for her musical merit – with the recovery of queer history in the 1980s. Clara Smith, quietly bisexual and not flamboyant offstage, hasn’t benefitted from that. Still, Clara’s role in extracting Josephine from her circumscribed poverty in St. Louis, mentoring her, and providing her with her start in show business should be more widely acknowledged, especially in the queer community. Mainstream blues historians, nearly all men, have never been eager to publicize the same-sex proclivities of these early divas. If Clara Smith, whose blues recordings came in second only to Bessie’s, who played to packed halls from coast to coast, is doomed to be remembered mostly as a footnote in Josephine Baker’s biography, even that footnote is subject to erasure because of its lesbian nexus.  Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Dinner Chez Josephine SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 2013 I was in New York to screen one of my films at the Harlem International Film Festival. While there I learned that one of Josephine Baker’s self-described adopted sons, Jean-Claude Baker, had opened a restaurant, Chez Josephine, in what was still a sketchy part of the theater district (42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenue) in honor of his “mom.”   Due to a malformation of her uterus, Josephine could have no children of her own. However, beginning in 1953, Josephine engaged in an experiment in racial harmony with her third (gay) husband, Jo Bouillon. They assembled what they called her “Rainbow Tribe” of twelve children adopted from different parts of the world. To support this large family, Josephine continued to perform for the rest of her life.   Jean-Claude Tronville-Rouzaud first met Josephine in Paris in 1957, when he was fourteen years old, and later became a close friend and confidant. Although never formally adopted by her, she considered him one of her own. He loved her deeply enough to change his original last name by legally adopting hers, and in 1986 he opened Chez Josephine.  Twenty-seven years later, I was eating fusilli with mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and black truffles in the ornate dining room of red banquettes and pictures of a scantily-clad Josephine on the walls. I was still at the beginning of my research on the Queer Harlem Renaissance and didn’t realize how deeply intertwined Josephine was with New York’s theater life before she moved to Paris in 1925. Nor did I know she was bisexual. That part of her biography hadn’t been much trumpeted. However, I spoke French, had lived in Paris on several occasions, and had visited her chateau, Milandes, in the south of France. I asked if Jean-Claude Baker was there that evening and upon learning that he was, I introduced myself. Jean-Claude was charming, a bit florid and theatrical, but that was entirely in keeping with the mise-en-scène.      When I mentioned my film work and research on the Queer Harlem Renaissance, Jean-Claude said I simply had to read the biography he had published about his “mother” in 1993, Josephine The Hungry Heart . As it happened, there were copies on display at the bar. I bought one and received a complimentary Josephine Baker cocktail featuring Grey Goose Vanilla and Amaro.   I did not know what I held in my hands. Jean-Claude Baker spent 18 years obsessively researching his mommy dearest’s life. “I read everything about her I could find because I loved her, hated her, and wanted desperately to understand her.” The resultant biography, 529 pages, left out nothing, glossed over nothing, sugar coated nothing. And it was through his biography that I learned about Josephine’s many same-sex affairs. Jean-Claude mentions six by name: Clara Smith, Evelyn Sheppard, Bessie Allison, and Mildred Smallwood, all of whom she met on the Black performing circuit before shooting to superstardom in Paris. Then came Bricktop and Colette. (Frida Kahlo is another candidate.)   Of course, Josephine was famous for her husbands, her heterosexual conquests, and her pet cheetah Chiquita. In retrospect, it seems obvious that Josephine was a sexual supernova; labels could hardly contain her, and even “bisexual” seems inadequate to describe the effect she had not only upon men and women but international audiences everywhere.   I learned about Josephine Baker and Clara Smith too late to include them in my early documentary “T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s.”  If there’s a re-do, I’ll definitely make room for Clara Smith. Josephine Baker was not a blues singer, but she was certainly part of the Queer Harlem Renaissance.   Nota Bene.  Whatever demons Jean-Claude was trying to exorcise through his tell-all biography apparently got the better of him. He committed suicide at his East Hampton home 18 months later.     -Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Whatever Happened to Clara Smith? SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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

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

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

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

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

Langston Hughes has long been fiercely claimed as gay by the Black LGBT movement, although there is no hard evidence that he was attracted to or had any sexual relations with another man. As a beautiful young poet who could have had anybody he wanted and as Harlem's most eligible (perennial) bachelor for decades who never dated women, that was the universal assumption, especially given his penchant for attractive male secretaries. Langston was certainly queer, but he probably had no sexual relations with anybody. That was the opinion of Louise Thompson, a beautiful intelligent minor player in the Harlem Renaissance whose close but non-sexual friendship with Langston sparked a jealous reaction from Zora Neale Hurston that wrecked the one truly emotionally intimate relationship he had -- with his white patron. Charlotte Osgood Mason was rich, manipulative, and deeply racist in a "benign" way. She wanted her Blacks to be primitives and so infantilized Langston to the extent that she could. As a mother surrogate, the idea of sexual relations with Mason was not even to be thought of, so Langston was "safe" on that score and became deeply emotionally entangled. Known as one of Langston's closest friends all of his adult life, Thompson told his biographer Arnold Rampersand that she judged Hughes to have been asexual. As for suggestions that he was a homosexual, she said "that I felt was not true. I never had in any sense any intimation that he was that way." Another lifelong friend of Langston Hughes was semi-openly gay, the white writer, photographer and premiere publicist of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten. It is probable that "Carlo," as many of his friends called him, subtly tried to seduce Langston through an enthusiastic appreciation of the fledgling writer's poetry -- he was instrumental in getting Hughes' first book published -- but getting no response from Hughes of a sexual nature, the erotic impulse turned into a genuine friendship chronicled in a lively correspondence. Van Vechten speaking to his own biographer, Bruce Kellner, declared that he knew two men "who seemed to thrive without having sex in their lives." Of the two, "never had he any indication that either was homosexual or heterosexual. One of these was Langston Hughes.”  SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 2007, queer representation was, in a word, lacking. What was available was decidedly whitewashed, offering glimpses of a simplified queer world only interested in telling the stories of binary-gendered white men of a very specific type. If you were looking for portrayals of Black queer life, you had only a few options: the groundbreaking Logo series “Noah’s Arc,” which followed the lives of four gay Black men living in Los Angeles. There was also “The DL Chronicles,” a sharp, intimate look at Black men dealing with the pain of having to explore their queer sexuality from inside the closet. The series, created by the now-married team of Deondray and Quincy Gossfield, made waves. Today, the Gossfields are taking another look at the hidden queerness left out of mainstream accounts of the Harlem Renaissance with a short film.  A lushly-filmed historical fantasy that could easily have been a true story, “Smoke, Lillies and Jade” is part of Lavender, a documentary featuring short films about the world of 1920s Harlem. The short film, featuring exquisite narration by the one and only Billy Porter, follows Alex, an artist looking to explore his queerness. When he meets a mysterious stranger referred to only as “Beauty,” he soon understands that he can’t suppress the queer part of him any longer. INTO spoke to the Gossfields about the impact of the Harlem renaissance on Black queer visibility.  INTO: How did “Smoke, Lillies and Jade” come about? DEONDRAY GOSSFIELD: “Smoke, Jade and Lillies” is part of a bigger documentary that’s called Lavender. Robert Philipson came up with the idea to do this documentary and instead of doing that boring flashback thing, he decided, ‘let’s do these very highly produced narrative pieces that we’ll cut to while talking heads are telling the story of the queer presence in the Harlem Renaissance. Quincy and I came in and being the creators that we are we, expanded upon those small ideas to make the standalone short films.  QUINCY GOSSFIELD: Robert is a historian and one of his focuses is the Harlem Renaissance. Our first piece was Congo Cabaret, which was adapted from the  Claude McKay novel Home to Harlem . And McKay made references to queer people in there. The queer presence in the Harlem Renaissance was so erased and kind of whitewashed, but the queer artists from that time left breadcrumbs throughout their work. For example, they would refer to a gay man as someone who “eats his own.” So the task at hand was to retell the story by finding those breadcrumbs in their poems, their novels, their short stories, and their artwork. Because they left those materials there for us. What Robert was able to do was to go through the source material, and to find those references and figure out how they spoke about being queer. We were able to expand upon that.  Robert is the scholar, we’re the filmmakers. We’re also lovers and descendants of the Harlem Renaissance. Deondre will tell you, it’s my love. I feel like if there was any other time I should have existed in this country, it would have been during the Harlem Renaissance. I love jazz, I love the art, I’m inspired by the poetry. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a Harlem-phile. And so when this project came to us, it was, it was kind of like perfect timing, because we were actually working on and developing a show that was loosely based around the period. It was about someone in my family who actually did live during the Renaissance. It was serendipitous. Darryl Stevens, who starred in “Noah’s Arc,” is a friend of ours, and Robert told him he was looking for directors for these pieces for his documentary and he’s like, “Well, I’ve got the guys for you.”   DEONDRAY: The point is to bring these forgotten queer figures to life.  Claude McKay isn’t talked about a lot, which is odd to me.   DEONDRAY: It’s so funny, because I keep talking about how LGBTQ+ figures of color, Black folks in particular, often get omitted. Like, being queer and out is not a new phenomenon for people of color. So it’s good to be able to tap into those roots and know where we’ve come from and the struggles that have happened to us, not just as Black people, but as Black queer people, and it validates you in so many ways and that’s why it’s so exciting to bring these stories and these people to light, because you get to know your lineage in a different way. It feels sometimes like we’re making it up as we go along and setting the tone, but when you look at this history, you realize that you’re not alone at all. Yes, these people existed long before you, but if only I had known, as a, as a gay teen growing up, that this moment existed in time and that queer moments in time existed before, I probably would have been walked very differently. Like, if these people came before me, if they did it, surely I can do it. And as much as Hollywood wants to tell these stories, it doesn’t necessarily mean the stories are being told right.  QUINCY: Yes, and in our community, there is still this stigma attached to being gay. Being queer in general is still viewed as something negative, right. And as open and liberal as things seem today, and as common as it is to see a gay, lesbian, transgender, or nonbinary person today on television and film, when we go to tell stories about these historic Black figures and explore the whole of who they are, suddenly, people get really worried. Like “oh, is this damaging their legacy?” And it’s like, why is being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender a damage to their legacy? It’s because people still see it as wrong, in the back of their subconscious. Like with that Billie Holiday movie, they didn’t go all the way there. They were like “okay we’ll give you a little bit” but they didn’t want to give screentime to Holiday’s partner, Louise Crane. They did a little bit, but they didn’t go all the way. And instead of just telling the story as it is, they’re afraid that there’s going to be backlash from the public. Because these people are held in such high historical esteem. I remember one of the films about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how they were afraid to go into the details about his extramarital affair. It’s written about, and it’s known. The FBI was trying to use that information to damage him. It doesn’t take away from the amazing person that he was and the work that he did to change the world. But in the end, he was a whole person, a whole being. There was more to him than just the “I Have a Dream” speech, and there were some things that maybe some folks find difficult to accept. And the history books leave out Bayard Rustin all the time. There wouldn’t be a march on Washington if it hadn’t been for Bayard Rustin! And yet if they made that movie, I’m sure it would be totally whitewashed and awful.  DEONDRAY: Yeah, the respectability politics thing even dates back to the Harlem Renaissance period. It was such a contradiction because, on the one hand, these people were sort of staking the claim to Black excellence in art and culture, and being, creating this beautiful expression of themselves and kind of being unapologetic unapologetically Black. But within that community, there was also this idea of respectability at play. That’s why these gay and lesbian characters who played this huge part in the movement couldn’t be celebrated openly because people were still trying to appeal to the status quo. It was sort of a tightrope act of trying to be unapologetically black but also kind of sweep the things that are not so cute under the carpet. So that’s why we are here, and just rediscovering these folks from this period because they were purposefully put aside because their queereness wasn’t seen as “helping the movement.” It’s like “We love you, but can you guys like not?” That’s the duplicity of being, first of all, Black in America. And secondly being queer in America. We’re always wearing two different shoes that don’t necessarily fit. We’re trying to be able to show up as ourselves, and be loved and respected and treated equally and fairly without having to play by those “respectability politics” rules. What’s coming up next for both of you?  DEONDRAY: We did a film called Flames with Lena Waithe’s company that’s also coming out soon. For Quincy and I, our work is really themed around this sort of coming to terms with your sexuality. And I know probably in today’s terms as something that seems so so done or past tense, but, or our community like I keep trying to impress upon people that we’re still in that phase. We’re not talking about closets as much as we used to, but we’re still there. We get these emails and correspondence with these young men across the nation and across the world that are of color, they are still struggling with closet issues, big time. And it’s sort of sad because when we were doing  “The DL Chronicles”  back in the day, it was basically all about that phenomenon of men living in the closet and dating under the radar. We thought that when we made that, we had ushered into a whole new existence for Black, gay people that could help folks be more comfortable being themselves, and now we’re finding that really not much has changed. The needle hasn’t moved all that much. So, Flames is one of those films that explores this topic in modern-day times. Two young boys go on a camping trip to the forest, and all of this old stuff comes out that kind of ends in this very unexpected way while exploring this idea that we are still, as Black gay men, not living our full truths in 2021. It’s just crazy to me. By Henry Giardina September 16, 2021 Original post: https://www.intomore.com/film/quincy-deondray-gossfield-celebrate-queer-black-history-smoke-lillies-jade/ SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

It is an odd, little discussed fact that ALL of the best-known poets of the Harlem Renaissance were queer: Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. As we pointed out in Part One of this series, lyric poetry was the most inviting vehicle to convey desire, but with rare exceptions queer poets could not express same-sex desire unless pronouns were suppressed or the language was heavily coded or poetic ambiguity was so thick that readers only heard the music and left satisfied with that. Claude McKay had already disclosed a gay orientation in the heartbroken envoi to his fellow constable, “Benny’s Departure,” published in Jamaica in 1912 as part of a book of dialect poems entitled Constab’ Ballads. These, however, were pretty much unknown in the States where McKay was forging his reputation as a poet in the late teens and early twenties. When his first book of Stateside poems, Harlem Shadows, was published in 1922, one of his poems “Rest in Peace” starkly ends “Farewell, oh, fare you well! my friend and lover.” That seems straightforward enough, but through the use of ungendered nouns (“lover”) and pronouns (the poem is addressed to the deceased “you”), McKay avoids disclosing the gender of his beloved, although it’s clear in the catalogue of urban woes of the previous lines that the figure is a man. Nonetheless, with room for any sort of ambiguity, critics of the time, and even today, were happy to turn a blind eye. Langston Hughes is the least revelatory of lyric poets. Queer critics comb desperately through his writings to try and establish his sexual orientation – still a mystery. The poetry doesn’t help. Langston’s first person (“I”) is rarely personal and is usually deployed in either a racialized way (“I, Too”) or in a persona poem (“Elevator Boy”). As Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker: “The ungrounded first-person voice allows Hughes to be humanity, but not a specific human.” In one instance only is there any note of personal loss and longing. Poem (To F.S.)  I loved my friend. He went away from me. There’s nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began. I loved my friend Contrary to the assertion of the third line, there’s plenty more to say … or at least many questions left unanswered. What kind of friend was F.S.? How did he go away? Why did he go away? We can now speculate with the assurance of historical research that F.S. was Ferdinand Smith, a Jamaican merchant seaman Hughes met in Harlem, but knowing that sheds little light on the nature of their relationship or why Hughes was so moved to express a personal sorrow he publicly exhibited nowhere else. Which brings us to Countee Cullen, the gayest and most active of our closeted trio. Throughout his adult life, Cullen carried on affairs with a string of white lovers, some of whom found themselves as dedicatees: Donald Duff (“Tableau”), Llewellyn Ransom (“The Shroud of Color”), and John Gaston Edgar (“For A Poet”). Cullen also dedicated poems to gay friends Leland Pettit, Edward Perry, and Carl Van Vechten. The motives behind such dedications were hardly the stuff of public knowledge, and although Cullen’s homosexuality was an open secret to his circle of friends, his poetry was generally so allusive and dense that any possible gay meanings were well hidden. The best candidate for a straightforward queer reading is the poem “Tableau,” dedicated to Donald Duff. Locked arm in arm they cross the way, The black boy and the white, The golden splendor of the day, The sable pride of night. From lowered blinds the dark folk stare, And here the fair folk talk, Indignant that these two should dare In unison to walk. Oblivious to look and word They pass, and see no wonder That lightning brilliant as a sword Should blaze the path of thunder. Locked arm in arm? Lightening brilliant as a sword blazing a path of thunder? Suggestive but no smoking phalli, to coin a phrase. And yet the accomplished ambiguity of the poem makes searching for an indisputably gay motive seem almost trivial. “Tableau” offers a perfectly harmonized counterpoint of the two themes, sexuality and race, in a manner which, while saying nothing explicitly gay, nevertheless broaches the topic of homosexual miscegenation without subterfuge or disguise. To be so discreetly indiscreet is an achievement in itself. No amount of paraphrasing can do it justice. As with the queer poetry from the Harlem Renaissance women, the harvest is meagre. But it had to be so in a time when proclaiming one’s homosexual orientation was professional and social suicide. Even Richard Bruce Nugent, the most visibly queer artist of the Renaissance, acknowledged as much in his posthumously published lyric, “Who Asks This Thing?” But that I wear my heart for all to see Means I am bound while he is, sadly, free. He walks alone who walks in love with me.  SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Jennie Livingston’s groundbreaking documentary, Paris Is Burning, was filmed in the 1980’s, hit the festival circuit in 1990, began DVD distribution in 2005 and has finally been made easily available to the masses through Netflix. I had never heard of Paris Is Burning until its addition to Netflix. From the title I assumed I would be watching a film made in Paris, but boy was I wrong! The name of the film actually comes from an annual ball run by Paris Dupree called “Paris is Burning”. The documentary chronicles several drag balls that are intertwined with candid interviews from prominent transgender African Americans and Latino Americans within the community. Interviewees explain words like “vogue”, “shade”, and “reading,” but the film is more than just a glimpse into the vogue and ball phenomenon. Participants also discuss difficult realities within the community such as sex work, AIDS, rejection from families, and hate crimes.    Paris Is Burning was directed by an amateur filmmaker named Jennie Livingston.  Livingston walked upon a group of men vogueing in New York City and began to take pictures and video footage. She then started to attend a few balls to learn more and her interest grew into a feature-length documentary. She befriended people in that world and was able to get an inside glimpse of their lives. Although Paris is Burning was Livingston’s first film, it went on to win numerous awards and remains a critical film about issues dealing with race, gender, sexuality and class.  The film did much more than just explain and educate about balls and vogueing. As a personal response, it helped me understand everything that goes into maintaining your integrity and identifying yourself as something that is marginalized or mistreated by society. One eye-opining scene demonstrating their strength and courage was when one of the film’s stars, Pepper LaBeija, explained how many gay people have looked up to him and treated him as a mother because they had been searching for a loving relationship that they couldn’t get from their biological families. It was then that I understood the importance of houses and mothers to the community. Sharing genes and blood wasn’t what made them family. It was the acceptance and love of these intentional families that allowed them to feel accepted without having to be anything but themselves. Paris Is Burning revealed an unknown part of LGBT culture that took place in Harlem. Just as graffiti and hip-hop came from an oppressed culture finding a place to artistically declare itself, balls were created as a place where transgender African Americans and Latino Americans could express themselves through movement and fashion. It became a place where they could celebrate their differences from mainstream America. The film wasn’t just about the LGBTQ community, however. It also touched on topics of poverty and race.  LaBeija spoke about how we live in an America whose hegemonic whiteness is constantly broadcast from the media, “When they showing you a commercial from Honey Grahams to Crest, or Listerine or Pine Sol- everybody’s in their own home. The little kids for Fisher Price toys; they’re not in no concrete playground. They’re riding around the lawn. The pool is in the back. This is white America”. Living in a world where it was difficult to climb the social ladder, balls created a space for achievement. Nonethless, judgment was commonly still based upon economic advantage or the ability to give the appearance of economic wealth. In one scene one of the interviewees and ball attendees, Venus Xtravaganza, confessed to commonly stealing or “mopping” name brand clothing in order to appear beautiful and wealthy. However, categories of “realness” didn’t require participants to spend hundreds of dollars on their outfits but instead were judged by how real one looked. Could you pass, for example, as an executive or a woman walking down the street? Realness created a facsimile of dreams that were otherwise out of reach to come true. You could be anything you wanted as long as you knew how to work it. The film provides much pleasure in the performances of its subjects, but it also tackles the dark side of “the life”: death as a result of hate crimes and the rampant spread of AIDS. At the end of the documentary the audience discovers that Venus Xtravaganza has been murdered. The mother of the house, Angie Xtravaganza, says, “It’s a part of life; it’s a part of being a transsexual in New York City”. Many of the stars of Paris is Burning have since passed away. Angie Xtravaganza passed away from AIDS-related liver failure; Dorian Corey perished from AIDS-related complications; Pepper LaBeija died from a heart attack. Willi Ninja heart failure was brought about by AIDS, and Octavia St. Laurent passed away after a long fight with cancer. The issues brought up by the film are, sadly, as relevant as ever: the evils of sex work, poverty, and homelessness. In spite of more diversity in some media, most notably television, America still seems overwhelmingly white. The 2016 Oscars notoriously nominated no African American actors sparking a boycott by some prominent Black names in film and media. Jennie Livingston was quoted saying, “It's [Paris is Burning] about how we're all influenced by the media; how we strive to meet the demands of the media by trying to look like Vogue models or by owning a big car. And it's about survival.” I couldn’t agree with her more. Whether you are gay, transgender, straight, bisexual, black, white, male, or female, our culture is judgmental and hierarchical. Life can be difficult and unfair but this film shows real people dealing with strong prejudice and hatred in beautiful, artistic, and fashionable stride. They show audiences how to survive with grace, humor, and wisdom. And it shows that we have within us the strength to go against the grain. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Pariah means outcast. The film, Pariah, follows the development of Alike, a seventeen-year-old high school student in Brooklyn struggling to hide her sexual orientation from her family and her family’s friends. Unlike her best friend, Laura, a “butch” lesbian (or AG as they’re referred to in the film, AG meaning “aggressive”), Alike has a hard time finding her place not only in the straight world but in the gay world which she is just beginning to explore. Throughout the film, I was struck by Alike’s loneliness and her desire to be accepted despite her insecurity about where she fit into the two worlds she was trying to negotiate. From the very beginning, the first scene of shots at a lesbian club, Alike is shown as cut off despite being with her best friend in a sea of people. Alike literally changes her identity (for others) by changing her outfits, shedding the girly clothes her mother makes her wear to the more masculine ones of an “AG.” She borrows these clothes or buys them from Laura, a straight-up