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

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

The breakout film of 2016, Moonlight, can be described in two words: instant history. For the first time, we see a film with African American and gay themes reach groundbreaking box office success -- and this with a budget of only 1.5 million, Moonlight performed exponentially well by raking in 55.8 million. In yet again instantly historic fashion, Moonlight was awarded three Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and, the most coveted, Best Picture. Contrary to the well-publicized award ceremony snafu, Moonlight’s stellar ascension is no mistake. With it’s unconventional triptych story structure and un-American reliance on silence, Moonlight feels influenced by foreign films. Sitting in the stillness or tension of the moment, the audience is left to interpret the meaning in subtle facial expressions and words unspoken. The characters communicate in a non-verbal language composed of lip biting, finger licking and side eye. As a Black man, I found this to be very genuine. Culturally, we “speak” two languages, one overlaying the other, one vocal and the other silent, one public and the other received only by the initiated. Theresa perfectly demonstrates this point during the scene where Little asks innocently, “What’s a faggot?” As Juan struggles to find the words, Theresa silently guides the conversation along using nuanced frowns and rapid headshakes. Moonlight serves up everything from nightmares to wet dreams. Demonstrating the fullness of each character, we see the protagonist, Chiron, playing the changes from running for his life as a child to breaking a chair over someone’s head as a teenager to tenderly leaning on his first love as an adult. Moonlight subtly exposes the audience to a wide range of human contact: the same hand that rinses Chiron’s seed in beach sand repeatedly strikes Chiron to the ground. The circle of children seen playing show-and-tell with their privates are seen as teenagers kicking their former friend while he's down. It’s great to see a film that gives Black actors an opportunity to display such range. One of the qualities that makes Moonlight so poignant and powerful is the cast of multi-dimensional, dynamic Black characters. In America, where we have grown accustomed to flat stereotypes of minorities as props (street urchins or comic relief), it’s enlivening to see a story showcasing complicated and nuanced African Americans. Unfortunately, it is rare to see inner-city Blacks represented in such a compassionate and human light. Black’s hard, muscular exterior sheaths his softness, vulnerability and sensitivity. Juan, a local dealer, rides herd on the dope boys working in his community but also gently cradles Little, the young protagonist, in the deep blue ocean. Some people appreciate mystery; some do not. In my conversations with people about Moonlight, I’ve heard two different responses to the film: (1) “Moonlight is a game changer! I love it! Everyone should see it!“ (2) “I don’t see what all the fuss is about, there’s no ending.” What seems open-ended in films to some comes off as unfinished to others. (What happened to Theresa?) Moonlight’s final shot of Chiron and Kevin leaning tenderly on one another deprives us of the gratification of a happy ending or knowing what the ending is. We find ourselves aching to see more. But unless there is a sequel, we will never know whether Black was touched again. As the credits roll, we are forced to imagine for ourselves what’s next for Chiron and Kevin. This is a film that would be great by any measure, the blue-violet color palette, the superb acting, the rich characterizations, but the fact that it set its gaze upon the humanity of a Black, gay man in the projects -- instant history. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

As I entered the screening of the recently-completed documentary Major!, presented by Spectrum Queer Media and part of Oakland’s 2016 Black Queer Arts Fest, I could feel this night was going to be memorable. I myself got excited when the usher told me Miss Major was in the building. Although the crowd was comprised of folks with many different identities and from all walks of life, a sense of community pervaded the Piedmont Theater. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a Black transgender woman who has been fighting for the rights of trans people of color for the past 40 years. Major!’s stories are told not only by Miss Major herself but many other transgender women and men in the community. Annalise Ophelian, a queer-identified white (cis) female who works as a clinical psychologist, directed and produced Major! Ophelian owns Floating Ophelia Productions, a company that seeks to distribute and produce independent LGBT documentaries with a social justice theme.  The film features Miss Major and her work but it’s a larger story than that. It concerns the struggle of transgender men and women of color and introduces the organization that is run by Miss Major called TGI Justice Project. TGIJP’s mission is to challenge and end the human rights abuses against transgender, gender-variant and intersex (TGI) people in California prisons and beyond. The film incorporated many people from Miss Major’s life, including candid interviews from the mother of her child, her child, her current partner, and people that consider Miss Major a mother, father, and grandmother. In the film Major speaks about her mother and her mother’s reactions to Major’s changes in gender and sexuality, about being in the Stonewall riots, and about her time in jail. The film wouldn’t have been so touching and beautiful if Major hadn’t been so open about her life. She told her life story, a difficult one marked by struggle, with grace, acceptance and a sense of humor. During the Q and A after the film, Ophelian explained that she didn’t want the story to be told from her point of view because, as a white cis woman, she has a different identity and therefore belongs to a different community. She wanted the story to come from the trans community so involved Miss Major in every step of the production. This film took Ophelian 3 years to make. Her mission for the film was to bring Miss Major’s lessons and teachings beyond Miss Major’s circle. She explained Her film, she explained, isn’t the common narrative of sex work, difficult interpersonal relations and unhappy life stories that popular media has created for trans people.  Miss Major has an optimistic, beautiful outlook on life and although she has dealt with plenty of racism, homophobia, and ignorance, the film focuses more on the positive and the great work she does to make a difference in other’s lives. The film evokes emotion. It makes you feel happy, sad, confident and inspired. Miss Major possesses a wonderfully crass, classy, wise and sassy humor that is highlighted throughout the film. During the film Major had the whole crowd tearing up from laughter as well as heartbreak and awe. Her words are eloquent whether cracking a joke or discussing the injustices in her life and what goes on today. To me Miss Major is an inspiration. She dedicated her life to create a better future for everyone because as she says in the film, a world where trans people can feel accepted is a better world for everyone. As the credits began to roll everyone stood to give a much deserved standing ovation to THE Miss Major, a woman who works to inspire greater love. Major! is a testimony to not only the work that Miss Major has done for the community of trans people of color but a testimony to the resilient and brilliant lives within the community. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

August Wilson's early masterpiece " Ma Rainey's Black Bottom " debuted on Broadway in 1984. The play broke revolutionary ground by making a Black woman a main character. The play went beyond revolutionary by integrating the fact of Ma Rainey's bisexuality (revealed through the 1972 publication of Chris Albertson's biography of Bessie Smith ) into its portrayal. This is done matter-of-factly. Ma brings her girl-toy Dussie Mae into the studio as part of her entourage, and though their relationship is clear, there's nothing overt about it in the play. The movie, of course, ramps up the sexuality whenever possible. The other protagonist, Levee, also hits on Dussie Mae. In the 1984 play, he's only semi-successful, stealing a couple of kisses. In the 2020 movie he has full-on sex on the piano. Of course we can't have lesbian sex in a big-budget film aiming for wide release, but there are scenes of physical intimacy between Ma and Dussie Mae that portray the obvious. And yet Ma's bisexuality seems beside the point. The hammered-home thesis of "Ma Rainey" is that the white man screws Blacks over every which way to Sunday. Part of Ma's heroic stature derives from the way she imposes her will on the whites around her. It makes her a bitch diva, but doesn't she have to be in a world stacked against her? She's dark-skinned, female, fat, and homely. No wonder she seems pissed throughout. Yet the title of the play -- and the song which Ma composed -- belies that portrait. The song is funny and slightly lewd in a poker-room context. "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." The real Ma Rainey was also funny and slightly lewd (check out her " Sissy Blues "), but not in August Wilson's world. Pride of place goes to his tormented men. The play may bear Ma Rainey's name, but it's the men of her band who get the big emotional arias. "What's the colored man gonna do with himself?" Toledo asks in his famous "leftovers" monologue. The "colored woman" doesn't even get the question. And none of Wilson's men in any of his plays have a homosexual bone in their bodies. Where does Ma's bisexuality fit into all of this? I can't figure it out. It's potentially central. The sexual rivalry over Dussie Mae contributes to the conflict between Ma and Levee, but more fire and dialogue is given to their clashing views on music and performance. Although Ma is a commanding figure, compelling to watch, the play is ultimately Levee's. It is his oppression -- by the white man, by his uncomprehending boss (a queer woman), by his own self-sabotaging character -- that we are asked to bleed for. And yet it is the hapless innocent Toledo that he kills. Ma Rainey has left the studio. She seems strangely marginal by then -- along with her lesbian tendencies. There will be lots of criticism and analysis of the movie. Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman will be nominated for Oscars; kudos will flood to all involved. But this I prophesize -- there will be little discussion, outside of a throwaway reference, to the complexities of Ma's sexuality. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The 2017 edition of Frameline, the San Francisco LGBT film festival, screened a gorgeously restored copy of Issac Julien’s Black queer classic, Looking for Langston, released during the Stone Age of queer cinema – 1989. Hard to believe it is already a quarter of a century old. I had seen it many years ago, but in the greenness of my years, I had little taste for non-narrative films, and Looking for Langston was nothing if not experimental. Seeing it now with a greater understanding and (presumed) maturity, I can only add my voice to the mountains of accolades the film has already accrued--among them a Teddy award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Although the film is non-narrative, there is a thematic and visual cohesion that makes it enjoyably watchable througout its 40 minutes and suggestive enough to sketch possible story lines in my mind as I think about it later. Sumptuously shot in black and white, the film begins with a funeral, presumably Hughes’ though, as an in-joke, it is Julien who lies in the coffin, and a voice-over of Toni Morrison’s eulogy of James Baldwin. If we take the funeral to be in commemoration of, at its most generic, a Black queer artist, then the camera’s descent into a highly stylized gay Harlem nightclub where most of the action takes place can easily be read as symbolic or Freudian or deconstructionist . . . or any number of ways. The thing that strikes me about Looking for Langston is at what a high point Black queer filmmaking begins. Oftentimes – and I’ve seen this with other oppressed minorities finding their voice – the filmic beginnings are raw, amateurish, and focused on the difficulties of being (fill in the blank). Witness the movies of Oscar Micheaux, who never made a film that measured up to what Hollywood was producing during that same era. Similarly, as the first feature-length film featuring a gay Black man growing up in the ‘hood, Moonlight deserved its Hollywood coronation as Oscar’s 2017 Best Picture. So sometimes a fully fledged artists comes shooting out of the gate and needs no ancestors on whose shoulders (s)he can stand. But that’s a rarity and a quirk of history. When considering top-flight movies featuring Black queer characters, what else comes to mind?  Dee Rees’ Pariah (2011) is workmanlike and adequate but not a masterpiece. (Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman [1996] is much more interesting.) As somebody who is currently working on a documentary about queers in the Harlem Renaissance, I was particularly interested in the film’s visual and literary references – recognized much of the archival footage used (and which I plan to use myself) as well as the literary texts quoted.  In fact, the world that Julien creates in Looking for Langston is so compelling that there were external clips that threw me out of it. The footage of Hughes reading from Montage of a Dream Deferred to a jazz band in the background now seems corny, and the voice-over excerpts of Essex Hemphill’s sexually explicit poetry (“Now we think/as we fuck/this nut might kill us”) struck me as vulgar given the era’s sophisticated sheen. I can’t imagine anybody in Langston’s circle ever saying “fuck.”  I also didn’t realize, until doing further research, that the white character was “supposed” to represent Carl Van Vechten, that the handsome mustachioed lead was “supposed” to represent Langston himself, and that the hunky dark love interest was an imagined male lover named “Beauty.”  (See above photo.) Nor did it matter. Many people know that there used to be copyright disputes with the Hughes’ estate requiring that the sound be turned down or off during the two clips of Hughes’ reading from Montage. I believed, as did many, that was because the inheritors of the Hughes estate didn’t want to have his name explicitly associated with queer themes, but, as Wikipedia points out, the estate allowed Hughes’ poetry to be included in many anthologies of queer poetry. So it seems that the original difficulties, now ironed out, weren’t due to denial or homophobia on the part of the protectors of Hughes’ reputation but stemmed rather – and predictably--from the usual greed of the rights holders. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Modern African nations are largely creations of Western imperialism. Once the colonial powers and their administrative authority evaporate, these societies frequently experience wrenching transitions. Without a properly regulated society, there is nothing to curb the values being implemented by the newest wave of extremism. Thus, Uganda is subject to mob justice and various other manifestations of extreme faith. Some of the most disturbing scenes in God Loves Uganda are of young missionaries praying with destitute mothers and their feeble children in remote villages, promising them God’s glory and grace. Unlike these American youths (who are likely acting on good intentions), poor Ugandans do not have the choice to ‘reinvent’ themselves, reestablish their religious identity, and can’t lean on an effective social or governmental system to provide them with their basic needs. It becomes increasingly difficult for the religious poor to distance themselves from an irrational dependence on evangelicalism to solve their problems and “absolve them of their sins.” This paves the way for a violent demonization of the homosexuals already condemned by Western evangelicals. In God Loves Uganda , Kato’s murder is no longer a stand-alone event. Images of presumed homosexuals being jumped in the street and discussions of gay lynchings draw attention to the increasingly regressive effects of devout Christianity in Uganda. Uganda was the first African nation to feature a barbarous dictator, Idi Amin. Although Amin was patently a buffoon and a murderer (100,000 to 500,000 people murdered under his regime), the very fact that he was able to remain in power for eight years, including a stint as the head of the Organizations of African Unity, demonstrates the weakness of the Western democracy Britain tried to leave as its legacy. Other forms of Western influence (Christianity, small-time capitalism), however, struck much deeper roots as evidenced by impassioned street preachers and the ‘hustle and grind’ mentality of Ugandan salesmen. Today, whichever Western values are backed by money and well-honed rhetoric easily penetrate Ugandan society. Unfortunately, the only influences attempting to reach Ugandans in this capacity are religious forces, while more useful and important aspects of Western democracy are denied the public by economic sanctions and ideological factors. Prior to the passage of Uganda’s anti-gay law, another Christian-based policy undermined development in the nation; the George W. Bush administration’s push for abstinence-based programs led to a rebound in AIDS rates in a nation that had previously been a model in the fight against the disease. Both Call Me Kuchu and God Loves Uganda explore themes of extremism, perception, and morality. While the former features scenes of Kato and his friends performing gender-bending drag shows, the latter depicts International House of Prayer devotees flailing and wailing in alarming mass prayer services. As third party viewers, we begin to wonder how extremism is defined, how context and cultural perception determine our perspective of each film. Western-style homosexuality is a modern phenomenon, unknown in traditional African societies. There are other, age-old forms of homo-social attraction and activity, but nothing approaching a unified identity. With greater visibility in the West came greater reaction, particularly from the Christian right, engaged in culture wars against abortion, homosexuality, and liberalism. The movement’s clear losses in the United States have prompted its leaders to look to other nations. “The West has been in a decline,” Engle explains, “But right now I think that Africa is the firepot of spiritual renewal and revival.” While America has developed a resistance to this bigoted faith, Uganda is a prime target. With the youngest population in the world, indoctrination begins early on. While evangelicals warn Ugandans against homosexuals and their ‘recruitment’ and brain-washing’ processes, scenes of faith leaders and missionaries literally whispering the word of God into Ugandan children’s ears during prayer are profoundly unsettling. This religious brainwashing creates a receptive audience for outrageous lies (homosexuals created Nazism) and distorted propaganda (presenting some extreme practices, such as coprophilia, as typical). All the while, Evangelical devotees engage in their own irrational and extreme behavior: speaking in tongues, practicing exorcisms, and preaching hate and violence against gays. Gay pride parades, effeminate dress, and other markers of Western homosexuality may be commonplace in the US, but films of two men kissing, drag queens, and discussion of sex practices among gays (used by Western-trained Reverend Ssempa) are shocking to most Africans. The liberal and culturally specific identity of homosexuals in the West is alien to citizens of underdeveloped nations, in which individual freedoms and personal identity have been suppressed for decades. Perhaps the degree to which gayness is perceived as ‘extreme’ in Uganda is indicative of an underlying truth: that some African nations are so behind in social evolution and the realization of freedoms that Western homosexuality is thought of as frightening. As we in the West now know, homosexuality is not the product of indoctrination and recruitment, or individual choice but rather, genetically determined. The irony of fundamentalist claims regarding homosexuality is that they bastardize what is natural and unalterable, describing Christian fundamentalism as transmissible as DNA (an actual claim made by Reverend JoAnna Watson in the film). The degree to which notions of extremism and what is morally acceptable continue to be warped in Uganda is truly worrying. With prominent oppositional leaders being killed off (Kato), excommunicated (Christopher Senyonjo), and fleeing the country (Kapya Kaoma), hope for Uganda seems slim. However, both Call Me Kuchu and God Loves Uganda have prompted serious discussion regarding the damaging effects of exported Evangelism on Ugandan society. However, in spite of international condemnation, Ugandan President Museveni signed the infamous kill-the-gays bill into law on February 23, 2015. It will take further exposés, prolonged debate, and more honest and well-intended Western exports to re-educate and reform the ills of this nation and to free its repressed gay population. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

We were talking about Christmas, about the Christmas tree, and we never called it a Chanukah bush.  I must have heard that somewhere else.  We decorated it with bulbs and tinsel, and it stood beautifully in the corner with the fireplace flames reflected in the colored balls.  The cats would play with the ornaments, and there was the inevitable Christmas when one of them pulled the whole tree over.  My mother baked cookies to put in the playroom for Santa, and I wondered how he came down the chimney without getting sooty.     The mounted moose head above the piano wore false eyelashes and dangled a cigarette from its lips. And when some innocent visitor asked where the rest of the moose was, expecting no doubt to hear that it was packed in the freezer, my father replied, “It’s hanging out the back.”  And at Christmas we decorated his antlers with bulbs and tinsel.   But it wasn’t all Christmas, and after all, the tree was thrown by the woodpile after it had turned brown and its needles were falling to the floor.  The crickets sang outside my window every night, and sometimes I would run to the garage and piss in the bushes, shivering from the cold and knowing I would soon be under the covers again.  We were talking about Christmas, and every year we'd get Slinkies and every year we'd stretch or tangle them, but toys were made to be broken, and nobody much cared.  Only the wagon stayed relatively intact, rusting every year into further dissolution, but red, after its fashion, and four-wheeled, the essence of a wagon.        I'm not going to say we were talking about Christmas again, because it was all Christmas, even though my mother tried lighting Chanukah candles for a few years.  It never took. My sister killed the elm tree in the backyard lawn by hosing soapy water from the horse's washing into its pit. And I accidentally knocked a croquet ball into my brother’s aquarium after he had washed it and left it out to dry.  (And when I was seventeen, I tried to keep track of how many times I heard "White Christmas" between Thanksgiving and New Year's, losing count after thirty-six.)  I suppose we were different – my parents certainly thought so. I was not popular in school, but the difference didn’t explain why my brother played so well in Little League.  My childhood idol, Steve Lewis, organized our games of sandlot football before his father built a house on the playing field.  Steve was blond and big and athletic and tolerated my company, and it was only later that his father became a member of the John Birch Society. Maybe that’s why he stopped playing with me.    And we weren't talking about Christmas so much anymore because we had grown up some and the aerospace depression had hit, and there were better things to spend the money on.  But we still had a tree, and some of the neighbors hung colored lights from the roof eaves, and Hastings Ranch, just across the canyon, put on such a big seasonal display that tour buses started coming through. Each street would have a series of the same cut-outs in front of each house: angels in blue dresses holding gold books, four-foot candy canes tilted at a similar angle, giant Christmas cards with season’s greetings displayed in different languages. Individual houses boasted their own displays: Santa's helpers skating on mechanized wheels, an automatic slide show of the Nativity, sleighs and snowbells on irrigated lawns, a world of lights and cardboard wishing you a Merry Christmas.  (I laughed so hard at the six-foot figure of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer holding a champagne glass and hiccupping "Bingle Jells.")  And, yes, we caroled along with others in the neighborhood.  “O come O come, Emmanuel/To free your captive Israel.”   Blood. By blood. By tradition and blood. By memories, tradition and blood. What memories? What tradition? We were talking about Christmas; we weren't talking about the paschal lamb.  We were talking turkey if we were talking anything, and the calendar cut-outs at elementary school were pumpkins for the month of October and holly wreaths in December. We were talking about Christmas, though some were talking about Auschwitz, and the rain made the roof slick so that it was dangerous to climb and adjust the antenna, but nobody ever fell, and the mudslides from the mountains never hit us, though there was always a chance that they might.     -Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Chanukah vs. Christmas – The Underdog Loses SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Dear White People (2014) is one of the smartest and funniest satires on screwed-up American Black/white relations ever. I can't think of another move that comes close to its range and wit on this particular subject. (Movies focusing on race relations usually take themselves very seriously.) Writer/director Justin Simien produces crackling dialogue, and his principal characters are as articulate as those of George Bernard Shaw. Best of all, Simien himself is gay. “I definitely got a subversive thrill out of, you know, sticking a gay character in the middle of a black movie that does aim for the mainstream,” he told a group of Harvard students gathered for a conference on non-white matriculates. The character, Lionel Higgins, a sci-fi nerd with an Afro the size of a 1950s beehive hairdo, seems as uninterested in his Black identity as his gay one. In a conversation with Lionel, the school’s Black dean admits, “Sure, sometimes our folks can be intolerant around people like you. Homo . . .” “I don’t believe in labels,” Lionel cuts in. But that doesn’t stop others from bullying him because of his sexual orientation. Students at the Ivy League stand-in of Winchester College are divided between several residence halls. Most of the Black students choose to self-segregate in the Armstrong Parker house, but Lionel has been placed in another house led by Kurt Fletcher, the bratty entitled son of the white university president. Kurt doesn’t slam Lionel for being Black, but his homosexuality is fair game. In a prank message put on Lionel’s answering machine, Kurt’s voice lisps, "Hey boyss, you've reached Lionel Higginss, the only bitch on campusss who'll give you a dicksscount. That's right, the bigger the dick, the less you'll have to pay me to sssuck it." Lionel is not the only gay character in the film.  George, the white editor of the main campus paper who recruits him to “go undercover” and write about the Armstrong Parker House, locks lips with him during the course of the movie. (In the Charlotte, NC theater where I was watching Dear White People last month, the predominantly Black audience groaned at this gay kiss.)  However, it becomes clear that George has fetishized Lionel for his Blackness, so even the possibility of gay love is foreclosed by the all-pervasive racism of campus life. Looking through the script, I saw that there was a shot of out and proud students at the university, but I have no memory of it. Otherwise there’s no sense of an LGBT community on campus. It’s not fair to ask a 90-minute movie to take on all issues it brings up—and race clearly holds center stage—but Lionel’s sexual orientation seems to be only another marker of his outsider nature. By the end of the film, once he’s embraced his Black identity, he’s shown, shorn of his ridiculous Afro, smiling and exchanging high fives with other residents of Armstrong Parker House. Interestingly, however, the violence of racial confrontation climaxes in a transgressive same-sex kiss about which next to nothing has been written. Kurt is editor of a Harvard Lampoon style paper that hosts a famous Halloween party every year. This year’s party features a Black theme that encourages attendees to “unleash their inner Negro.” Sickened by what he sees, Lionel smashes the DJ stand, provoking a confrontation that escalates into pushing and shoving. Kurt hustles Lionel out of the house, throws him to the ground and demandswhile sitting on top of him,“Why do you have to be such a fucking fag?” (And what does that have to do with Lionel’s objection to the racism of the party’s premise.) At this point, Lionel fully embraces his Blackness but uses “being a fag” as the ultimate weapon of aggression. ”Well,” Lionel replies, “you finally got me where you want me.” At which point, he raises his torso and plants a violent kiss on Kurt’s lips. This provokes not only a full-scale assault on Lionel but a student riot that requires the intervention of the police and commands the attention of national news outlets. There’s a lot going on here, but what’s not going on is any contextualization of Lionel’s gayness or of the radical nature of his “attack.” (Though he’s not the first movie character to use a same-sex kiss as a form of violence.) Nor has there been much commentary—and no analysis—on the few gay elements present in the film. Of course, when football players at Morehouse College created a loud outburst during the first gay kiss of an on-campus screening, that made it into the media but it’s hardly news that football players, Black or white, are homophobic. Simien himself makes it clear that the film’s focus is on race, which perhaps reflects the more pressing aspect of his dual-minority identity. “In Hollywood I experienced racism more than homophobia,” Simien declared in a BET interview . But then, outside of Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant, how many openly gay American directors can you name working in mainstream cinema? Simien is a young director and, God willing, has many more films in him. Perhaps in the future we’ll see a deeper consideration of gayness from his screenwriter’s pen. Or perhaps race will continue to trump sexual orientation because race can never be invisible, and bigotry goes for the low-hanging fruit (pun intended). In the meantime, let’s take nothing away from the achievement of Dear White People . Turning an openly gay character into a “race man,” to use the label of an earlier era, is perhaps a unique act in American cinema – and hopefully a promising start. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts