Our home town Christmas tree, Union Square, San Francisco Jewish holidays fall broadly into two categories – those confirming the greatness of Jehovah (Yom Kippur) and those celebrating the unlikely survival of the Jewish people against lopsided odds (Passover). The major Jewish holidays are Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in October and Passover in April. The Jewish holiday best known to Americans, however, is the minor holiday Hannukah, which is celebrated in December. Hannukah’s temporal proximity to Christmas made it the only festive contender to put up against the Christian juggernaut. The outcome of this contest was a foregone conclusion and this was for several reasons. Christmas is a major holiday; Hannukah, a minor one. The stories behind the two holidays are of a different order of importance altogether. Hannukah celebrates the miracle of a one-day oil supply of the newly rededicated Temple of Jerusalem’s menorah, feeding the sacred flame for eight days. It’s cool enough as miracles go but not as dramatic as parting the Red Sea or walking on water. Furthermore, Christmas celebrates THE BIRTH OF THE MESSIAH WHO HAS COME TO SAVE ALL MANKIND! -- a religious rock star. We Jews are still waiting for our Messiah. Once again, a distinct lack of drama. Furthermore, America’s version of Hannukah got hyped in direct response to the invention of Christmas at the end of the 19th century. Two Cincinnati rabbis, hugely influential promoters of Reform Judaism, saw that we needed something to offer the kids to keep them in the fold. The main draw was all the Christmas loot. We couldn’t justify the lavish expenditures of an increasingly prosperous and urbanized middle class (and as Jews, we weren’t that rich yet), but we spaced our gift-giving out over the eight days of Hanukkah. Compare one gift a day to the riot of wrapped presents to be torn through on Christmas morning. Lighting the menorah candles possesses a pleasing ritual gravitas, but what is that to a kid compared to trimming a fir tree with bulbs and tinsel? Every newly unwrapped toy testifies to the bounty of Christmas. What do we have at Hannukah? – sad little dreidel games accompanied by the sad little dreidel song. “Dreidel dreidel dreidel, I made it out of clay/And when it’s dry and ready, dreidel I will play.” That doesn’t stand up against any Christmas carol. Quite unfairly, all the Currier and Ives winter imagery gets associated with Christmas, not Hanukkah. (Imagine those Central Park skaters in black caftans and fur hats, women on one side and men on the other.) “Jingle Bells” is not a Christmas song, and yet it gets thrown in with paeans to the Baby Jesus. And just when Hannukah is down for the count, America’s Teutonic heritage provides the coup de grace – Santa Claus, the flying reindeer, the huge sack of presents. And yet . . . Jewish difference, the refusal to submit to cultural or physical extinction, manifests itself once again. We put our indelible stamp on the culture. Practically all of the great Christmas songs were written by Jews: “White Christmas” (Israel Beilin), “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (Hugh Martin), “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” (Walter Kaufman), and the poison pill that may ultimately kill Christmas in a better future, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (John David Marks). --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience into this foray in Unplugging from Christmas SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Raising her family in a newly-created suburban neighborhood on a Pasadena mesa during the 1950s, my mother always knew she was a square peg in a round hole. For a long time, we were the only Jewish family on the block, the street, and probably the whole damn mesa. But almost as bad was the fact that my parents were Democrats and made no secret of it. While driving to a neighborhood party (there were plenty of those in the 50s and 60s), my mother querulously remarked, "I wonder why we're invited. They don't like our politics, and I'm sure they don't like Jews." "They have to," my father replied, "or they'll lose their federal funding." The linkage of Jewishness to commie proclivities was hardly new to the neighbors. While they may not have known the particulars of history, they'd probably heard the recognizably Jewish names of Rosa Luxemburg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg, and wasn't Karl Marx himself a Jew? Nobody explained how a cabal of Jews directed capitalism from behind the scenes on the one hand while working for the victory of communism on the other, but this diffuse antisemitism was rarely put under a spotlight and so never needed to leave the shadows of innuendo and prejudice. One of our right-wing neighbors, an early member of the John Birch Society, tried to alert the authorities that my father, who occasionally attended scientific conferences (he was consulting polymer chemist) behind the Iron Curtain, was in all probability a Soviet informer but was frustrated in his patriotic duty by the fact that the CIA had already asked my father to debrief them about those same conferences and went with their blessing. In the spring of 1966, the escalating catastrophe of the Vietnam War ruined or ended the lives of ever greater numbers of young American men, and since the Establishment (as we called it then) hadn't yet realized that you could fling your troops in harm's way with impunity if they were poor or colored or both, the draft was universal and imperiled the children of the middle class as well. (The rich always found a way to get around it; pace George Bush.) My brother, born in 1946, was required to register with the local draft board in 1964 when he turned 18. (My turn came in 1968.) There were escape hatches to being sent into this senseless slaughter, most notably the student deferment offered to those who were enrolled in higher education. In 1966, my brother was in his second year of attending Pasadena City College. In May of that year, a neighbor ("a good Democrat,") informed my mother that the talk at a ladies' luncheon had turned to the draft and the danger it posed to their boys. Unprovoked, one woman piped up, "Well, Amy doesn't have to worry. David will never be drafted because he's a communist." Here, I let my mother pick up the tale: The ladies pooh-poohed her, saying that they have known us a long time and all are impressed with Joe's secret confidential super security clearance, and they have always known that we are liberal Democrats and they are almost used to it. When she was questioned, this dumb dame said that she knew David was a communist because she had worked at the US employment office and when David had filled out his application, he had written on it that he was a communist. Mother was aghast at the gossip. My parents had lived through the McCarthy era and knew that if the label stuck, David might find it impossible to get work, and it could have even threatened my father's security clearance. So I decided to do battle and stop it right there. I realized that she was lying foolishly, for there is nothing on a federal application to show race, creed, color, church, etc. I telephoned the supervisor of the office in Pasadena and told him the story. He turned out to be a nice guy and was horrified. That kind of question was against the law anyway. Then he told me I could see the file, which was absolutely clean. Now I had her. She lied about his having put his name to be "that thing," and so I went to work. I telephoned her best friend, who had been at the party, and told her what had happened and expressed sorrowfully that I was considering a libel suit and was, of course, going to talk with Joe and our lawyer. I was terribly sorry, but I was sick of being talked about and really decided to see it through this time. As I hoped, the woman I called got in touch with my antagonist and told her I was sore and had proof she had lied. Then, I did nothing for a week so that the rumor would spread of what she had done and how I had checked her. It worked like I was a professional. I finally telephoned her and said I wanted to see her—that she had said something quite damaging about David and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I was very nice. When we got together, she was a shaking mass of apologies. Yes, she had said that about David, didn't know why, for they always liked us and she wouldn't do anything in the world to hurt us (like fun) and she was so sorry, so sorry. She also said that the rumor didn't come from anyone—that she had started it. She told me the story would stop there and she would call the people at the party. I was very nice and forgave her and said I was sorry too and this was a good lesson the whole neighborhood would learn for a long time to come. But even though my mother had emerged victorious, it hurt her too, proving yet again (as if we needed it) that we could easily be targeted for our "difference." You know, I had a feeling of relief, gratitude, pity and was also a little sick to my stomach. In so many ways this is such a magnificent country and these people want to tear it down and destroy us. This name-calling is a bad business and I am glad I followed it through, but it took a lot out of me. Nobody wants to start a fight. I'm glad she's dead and doesn't have to witness this awful renewal of antisemitism and liberal vilification. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Evilest Queer Jew in America SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

A panel from the AIDS quilt The list of evil queer Jews with any sort of public profile isn't long, but Roy Cohn, lawyer to the worst actors in mid-20th century America, amoral snake, and Svengali to Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, easily comes out on top. (Although he was a bottom in his drug-and-money-fueled pursuit of the handsome blond men who tickled his fancy.)I had some hazy knowledge of Roy Cohn before the AIDS crisis because my father was vehemently against McCarthyism and all it stood for, fueling his hatred not only of "Tail Gunner Joe" but other slimy opportunists who used the Red Scare to further their political careers, notably Richard Nixon.Interestingly -- and this is little commented upon -- Cohn's homosexual proclivities landed McCarthy in the hot water that finally scalded his seemingly impenetrable skin. Cohn became infatuated with a rich, handsome young anti-communist crusader, G. David Schine, whom he brought onto McCarthy's staff as an unpaid "chief consultant." Though Schine was straight and probably never returned Cohn's sexual interest, that didn't stop the young lawyer from conducting a campaign of hectoring telephone calls and threats to military officials when Schine was drafted into the army.  The military refused to grant Private Schine special privileges, and Cohn, maddened by encountering an entity that wouldn't cave, vowed to "wreck the Army" if his demands were not met. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which exposed the senator's dishonest, bullying tactics before a wide television audience. (The Army's defense attorney publicly shamed McCarthy by angrily demanding, "Have you no decency?" -- a tactic that would get no traction in these postlapsarian times.) Losing his credibility, McCarthy was censured in the Senate and drank himself to death three years later.  All the while, Cohn and McCarthy destroyed the lives and careers of numerous homosexuals in a collateral Lavender Scare because, of course, identified sex perverts were susceptible to blackmail and had to be stamped out as yet another security risk. Leaving a disgraced McCarthy and having inflicted incalculable damage upon the struggling and inchoate gay community, Cohn returned to private practice as a New York attorney. Because I wasn't a mafia don (Carmine Galante) or following the antics of the uber-rich (Aristotle Onassis), the extremely corrupt (Roger Stone), and the rampant avariciousness of the rising fascist elite (he introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch in the 1970s), I wasn't aware of Cohn's poisonous but extremely lucrative calling as lawyer and advisor to the richest dregs of humanity. On some level, I knew that Cohn was a faggot. When he died of AIDS in 1986, protesting loudly to the end that he was afflicted with liver cancer, I consigned him to the same bin of self-hating homosexuals as Liberace and Freddie Mercury. Still, it was a shock to run across the panel in the AIDS quilt that some compassionate individual had fashioned for this rotted disaster whose evil against homosexuals surpassed even that of the gay Nazi, Ernst Röhm. But for another queer Jew, Tony Kushner, the life and death of Roy Cohn led to the monumental achievement of Angels In America, first performed in San Francisco in 1991. Kushner's portrayal of Cohn as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite (a different kind of screaming queen) has seared him forever into the American consciousness (probably with greater humanity than he deserved). Through the medium of the play, Kushner brought other facets of Cohn's evils to light. In his delirium, he is confronted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he prosecuted by extorting a false confession from her brother-in-law and who was executed after Cohn illegally lobbied the judge for the death penalty. "I'd have pulled the switch myself if they let me," Cohn brags in the play.  Cohn conducted his professional life as a closeted gay man (although his homosexuality was very much an open secret), but he couldn't run away from his Jewish identity. His name and origins in the affluent Jewish community of the Bronx marked him indelibly. He was a mama's boy, of course, but that's a condition shared by both gay men and Jews. In Cohn's case, Mama was even more of a warping influence on her only child than the usual run of such characters. Mother and son lived together until her death in 1967 and she was constantly attentive to his grades, appearance and relationships. When Cohn's father insisted that Roy be sent to a summer camp, his mother rented a house nearby. Predictably, after his mother's death, Cohn's frenzied promiscuity reached almost visible heights.  Writing that Cohn's sins finally caught up with him would be nice. In 1975, Cohn entered the hospital room of a dying and unconscious client, forced a pen into his hand, and applied it to a document appointing himself as executor. (The gambit didn't work.) He beat three trials for unethical and unprofessional conduct before finally being disbarred in 1986, but by that time, he was on his way out. He died at age 59, seemingly without remorse or any self-awareness. But how could he hate himself as much as others did?  In 1950, communists were identified with two minorities–Jews and homosexuals. Cohn was both. What better way to inoculate himself against the slanders he knew would be coming his way than by proving himself the most resolute of red baiters and acquiring enough clout to silence those who threatened to out him or subject him to antisemitism? He perfected the techniques of bullying and passed his playbook on to his mentee, Donald Trump: never admit wrongdoing, never apologize, and attack attack attack.  What a legacy!  --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in My Mother Scotches A Communist Smear Campaign SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Arna Bontemps For scholars and historians of the period, it is well understood that the Harlem Renaissance refers to a quickening of Black art and culture in many of the urban conglomerations of African Americans, not just Harlem. There was plenty going on in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Atlanta. When this quickening became so noticeable as to require a name, "Negro Renaissance" was the first appellation, and it's a pity something analogous didn't stick. But "Harlem Renaissance" became widely accepted even though it led to an overvaluation of Harlem as the unofficial Black capital and a slighting of other seedbeds of Black creativity. Several cosmopolitan "stars" of the Renaissance only passed through Harlem and went on to careers elsewhere (Jean Toomer, Josephine Baker, Claude McKay). Certainly Harlem itself was a magnet and drew to its bosom the brightest and most ambitious of the race. Countee Cullen, who came of age and spent his life in Harlem, was more the exception than the rule. The biggest names of the Harlem Renaissance came from elsewhere: Langston Hughes, Missouri; Aaron Douglas, Kansas, Zora Neale Hurston, Florida. What was California's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance? Even though the Los Angeles Black community outgrew all others in the Far West (almost 16,000 in 1920), the Great Migration that gave rise to Chicago's Southside and Harlem itself bypassed western cities. In contrast to the racial homogeneity of these enclaves, L.A.'s "Blackest" district, Central Avenue, housed one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the nation. Even though practically all of L.A.'s Blacks lived in proximity to Central Avenue, they topped out at 20% of the district's population, which included "white" immigrants from Europe, people of Mexican descent -- native-born and immigrants – and the Japanese. Not to mention white Americans from the Northeast and Midwest. Yet L.A.'s Black community resonated with the cultural trends emanating from Harlem. Marcus Garvey's UNIA took Black L.A. by storm in the early 1920s, but the enthusiasm quickly vanished in the wake of Garvey's fiscal mismanagement and the fiasco of the Black Star Line. The L.A. branch of the NAACP was convened in 1914, two years after the organization's founding. In 1928, it hosted the NAACP's national annual convention to great acclaim. But the cultural currents only ran from east to west. Two Western writers made the pilgrimage to Harlem to participate in the Renaissance, but only Arna Bontemps was raised in California. His middle-class parents, devoutly embracing Seventh-Day Adventism, raised their children to assimilate into the dominant culture. Bontemps lived in majority-white neighborhoods and was (excellently) educated at majority-white schools. By the time he graduated from Pacific Union College (an Adventist institution), he felt he'd been robbed of his birthright. Rebelling against his upbringing, he moved to Harlem in 1924 and, being a writer of some talent, entered the stabler cohort of younger writers and forged lasting friendships with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. But not being a writer of first-rate talent, the two Renaissance novels he produced are rarely taught and even less discussed. And, of course, the subject matter is Black AF, but since he didn't grow up in the South, his God Sends Sunday (1931) is rife with the stereotypes that W.E.B. Du Bois ticked off in his ticked-off review: "sordid crime, drinking, gambling, whore-mongering, and murder." Bontemps's second novel, Black Thunder, about the Gabriel Prosser slave rebellion of 1800 (another attempt to kill the white father) was far more artistically successful and broke ground in African American literature as historical fiction, but its 1936 publication came after the Depression had scattered the principal players of the Renaissance to safer harbors than a now-ravaged Harlem. Wallace Thurman, born and raised in Salt Lake City -- mostly -- was a Westerner, and his peripatetic life before relocating to Harlem in 1925 encompassed three years in Los Angeles, where he dropped out of the University of Southern California and met Arna Bontemps while both worked in the post office. Bontemps and Thurman promoted their own two-man Negro Renaissance to little effect in California, but when Bontemps made the move to Harlem as the literary Renaissance was rising to public notice, Thurman followed hard on his heels. The friendship between the two Western writers did not last. Thurman was extremely conflicted, maniacally productive, and undoubtedly the leading iconoclast of the Harlem Renaissance until he drank himself to death in 1931 -- also gay, which didn't help matters. He evinces little love for his Western origins in his fictional transgender autobiography, The Blacker the Berry (1929) and briskly skewers the shallow values of the aspiring Blacks at USC. (My father, who had won a fellowship in chemistry at USC in 1942, similarly hated the social climbing student body and dropped out in his turn.) Slim pickings, all told. I could complicate matters further by examining the astonishing and successful career of Claude Sergeant Johnson, a (voluntarily) Black sculptor who conducted his long professional life out of San Francisco, but this essay has gone on quite long enough. California, especially Los Angeles, made a group contribution to African American culture, but that came well after the Richard Wright generation had buried the Harlem Renaissance. And Octavia Butler wasn't born until 1947. --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Black Rebellions I Have Known: The L.A. Episodes SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Watts Rebellion, Los Angeles, California, August 13, 1965 Having grown up swathed in unrecognized white privilege (i.e. The Fifties), I accepted the common term “riots,” which the mainstream media used to delegitimize the violence. I was unaware of Black rebellions in the past – they were certainly never mentioned in history class. And the first one that hit Los Angeles, the Watts Rebellion of August 1965, packed a wallop. Six days of unabated rampage and crackdown produced 34 deaths,1,032 injuries, and over $40 million in property damage. Newspapers were filled with front-page photos of carnage and burning. I was fifteen and, though familiar with the potential condensation of suspicion that being Jewish sometimes produced, I never thought to apply it to other minority groups. I never questioned why there were no African Americans in my neighborhood, very few in Pasadena High, rare on TV except for the sports news. I wasn’t primed for fear. Anyway, Pasadena was 20 miles away from the mayhem, and suburban life continued as it always had. The rebellion remained distant. It hadn’t sensitized me to the conditions that brought about the rebellion in the first place: high unemployment, poor schools, inferior living conditions – POVERTY. All these facets of systemic racism were meticulously elaborated in the McCone Report, commissioned by the governor, ceremoniously received, then consigned to oblivion. Three years later, Dr. King was assassinated, and violence erupted in 125 cities around the country. But not Los Angeles. I was a senior, still at Pasadena High and was appalled like everybody else. Less than three months later, Robert Kennedy (the hero, not the fruitcake) was assassinated, also in Los Angeles. It seemed like a violent time. People spoke fearfully of “the long hot summers” that would ignite Black rage and consume other neighborhoods. For the next dozen years, all seemed quiet (or effectively clamped down) on the racial front – if you were white. White America refused to recognize that police departments all over the country could commit atrocities on Black individuals and communities with impunity. The inciting incident for all these rebellions was white cops taking African Americans into custody with horrifically excessive violence. That sparked the Miami Rebellion of 1980. Then the chickens came home to roost again. On March 3, 1991, African American motorist Rodney King was viciously beaten by four white officers while being arrested. This police brutality, usually invisible to the public and strenuously denied by the men in blue, was caught on camera and broadcast on local and national news. This video, the first of its kind (such violence now being sadly commonplace), shocked Americans across the country – again, the white ones. But since the cat was out of the bag in such a public manner, the Los Angeles Police Department had to put the four officers on leave and give them up to a State trial for excessive use of force. (King suffered a fractured skull, a broken right ankle, broken teeth, and permanent neurological damage.) The trial venue was moved from Los Angeles Country to the all-white town of Simi Valley. On April 29, 1992 the jury of ten white men, one Asian, and one Latino, acquitted all four police officers of assault. The Rodney King riots started that same day. The rebellion lasted six days, quelled only by the combined forces of the State. 63 people died (no law enforcement officials), 2,383 were reported injured, some 3,600 fires were set destroying 1,100 buildings. Estimated property damage swung from $800 million to $1 billion. I was teaching at UC Irvine in April of ‘92. Once again, I was showered with news and images of the violence, only this time I was even further from the action – 40 miles. And yet there was a palpable anxiety in this largely white, well off, and extremely conservative town. (I only spent six months there and disliked it intensely.) We didn’t really expect the maddened Black mob to invade our space and torch our buildings, but they were so volatile! Would it be even safe to goto events or parties in Los Angeles? I was in complete sympathy with the Black community, had been since I learned about the injustices of racism in college, and that was 20 years ago. I shook my head in disbelief at the announcement of the verdicts, but I had never chafed under the yoke of racism. I didn’t understand how much I didn’t understand until October 3, 1995. Once again, the news came out of Los Angeles. On that October day of 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Like everybody else in America, I’d had the 8-month trial crammed down my throat, and O.J.’s erratic behavior the day of the murder combined with the preponderance of physical evidence all pointed to one verdict – and it was the opposite of what the Simi Valley jury had delivered. “That’s outrageous!” I thought to myself. “How can this be?” When the shoe was on the other foot, I felt the actual pinch. –Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Harlem Renaissance (The California Connection) SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Alice Dunbar-Nelson painted by Laura Wheeler Waring “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes, but in the case of the possible career advancement offered to African American writers during the 1920s, male ships had much more buoyancy. The interest in Black life and Black writing as evinced by race-related journals (The Crisis, Opportunity), publishing houses, and even the occasional mainstream magazine provided platforms for women writers as well as men. Scores of women published poems, wrote plays (usually unproduced), and even the occasional novel. But now, 100 years later, which names survive? Who has been rediscovered? Who anthologized? Who still discussed? If you can name anyone besides Nella Larsen, whose posthumous rediscovery has made her reputation soar far beyond the modest acclaim she achieved during her lifetime, or Zora Neale Hurston, who didn’t start publishing her novels until after the Depression of the 1930s had strangled the literary wing of the Renaissance, you have an extraordinarily deep knowledge of the period. Who published the most novels during the Harlem Renaissance? Jessie Fauset (4). Who wrote the most plays? Georgia Douglas Johnson (28). Who cares? Who reads them? One of the young poets who recited at the famous 1925 Civic Club dinner that intentionally launched the literary Harlem Renaissance was Gwendolyn Bennet. (Langston Hughes was the other young poet on display.) Bennett was a double threat girl. She trained as a visual artist at both Columbia and Pratt and in 1924 was the beneficiary of a scholarship enabling her to study fine arts in Paris. When she returned to Harlem in 1926, she participated in the full flower of the Renaissance both in the visual arts and in print. Women writers were all over the Harlem Renaissance, even when they didn’t live in Harlem. Anne Spencer’s poetry was widely praised, and her Virginia garden provided a Southern outpost of hospitality to visiting Harlemites. Georgia Douglas Johnson (she of the 28 plays) not only published three volumes of poetry during the period of the Renaissance but hosted a weekly “S Street Salon” in her Washington, DC home for writers and intellectuals, including women you’ll never read: May Miller, Marita Bonner, Mary Burrill, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Angelina Weld Grimke. There are obvious reasons why women writers didn’t get as much traction during the Harlem Renaissance as the men – sexism and the demands of domesticity. No matter how much they wrote and whatever the quality of their output, the gatekeepers and assessors of literary value were all men. The editors were men (Jessie Fauset being the one exception); the publishers were men; men dominated the awards committees. The sexism of the period was so much a part of the cultural landscape that it wasn’t even perceived, much less challenged. The final scene of Nella Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, sounds the alarm plainly enough – and it could probably have only come from a woman’s pen. In escaping a life scrambled by her bi-racial background, the sexism and confusion brought on by her beauty, Helga Crane, the novel’s protagonist, thinks to put all her confusion and sadness to rest by marrying the backwoods preacher of an Alabama town. By the time she has her fourth child, she realizes that she is trapped in the quicksand of domesticity. She hates her husband, the town, and everything about her life, but she has no resources available for her escape. Nor can she bear the thought of abandoning her children. She falls sick after the birth of her fourth child and, while in recovery, fantasizes about a possible return to her former life. “And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.” It is a stark and shocking ending. For women writers of the Harlem Renaissance who, after all, still had to find a man to support them or support themselves, the choice was either a precarious existence as a single woman or some kind of domestic deal with the devil (i.e. marriage). (Lesbians naturally didn’t face that choice since they never thought of themselves as appendages to any man.) Oftentimes marriage, especially when it produced children, signalled the end of their literary careers. Jessie Fauset married in 1929 at the advanced age of 47, moved with her husband to Montclair, NJ, published two more novels, and went silent. Gwendolyn Brooks fell in love with a fellow instructor at Howard University, a relationship the administration deplored. When they married in 1927, Brooks followed her husband to Eustis, FL, where she had to endure Southern racism and isolation from the community, which inspired her until the couple moved to Long Island in 1930. She remained passionately involved in the Harlem art scene, but her days as a writer were over. The life and career of Georgia Douglas Johnson illustrates the challenges of a heterosexual woman writer who marries, not unwillingly. Born in 1880 in Atlanta, she married a local lawyer and prominent Republican party member ten years her senior. They had two sons and moved to Washington, DC, where her husband had been appointed to a political patronage position. Torn from her childhood home, Douglas found solace in writing, but her husband insisted that she devote more time to keeping his house and raising his family. Nonetheless, she brought out her first volume in 1918. (In its relation to the published works of the Harlem Renaissance, it is remarkably early.) Its lead poem, giving title to the whole volume, is dedicated to her husband and says it all. The Heart of a Woman The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home. The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars. --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in "The Pit Bull of AIDS Litigation" SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Alice Philipson - Berkeley based solo practitioner, 1987 In the 1980s, queer lawyers were still reluctant to come out publicly. They could lose jobs, clients, positions, possibly cases decided by homophobic judges. But in the year 1980, 10 lawyers came together to found BALIF [Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom]. My lesbian sister Alice, a solo practitioner in Berkeley, soon came into its orbit. Shortly afterwards, healthy young gay men began dying in alarming numbers. Informally known as the "gay plague," fear and stigma dictated the initial public response. By 1983 public health workers were fully aware of the potential scope of the AIDS crisis. Still, the Reagan administration wouldn't even mention the disease until 1985, two weeks after Rock Hudson had publicly come out (and died) with his diagnosis. In the meantime, the plague was raging in the Bay Area. Eventually, two thirds of the men of BALIF died. Lawyers went to the AIDS wards of San Francisco General Hospital to write up emergency wills for young men who had never conceived they'd need such a thing at their age. And there they found out about many other abuses -- men who lost their jobs, their rentals, access to their deceased partner's lives on the mere suspicion that they were gay. When HIV testing became widespread in 1986 (but without cure or mitigation), gay men were exposed to a whole new wave of discrimination and stigma, plus the cold-blooded violation of right to privacy and the exposure of medical information. Returning home from a short stay in the hospital, an AIDS patient might find the contents of his apartment strewn on the street. The BALIF lawyers started an AIDS Legal Referral Panel, the first of its kind, and the cases that seemed the most unjust, the most tangled, the most hopeless -- these they handed to my sister, who became known as "the pit bull of AIDS litigation." Burning with rage and sorrow, she went after the insurance companies who immediately voided their policies, HR departments who disclosed the HIV status of their employees, hospitals who informed their patients through voicemail that their tests had come back positive, landlords who used the possibility of an AIDS diagnosis as a pretext for bouncing tenants out of rent controlled apartments. All of it was illegal, and she had to combat the constant stream of lies and obfuscations coming from these institutions. She could only get them to acknowledge the harm they had done through trial or the threat of trial. (Not that they cared. It was only faggots and their ball-busting bitch of a lawyer.) As her clients descended into the final stages of their illness, she became their advocate in life as well as in law. They loved her, and she couldn't help but love them in return. But they died; they all died. Alice had to work feverishly sometimes to get a judgment before her clients passed. She had to watch as the midwestern families who had refused to visit their dying sons came out to claim the body, clean out the apartment that son might be sharing with his lover, and bar the man who was himself prostrate with grief from attending the funeral. She wasn't alone, although she was the most out there. The men were exhausted and, if not sick themselves, depleted by the loss of friends and lovers. There was so much work to be done, and the lesbians of BALIF stepped up big time: advocacy, activism, practical care, human kindness. They showed up, as did so many lesbians, in their glory of "getting shit done." The interns who worked for my sister volunteered for duty at the AIDS Legal Referral Panel for two years after passing the bar. My sister died in 2022, and I didn't think to ask her the question that I then had to pose to her intern and her wife: Why did she do it? Why expend her knowledge, passion, and diminishing strength on these men? The answer was the same from both women and would have been her answer as well: "These are my people." We were part of the same community. And this too is women's history. –Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Dogged by Domesticity SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan meet with troops on the Golan Heights On October 5, 1973, the State of Israel was still basking in the glow of virtue and success. To quote myself from a previous podcast: Israel seemed, once again, the center of an epic. The oppressed of the Old World had migrated to the Promised Land and had built for themselves a new life of justice and wealth. The kibbutzniks did seem to be a finer, more idealistic breed. They were trying to live according to a communal idea; they had profited from the labor of their own hands; they had made the land produce as it had never done before and created a new institution out of the Ashkenazi shards blasted from Europe. Israel was the reincarnation of the Jewish state, the biblical history enacted in our time, and the promise at last fulfilled. “May my right hand lose its cunning if I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” The people had remained faithful until the land was again delivered into their hands. And Israel’s deserts bloomed. And, by god, I had seen the deserts bloom! Watermelons and lettuce growing out of the sand! The new settlers had brought with them every ounce of Western culture and technology.The Jewish state was incomparably more advanced then its Arab neighbors. Through guts, skill, and imperiled valor, the tiny beleaguered nation had survived, triumphed, expanded. The Arabs had fled in terror before them, leaving their shoes in the desert as witness to their flight. The Sinai was embraced, Jerusalem reunited. Israeli paratroopers had battled their way through blood and fire to kiss the Wailing Wall with tears of thanksgiving in their eyes. And then, the next day, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, everything changed. The neighboring states of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had gotten their butts kicked in the wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967. The Six Day War had been a particularly shameful rout for the Arabs -- the destruction of their air force, the loss of much real estate now under Israeli control, another failed attempt to oust the Jewish state from its home in Palestine. The latest major conflict was only a little over five years in the past. Surely, the Arabs had learned their lesson! But on October 6, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel with a coordinated attack again! And furthermore, the Arabs were more successful in this attack than they had ever been before. Israel was caught on its back foot. The first days of the war saw losses of matériel, life and land that the young nation had never experienced before. Furthermore, the reliable Western allies who had been such staunch supporters of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 weren't quite so reliable. England conditioned its support on a return of Israel to its 1967 borders (not gonna happen, bro!), and France, mindful of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil, adopted a policy of supposed neutrality, imposing an arms embargo on all the belligerents. The Soviet Union jumped in as an arms supplier to the Arab states, which pushed President Nixon to offer a full-scale airlift of military equipment on October 10. This U.S. assistance replenished Israeli forces, allowing Israel to launch a successful counter-offensive. By the time a U.N.-brokered ceasefire took hold on October 25, Israel had recouped its military losses and had even advanced into Egyptian and Syrian territory. David, it seemed, had emerged victorious from its battle with Goliath yet again. But the war shattered Israel's complacency about its invincible military superiority, and the label of underdog which had served it so well in the first twenty-five years of its existence was shifting over to the Arabs. After 1973, the hot war of Middle Eastern conflict was between the Israelis and the Palestinians, not between sovereign states. As an occupied people, Palestinians were able to surpass Jews in the Victim Sweepstakes that conditioned international perception. In 1975, the U.N. passed a resolution determining that Zionism was a form of racism and promoted racial discrimination. (Israel didn't help its case here by allying itself with the Afrikaaner Republic of South Africa from the mid-70s to the late 80s.) Israel's former Western champions, England, France, and the European Union, demanded a return to the 1967 borders and a solution to the problem of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived precariously and without political rights under Israeli rule. A flicker of hope flashed when the Oslo Accords of 1998 were signed recognizing (in theory) a two-state solution, but Israel's promise was a hollow one, gradually gutted by the country's rightward drift. The brutality of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, as evidenced by the two Intifadas of Palestinian uprising, fatally tarnished Israel's reputation. The Jews were now the bullies in the Middle East. This was profoundly confusing to Jews in the diaspora who were used to thinking of themselves either as victims or as aspirants to full citizenship in countries with histories of antisemitism. We'd never had a state before where we could oppress other people! Ardent Zionists the world over refused (and still refuse) to acknowledge Israel's crimes and failures. And even ambivalent Jews have this secret thought. "It *could* happen here; if it does, I'm glad there's a refuge for me." The Jewish response to Israel's fall from grace was mostly to double down (with honorable exceptions, of course). Did the growth of Orthodox Jews and political conservatives create a bloc that works tirelessly to ensure no loss of land through the creation of a Palestinian state? Did the Israeli electorate put Benjamin Netanyahu, the worst Jewish leader in modern history, into the top office time and again? Did the American Jewish community direct any of its clout and wealth to pressure Israel into genuinely working towards the two-state solution it had presumably endorsed but was flagrantly trashing through its support of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank? O well! You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. We have a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card with the undeniable 2000-year history of antisemitism. And friends in high places! Do you know what the largest American pro-Israel lobbying group is? (No, it's not AIPAC.) Christians United for Israel, which has over seven million members! God help us! If only He would leave the Holy Land for more peaceful climes! Like Greenland! --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Hating Nixon -- A Family Tradition SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Born in 1950, I knew about Richard Nixon from the dawn of consciousness -- and he was synonymous with Evil. I inherited my contempt of Nixon from my father, an FDR liberal who had come of age during the Great Depression. My father came by his hatred of Nixon honestly. As a resident of L.A., he had seen up close the gangrenous success of Nixon's red-baiting during his first political campaign against Jerry Voorhis in 1946 for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nixon caught the postwar anticommunist wave early and rode it to a national reputation when he ran Alger Hiss to the ground as a Soviet spy -- the first real victory for the House Un-American Activities Committee. What really cemented my father's antipathy towards Nixon, however, was his 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagen Douglas to represent California in the U.S. Senate. The communist smear tactic which had stood him such good stead was amped up by the distribution of hundreds of thousands of pink sheets slanting Douglas' voting record as "evidence" of communist beliefs. This earned him the well-suited moniker "Tricky Dick." But the dirtiest trick was the phone call my parents received asking if they knew that Helen Gahagan Douglas was married to a Jew. Click! That solidified my father's hatred, and Nixon won. The following decade saw Nixon's rapid political rise through red-baiting, pandering, gross hypocrisy, and sheer effrontery. The best example of the latter was the way he wriggled out of a potential scandal when he was on the 1952 Republican ticket as Vice President. News of Nixon's improprieties relating to a fund established by his backers to reimburse him for his political expenses threatened to throw him out of the race. Nixon went on national television (a rarity for the time period) to defend himself, attack his opponents, and urge the audience to contact the Republican National Committee to advise whether he should remain on the ticket. And then, the maudlin arrow aimed straight at America's 1950s heart. He did receive one gift -- a cocker spaniel his children had named Checkers. "And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it." The Checkers speech cemented Nixon's appeal to Middle America, which he maintained until the Watergate scandal forced him to resign his presidency. My father was further disgusted, and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket swept into office for two terms. My father's hatred was somewhat assuaged by Nixon's loss to JFK in the 1960 presidential election and, surprisingly, his 1962 defeat for governor of California at the hands of the liberal incumbent Pat Brown. Always a sore loser, Nixon petulantly declared to the press, "You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Music to my father's ears, but it was just another Nixon lie. It took him six years to shake off the "loser" label, but he never stopped scheming, campaigning, and picking off his conservative rivals until he secured the Republican nomination in 1968. He then torpedoed Humphrey's chance for election by secretly sabotaging potential peace talks brokered by Lyndon Johnson (a dirty trick which extended the Vietnam war by six years and cost more thousands of American lives), and came into the office he felt was his by right. I was nineteen and a freshman in college when Nixon ascended to the presidency. It was my turn to hate Nixon, and there was a lot to hate: his bullshit "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam; his cynical racist dog-whistling that captured the "solid South" of white bigots for the Republican party; his divisive rhetoric that pitted his so-called Silent Majority against their own children ("hippies" "draft dodgers"). The "secret plan" remained a secret for the next six years but involved extending the war into neighboring Cambodia. Those of us who took temporary shelter behind the draft deferment afforded to full-time college students grew increasingly hysterical when it appeared as though *we* might be sent into the senseless slaughter of a war nobody could understand or justify in any credible manner. We screamed, protested, took over campuses, and blocked freeways. Nothing could move the Establishment, not even the killing of four student protestors at Kent State in May of 1970. Nixon reigned imperturbably over it all, and the lies that streamed endlessly from his mouth and those of his henchmen ... We simply couldn't believe that Middle America lapped it all up -- even as their sons, nephews, and husbands were dying. The irony was that Nixon was relatively progressive, especially by today's standards, but we couldn't see, much less celebrate, his achievements. He was Evil Incarnate and it didn't seem to bother him in the least. We knew he had no principles except to win, but we couldn't make Middle America realize that. He had them in the palm of his greasy hand. Tricky Dick's undoing was that he couldn't stand the thought of losing. The 1972 election was a slam-dunk, especially after his most threatening rival, Bobby Kennedy, was gunned down in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. (I was around for that one, too.) When the Democrats chose the unelectable George McGovern as their standard bearer, Nixon rubbed his hands in glee. But still, he had to cheat, to leave no stone unturned, no bug unplanted, no whispering campaign unpursued. With his blessing, he let his henchmen hire incompetent clowns to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex during the election. Two years of agony followed as the fetid stream of lies, leaks and coverups grew in volume until Washington was swamped with investigations, stonewalling, and revelations that pointed inexorably towards the Oval Office. "What did the President know and when did he know it?" My father and I watched in horror. We knew he was guilty, but he still had Middle America and the Republican party at his back. Even though the Watergate scandal brought the country to a standstill, he might very well remain in office. Nothing, it seemed, could kill him off. And then the Oval Office tapes were revealed, subpoenaed, and Nixon actually gave them up after the Supreme Court ordered him to do so. (How innocent we all were back then!) Now the whole world gained entry into Nixon's petty, scheming, paranoid, and always self-serving mindset. It was an (expletive deleted) public relations disaster. Still, he held on. I joined the Peace Corps in the summer of '74 and flew to Philadelphia to meet the rest of my training cohort before we were sent off to the Central African Republic. We asked our Peace Corps Washington liaison what the atmosphere in the nation's capital was like. "Watergated," he replied dourly. It was a great time to leave the country. I will never forget being awakened at 2:00 a.m. on August 9, gathering with other trainees on the balcony of the Agricultural Institute of M'baiki to listen to Nixon's resignation speech on a staticky short-wave radio. The dark, looming rain forest into which we stared only underscored the unreality of what was happening back home. Had Tricky Dick been finally toppled? To paraphrase Gerald Ford's same-day inauguration, our long national nightmare was over. One month later, President Ford gave Nixon a full, unconditional pardon. The fix was in. Who could be surprised? At least, we told ourselves, Nixon was out of public life for good. Ah, but even that stake had not pierced his zombie heart! After a period of illness and gilded disgrace in his rich Pacific seaside mansion, Nixon wrote, schemed, plotted and worked tirelessly for his rehabilitation. My father and I shook our heads. Finally, this truly evil man had gotten his comeuppance ... and nothing for him changed. No contrition, no enlargement of his humanity (missing to begin with), only his inexhaustible hunger for recognition. He wormed his way back into the good graces of the Republican party and subsequent Republican presidents as an Elder Statesman and expert on foreign affairs. He published book after book, pressed his "wisdom" into the ears of Republican presidents as much as they would allow. When he died at the age of 81 in April of 1994, his funeral drew luminaries from around the globe, including every living President. My father died one month later, a far finer man with much less fanfare. With Nixon out of public office, he could relax his hatred. I was not so lucky -- the Reagan snake oil, so attractively packaged and sunnily delivered, proved far more damaging to the national fabric than the overweening egotism of a man who had no ideology, no desire for public service, who only wanted power and recognition. So much worse was to come. -- Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, David Becomes Goliath SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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

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

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