butch, who is studying for her GED, and working to pay bills while living with her sister who is also working. Although the film clearly makes Alike the protagonist (the director, Dee Williams, is herself a Black lesbian), other characters are presented sympathetically with the possible exception of Audry, Alike’s mother, a devout Christian. Audry is shown trying to reach out to Alike in a number of ways and is hurt by Alike’s refusal to communicate with her and the rejection of the wardrobe she buys for her. Although she never utters the word “lesbian,” she makes clear her dislike for Laura who she believes is leading her daughter down the wrong path. Audry’s Christian homophobia makes it impossible for her to maintain a supportive relationship with Alike once she comes out to her family. By contrast, Alike has a better, more nuanced relationship with her father, a policeman who is shown to be having an affair with another woman. (This is one plot point that never gets developed but acts as the catalyst for the family fight that outs Alike. Interestingly enough, it is the mother who finally puts out in the open all of the family’s secrets – not only her husbands’ affair but her daughter’s homosexuality. And it is her mother who physically attacks Alike.) There are moments in the film where Alike is shown to be “daddy’s little girl” and actually enjoys that loving bond. But Carl, Alike’s father, is blinded to Alike’s lesbianism by the kind of love he has for the daughter he wants, not the daughter he has. He is shown accepting the prevailing homophobia of his community when he remains silent as a friend of his taunts Laura in a corner store by calling her a “bulldagger.” And I’ll be the first to admit how disappointed I was that Alike’s father didn’t teach him a lesson after the man implied that Alike was a lesbian. Although Alike’s struggles are well documented in the film, aspects of her relationships with others seemed a bit sketchy or even stereotyped. Sharonda, Alike’s younger sister, actually knows about Alike’s lesbianism and sometimes threatens to tell their parents, although it’s clear that there is a loving bond between the two. When the parents fight downstairs, Sharonda seeks emotional protection by getting into Alike’s bed. It’s touching to see the sister’s cling to one another while their parents’ marriage is flying apart. Yet I would have liked to see that relationship blossom – Sharonda is the only person in the family who knows the truth about her sister. I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of relationship they would have after Alike was kicked out of her house by her mother. It was interesting that the film presented three family members with different levels of knowledge and acceptance: Carl, who is in active denial; Audry, who knows but refuses to accept; and Sharonda, who both knows and accepts. Pariah is the first narrative film to feature a Black lesbian, and I was proud that the film was as well-done as it was. I thought it was interesting that Dee Williams chose as her protagonist a young woman closeted to her family, out to her friends, and yet still so inexperienced and unsure of herself. During the course of the film, however, Alike does come into her own, not only accepting her lesbianism but using her love of language and intelligence to distance herself from her home community. At the end of the film, Alike is on a bus bound for Berkeley, California where she has a scholarship. Berkeley here is presented as a site of freedom from the constraints of a homophobic community. Yet I didn’t love everything about Pariah. I found myself irked by some aspects of the friendship between Alike and Laura. The script plays on the idea that Laura may have serious feelings for Alike, which itself leans on the notion that best friends tend to have borderline love-like feelings for each other. Their relationship is interesting but I wish that the director would have made it not so typical and easy to read. In the few movies I’ve seen with a lesbian character, the best friend often falls in love with her, but that doesn’t happen much outside the movies. Oftentimes the story seemed rushed; I wanted more time on the intimate moments Alike shares with the people around her. I also wanted a bigger view of the larger black LGBT community. I wanted to see how Alike would react to some of the hardships that an out person goes through, which was shown but not as much as it should have been. However, no movie is perfect, and this film attempted to show different sides of “the life” while staying true to some of that things that one may experience being out and being closeted. I was pleased to see a theatrically released feature film about a Black lesbian with such strong acting, good script and high production values.  SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts