In January of 1975, I was lying on top of a water tower in the middle of Africa. It was a fine, warm night. A full moon had scrubbed the sky of its spangle of stars. Stretched out next to me was a handsome African man, one month younger than I. His name was Yves D-, a Central African English teacher at the high school that used to be serviced by the defunct water tower, which served as our perch. We were both stoned on grass I had purchased over the Christmas break in Bangui, the capital of the country where I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I too was an English teacher at Bossangoa High. Though English was our shared teaching discipline, Yves and I spoke in French, the language of business, education, and occasionally friendship in the Central African Republic. Sango, the lingua franca, served most often as the language of intimacy, but intimacy with the Central Africans was difficult to achieve. Most of my relations with the people surrounding me were conditioned by a colonial past I had known about only in theory. The master/servant dynamic dictated by my race never ceased to disorient me, even as I made my accommodations. I had surrendered to the deference shown to me by shopkeepers, bus drivers, and public servants. I had my own servant, Jacques, who came every day except Sunday, whom I had “inherited” from the site’s previous Peace Corps Volunteers. I was on good terms with the other Central African teachers at Bossangoa High, but nothing developed beyond a collegial level. With Yves, it was different. He had lustrous skin, dark, regular features in a wide oval face topped by neatly cropped jet-black hair. His brown eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor. I found him arrestingly good-looking, and I enjoyed the banter we exchanged in the shabby little room that passed as a teacher’s lounge. Several months into my first year, I asked Yves to help me perfect my French. The Peace Corps paid for lessons. Thus, through this mutually beneficial arrangement, our friendship formed. The evening on top of the water tower was the first time I’d gotten a Central African stoned. Drugs had none of the glamour for the locals that my youth culture had invested them with in the sixties. Smoking grass was considered low-class. But Yves, even though he had never left the country, was drawn, like all ambitious young men, to the glitter of the West. I asked him as we were lying next to one another, dazzled by the moon, if he had wanted to do something big. “I wanted to be a pilot,” he replied. “Even growing up in the bush, I saw the planes flying in the sky and going to places like Paris and New York.” “How did you end up as an English teacher?” “It was a strategic choice,” he replied with a hint of sadness. “I was enrolled in the science series in high school, but I couldn’t make the necessary grades to stay afloat. I was in danger of flunking out, so I switched to series C.” “The humanities series.” “Yes,” Yves replied. “Much easier than Series A.” By this time, I had absorbed enough of the French educational system to understand the difference between the various tracks (A, B, C, D) and where they were supposed to lead. The Central African school system, an exact copy of what reigned in the former colonial power, was ruthlessly efficient in cutting away all but the brightest students as they strove toward a middle-class berth that promised ease and power in a country where the gross per capita income scarcely matched the two-month salary of a factory worker in the West. The goal of the Central African system of education was to narrow the field of candidates for the limited number of jobs in the civil service. Yves saw that he was in danger of falling through the net and specialized in English, a foreign language in the C.A.R. This allowed him to get on the rolls of the state as a high school teacher, and America, anglophone America, glowed on the horizon like a full moon rising. At 24, Yves had married and fathered a baby girl. As a rare source of revenue in a peasant economy, he was already supporting a household of six, including two young cousins who were also attending high school. “How sad,” I wrote in my journal, “that he had to give up on his dream so early! A real-life counterpart to Bigger’s frustrated desire to pilot the plane he sees flying over Chicago. I wonder if I can find a French translation of Native Son for him the next time I’m in Bangui.” I was very literary in my journal. What I didn’t write – what I didn’t dare write and barely acknowledged – was that I was strongly attracted to Yves. There was a powerful erotic component to our friendship – on my side only. Friendship between men was well understood in African culture and often included a physical dimension that sometimes delivered an enjoyable surprise. Occasionally, an African would grab my hand, and though I had to smother the impulse to pull away, the gesture would fill me with pleasure and sometimes a powerful excitement. I let none of this show. Homosexuality was even more distasteful to cultivated Africans than drugs. They acknowledged it only in the context of white perverts who paid for their sexual pleasure with Black men. “La maladie des blancs.” As for myself, I was confounded by the unruly nature of my desires and filled with internalized homophobia. Yet my attraction to men powered my friendships in their direction and helped me break through the bitter historical shell that separated Blacks from whites. Once, during a reception at the high school principal’s house, I went to fetch Yves on my mobylette, a French motorized bike that provided Peace Corps Volunteers with a rare mobility in the African bush. As I rode into the principal’s compound with Yves’ arms around my waist, the one female student who had made it into the upper grades and who was preparing the meal remarked in Sango that I seemed to be really fond of Yves. Yes, the principal replied, also in Sango, he’d never seen that kind of friendship between an African and a white person before. Yves told me about the conversation, and I flushed with pleasure. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay Langston and Carlo - A Cross-Racial Friendship SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1924, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, and promoter of African American cultural art forms, met Langston Hughes at a Harlem party. "Kingston" he called him in the journal he kept at the time, but when he met Langston a second time as the winner of the first poetry contest sponsored by a Black magazine, Langston’s recital of “The Weary Blues” knocked him off his feet. Then and there he committed to getting Langston's first book of poems accepted by his own publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. Van Vechten, 45, famous and well connected, published articles about his discoveries of life in Harlem in Vanity Fair. Hughes, 23, was still unknown and living with his mother in Washington, DC. Hughes was very beautiful, and Van Vechten, actively bisexual. There was cause to suspect that Van Vechten's interest in the young poet was not entirely literary, but the older white man played it cool. As good as his word, Van Vechten got The Weary Blues published in 1925 and wrote the forward -- a mixed blessing as Van Vechten's framing revealed a patronising stance and a tired -- but common -- belief in the salutary primitivism of Black culture. "You are my good angel!" Langston enthused, and although there was undoubtedly some sycophancy in his sentiments in the beginning, a genuine friendship developed between them. In fact, Langston saved Van Vechten's ass when the latter published his sensational novel, Nigger Heaven, in 1926. Feeling himself at that point to be a privileged commentator, Van Vechten arrogated the insider's use of the explosive term to insure its highest degree of visibility. (It worked but not always to his benefit.) In the same spirit, he casually lifted some blues lyrics quoted in the manuscript without attribution or permission, but a threatened lawsuit put him in a panic. He turned to Langston who was in his first year as a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Langston jumped on a train and replaced the borrowed lyrics with originals in a night-long session at Van Vechten's apartment. Although the novel became the biggest best-seller of Van Vechten's career (amongst white folks), it caused an uproar in Harlem. Langston defended Van Vechten in print, arguing that the novel was "neither praise nor condemnation," but a portrayal of "life as it is." Langston's defense of the novel put him in a tricky position as the book's sensational title and white-authored voyeurism ignited anger among Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois who described it in his review as "a blow in the face." Still, there was a deep commonality of appreciation that Langston and Van Vechten shared regarding the valorization of popular Black culture -- blues, jazz, speakeasies – and a disdain for the middle class pieties of taste and morality embraced by the Talented Tenth. "You and I are the only colored people," Van Vechten wrote to Langston, "who really love niggers." Langston never upbraided Van Vechten for the effrontery of the "joke" and perhaps took it in stride as a condition of their friendship. We'll never know. Over the next 40 years, the two friends exchanged 1500 letters; letters filled with gossip, in-jokes, aesthetic judgements, and an evident mutual affection. (However they didn’t touch on queer topics nor evince any queer sensibility, a sensibility on full display in the scabrous scrapbooks that Van Vechten willed to Yale’s Beinecke library collection under a 25-year-seal of secrecy.) As Langston’s star rose, Van Vechten’s sank, but he had a personal fortune to cushion his disappointment of being culturally sidelined and forgotten. However one may judge Van Vechten’s role as cultural impresario of the Harlem Renaissance and mediator between the races, the genuine affection he roused in some of his Black friends went beyond fetishism or exploitation. Langston was no fool, and the friendship between the dandified magpie and the African American 25 years his junior was one of equals – a difficult feat to bring off between two people of such different class backgrounds and races to this day. – Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Yves and Robert - A Cross-Racial Friendship SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

L to R: Mwalimu Jecha, my Swahili teacher, Muhammed Said Abdullah, and the scholar-in-training I first encountered African literature when I was an undergraduate at Merrill College at UC Santa Cruz, which offered a core course in Third World studies. We were introduced to a smorgasbord of writings from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The African novel on the curriculum was—unsurprisingly for 1968—Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I liked it well enough, but it didn't rock my world. My second encounter with African literature was far more extensive and unguided. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the French-speaking Central African Republic, I set myself the task of reading whatever African novels I could get my hands on to improve my French. As I grew enamored of African culture and was able to contextualize the novels through my own experience, I became excited about the idea that, once I returned to graduate school in literature (a foregone conclusion for such a writer manqué as myself), I could specialize in African literature. I eventually did this through advanced studies at the University of Paris and a master's program in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Although I immeasurably deepened my knowledge of the francophone literatures of Africa and the Caribbean, I was unfavorably struck by the fact that all of my professors were French, not infrequently part of the colonial and postcolonial structures that had introduced them to the part of Africa whose literature they taught. None of them had bothered to learn any of the local languages, even if they had lived in Senegal or Madagascar for some time. Why take on the local patois when internationally recognized poets, novelists, and dramatists wrote in such beautiful French and were influenced by the same literary canon fed to their metropolitan counterparts? I would not make such a mistake, I determined with an endearing mix of arrogance and naivety. It was simply a matter of choosing the right African language and Swahili was the obvious candidate. It had the oldest tradition of written literature of sub-Saharan Africa, stretching back four centuries to manuscripts written in Arabic script and focusing on religious themes, battles, and Islamic heroes. I made my choice back in 1978 when all my training and presumptions told me that literature was written. Well, Swahili had aa written literature, and it was extensive! Even better, German and British colonialism in East Africa had imposed the Roman alphabet on the written script and had introduced Western genres as markers of modernity. The first recognizably Western novel was a Sherlock Holmes knock-off written by a Zanzibari newspaper editor, Muhammed Said Abdullah, published in 1960. And so it came to pass. Ten years later, I was in Tanzania researching my dissertation on East Africa's most celebrated, mostly untranslated, Swahili playwright, Ebrahim Hussein. My painfully acquired classroom Swahili blossomed in the humid coastal climes of Dar es Salaam, and I eventually befriended the Man himself. Suspicious of my motives at first, he only spoke English to me in our early encounters. Still, later, once a genuine friendship had developed, he switched over to Swahili, a landmark moment. During my year as a Research Associate in the Department of Kiswahili, I became friendly with the rising writers and critics of the day, translated the novel Rosa Mistika, a literary touchstone of the Arusha generation, into English, and facilitated the academic exchange of professors between the University of Dar and the University of Wisconsin, where I was pursuing my doctorate. Soon afterwards, I made my little mark as a scholar of Swahili literature with published articles on the persistence of oral forms in early Swahili writing and the analogous introduction of Western materialism that the new realism of the contemporary Swahili novel brought in its train (euphoniously titled, "Balzac in Zanzibar"). I was, to my knowledge, the only American literary critic writing authoritatively on Swahili literature. And then the rubber hit the road. I came on the job market in the late eighties. By then, there were plenty of African Ph.D. candidates vying for the same academic positions as I, or, if they weren't Black, they were at least women or nonwhite or anything else that contributed to the diversity that literature departments (or their students) were clamoring for. I was out and, having no more use for a language that was so far removed from any American cultural milieu, I let my Swahili dry up and blow away. Was it all for naught? If you look up Ebrahim Hussein in Wikipedia, you'll see some references to my work there. In studying and getting to know the man himself, I came to understand the tragedy of a keen mind and talented writer constricted by loyalty to a mother tongue that had no resonance in the West. What I didn't understand then was that I, too, had bound myself to a conception of literature — words on a page — that was too narrow, too shallow, too dependent on that same hierarchy of genres that extolled the slender achievements of the literary Harlem Renaissance to the detriment of the richness of African American folklore, music, and dance. — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Year One of the (Literary) Harlem Renaissance SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

David Levering Lewis, one of the early—and still the best—historians of the Harlem Renaissance, deemed 1925 Year One. And why was that? Precursors to the Renaissance—Jean Toomer (Cane) and Claude McKay (Harlem Shadows)—had already made a splash. The 1921 musical Shuffle Along had spawned a host of shows trying to capitalize on the Black talent in music, comedy, and dance that white producers were only too eager to appropriate. The Great Migration, begun a decade earlier, had brought about a sea change in African American demographics and widened horizons. Still, Harlem became a magnet for the brightest and most talented of the generation born around the turn of the 20th century. Few, except Countee Cullen, were native Harlemites, but all—Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston—eventually answered the Black Mecca's siren call. The generation that had preceded them, luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and, crucially but least known, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, felt they had identified a chink in the implacable armor of prejudice and derision that sheathed white America: poetry, writing, the arts. If these race men could shepherd the talents and productions of the younger generation into celebrated works of literature, then the Negro's claim to equality would be self-evident. And once that was established, racial barriers would have to fall away -- "civil rights by copyright" to use Lewis' clever formulation. Johnson, head researcher for the National Urban League, founded its highly influential journal Opportunity in 1923 and turned it into a showcase for the visual and literary accomplishments of the cohort that was beginning to be termed the New Negro. Du Bois, longtime editor of the NAACP's journal, was much taken up with the Pan-African movement and, during the run-up to Year One, gave Jessie Fauset, as literary editor of The Crisis, a platform from which to disseminate her early discovery of Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes. Fauset had also written a novel, There Is Confusion, published in 1924, that provided Charles Johnson with the occasion to bring together the white publishers, writers, and critics with the New Negro artists whose careers he hoped to advance. The 1924 Civic Club dinner was supposed to celebrate Fauset's achievement (not much admired by the small coterie of African American writers and intellectuals). Still, between the machinations of Johnson and his newly recruited accomplice, the philosopher Alain Locke, the occasion turned into a dress rehearsal for the Renaissance itself. One of the attendees, editor of the sociological journal Survey Graphic, was so impressed by the presentations that he wanted to devote a whole issue to the subjects broached and to the African Americans who had presented them, or to their poetry. Alain Locke was tapped to edit the March 1925 edition, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." Riding high from his success, Johnson announced the establishment of Opportunity prizes to be awarded in May of 1925. Langston Hughes won first prize in poetry with "The Weary Blues," which so excited the white writer and tastemaker Carl Van Vechten that he rushed to introduce himself to the young poet after the ceremony and eventually arranged for the publication of Hughes's first volume, also called The Weary Blues, the following year. Countee Cullen (2nd place in poetry) and Zora Neale Hurston (2nd place in short story and drama) were also laureates. In the meantime, Locke was heroically pulling together and polishing an expanded version of poetry and prose from the Survey Graphic edition and the Opportunity prizewinners. This was published at the end of Year One under the title The New Negro: An Interpretation. The quality of Locke's editorship was little short of spectacular. He had not only culled the best African American writing of that time, but he had also enhanced it with superb portraits by the German artist Winold Reiss. Locke's anthology definitively announced the arrival of "the Negro Renaissance," as it was beginning to be called, on the literary scene. Of course, there was plenty of Black creativity and presence in the other arts—Louis Armstrong began leading his Hot Five band in 1925, and Paul Robeson starred in a revival of The Emperor Jones to great acclaim—but for a long time, the achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was viewed mostly through a literary lens. —Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Why I Specialized In Swahili Literature SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

L to R: Human #1, MAXIMILLION, Human #2, GRANDMA, Human #3, HAMLET, Human #4 It was a good life for a dog. We had returned to our mesa, so it was hikes on the weekends and a walk at night. Because our cul-de-sac was strictly residential, there was never much traffic, and the dogs went out themselves when nobody was available for their nightly outing. A nearby canyon led to the mountains. We left the gate open, and in the morning my mother would find them sleeping on the furniture of the mis-named living room where nobody lived. At first she made an effort to protect the “good” furniture, but that only insured that the burnt-orange upholstered couch and matching wing chairs became their nests of choice. And yet … it is impossible to get angry at a basset, much less a sleeping basset. A sleeping basset is the confirmation of a natural and benign order. Those vouchsafed the vision of a sleeping basset have received an intimation that, as Browning writes, “God’s in his Heaven/All’s right with the world.” A basset sleeping is as innocent as birdsong or a baby’s laughter. Hamlet was a particularly accomplished sleeper, moving fluidly from Position Three (side curl) to Position One (supine with limbs spread-eagled). And when she sometimes indulged in a gentle, mellifluent snore, it could only ease the aching heart. When Max slept it was the only time his ears left him in peace. They were monstrous—a mark of beauty in a basset—and they would have been a problem for a dog with a less devil-may-care attitude. My father would take Max’s ears in both hands, tie them over his head and sing: Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow? Can you throw them over your shoulder Like a Continental soldier? Do your ears hang low? Max would sit on the floor looking perplexed. The answer to these existential questions was a lamentable yes. Neither dog could drink water without the ears drooping into the liquid along with their snouts, but mealtime was the real debacle. The French say that one should not eat to live but live to eat, yet this ancestral wisdom (“basset” derives from the French basse) had not survived the Darwinian imperative. The two dogs attacked their dinners with alarming gusto; large mounds of dog food would disappear in seconds. Considering that mealtime was the summum bonum of their lives (and although we knew they loved us, we held no illusions about the basset’s scale of values), one would have thought they'd savor a bit this supreme moment. But the basset appetite should not be taxed with gluttony. They ate; they drank; they were merry – and they lived in the hope for more. It sometimes happened. So we had our two bassets, and they were happy and loving and sweet. And then one night, Alice and her boyfriend took the dogs on a walk in the canyon. They returned sans bassets, but this was not unusual. The following morning only Hamlet had returned to her spot on the living room couch. We scoured the neighborhood, fixed signs to telephone poles, put an ad in the newspaper. Silence. Every walk, each ring of the telephone was sharpened by an anxiety that only dulled slowly with time. We couldn’t believe had had been stolen, hoped irrationally that his disappearance was temporary. And I remember poking about the unbuilt fields of the mesa, calling out Max’s name with only the stars and dim noise of traffic for answer. The lights of the long, fairy-flecked city stretched out in the basin before me. Someone had seen him and taken him away. And this was the end of our beauty. They had seen and admired his pelt and form, recognized perhaps that he was a purebred, and they had taken him away. And it was bitter, although not in a way I could then understand, that the thieves had taken him for his “beauty” without knowing his real beauty: his sweet disposition, his calming affect, the unconditional love he had for us all. And now he was gone. For months afterwards we couldn’t hear the rustle of bushes without straining our ears, holding our breath, helplessly hoping for the jingle of his collar and the sight of his tongue hanging from his smiling mouth. -- Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, How Jews Birthed the Dog That Elvis Stole From Big Mama Thornton SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Everything You Thought You Knew About “Hound Dog” Is Wrong. On June 5, 1956, Elvis Presley exploded onto the 50s version of the culture wars with his performance of “Hound Dog” on the Steve Allen show. It wasn’t his first turn at national TV, but it was the first time he belted out his version of the song, swivelling his hips and swinging the mic in a simulacrum of sexual heat that thrilled the youths and enraged the adults. That performance catapulted Elvis into superstardom and cemented his image as a rebellious, electrifying force in (white) American music and culture. But it wasn’t just the pelvis. “Hound Dog,” released as a single one month later, launched into the strotosphere, selling 10 million copies worldwide It was simultaneously number one on the US pop, country, and R&B charts. On the pop chart it stayed at #1 for 11 weeks—a record that stood for 36 years. Not everybody was thrilled, however. Big Mama Thornton, the blues singer who had recorded the original version for a small Los Angeles label in 1953, said “He stole my song. But I don’t blame Elvis. I blame his manager.” However, in the restricted world of the blues, “Hound Dog” had done Big Mama well — at least in terms of her career. "Hound Dog," Thornton's only hit record, sold over 500,000 copies and spent 14 weeks in the R&B charts, seven of those at number one. Being Black and female, Thornton was cheated in the then routine manner of the times. "That song sold over two million records. I got one check for $500 and never saw another." “Rhythm and Blues” was now the more acceptable appellation of what used to be called “race music.” Few whites heard “Hound Dog” in its original incarnation. In its original incarnation, “Hound Dog” was not about a dog. It was sung by a fed-up woman kicking her no-good boyfriend out of her life. You ain't nothing but a hound dog Quit snoopin' 'round my door You ain't nothing but a hound dog Quit snoopin' 'round my door You can wag your tail But I ain't gon' feed you no more The song is squarely in the blues idiom, and Thornton brought the blues strain of female empowerment into the musical stew that birthed rock-and-roll. Four years later, the white genre transformed the black song. Elvis’ “Hound Dog” was faster, more pop-oriented, and lyrically neutered. “Hound Dog" shifted from a woman’s defiant blues to … a song about a dog. You ain't nothin but a hound dog Cryin all the Time. You ain't nothin but a hound dog Cryin all the time. Well, you aint never caught a rabbit And you ain't no friend of mine. So far it’s a familiar tale of white appropriation of Black culture. But wait! Here come the Jews! In 1950, two Jewish teenagers in Los Angeles, Jerry Leiber (words) and Mike Stoller (music), discovered a shared passion for the blues and found immediate success with the scrum of small labels looking for materials for the Black artists they had signed or were managing. Their first big hit was “Hound Dog,” but by the age of 20, Leiber and Stoller had seen their songs recorded by Jimmy Witherspoon, Little Esther, Charles Brown, Little Willie Littlefield, and Ray Charles. Where does this channeling of a Black musical sensibility come from? It’s rare, but it’s authentic when it happens. There are a few Jewish exemplars — Mezz Mezzrow, Benny Goodman — but the phenomenon isn’t confined to Jewish parentage. Johnny Otis, son of Greek immigrant parents who grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Berkeley, California, decided to live his professional and personal life as a member of the Black community. Born in 1921, Johnny Otis was a major figure in the West Coast R&B scene of the 40s and 50s as a bandleader, talent scout, and producer. He had an eye an for fresh talent and was open to working with white writers who understood and respected Black music. Otis had already discovered or championed Etta James, Esther Phillips, and Little Esther. He saw that Big Mama Thornton had a commanding blues voice and stage style that could reach a national audience — but she didn’t yet have a hit. In 1952, Otis brought Leiber and Stoller into the studio to work with Thornton. He asked the young songwriters to come up with material, and they wrote “Hound Dog” in 15 minutes, tailoring it to her bull dagger persona. Strangely enough, Thornton didn’t recognize the country-funky feel when she was handed the lead sheet. She began crooning. When Leiber tried to steer her in the right direction, she turned her fury intro a lewd joke. Otis stepped in and suggested that Stoller sing it the way the songwriters heard it. Thorton was ready to laugh at the white teenager trying to sing the blues, but, quoting from Stoller’s recollection, “Suddenly the joke was over. Big Mama heard how Jerry was singing the thing. She heard the rough-and-tumble of the song and, just as important, the implicit sexual humor. In short, she got it.” So … two Jewish teenagers write and help a seasoned Black (probably queer) blues singer “get” the raunchy blues they had dashed off under the auspices of a Greek American who identified as Black. He produces and records “Hound Dog,” spawning a major success that eventually morphs into a monster hit for the avatar of the rising rock-and-roll genre, Elvis Presley, whose discoverer, Sam Phillips said, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars!” Now if somebody could tease out where the cultural appropriation takes place, please send in your best diagrams. --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in The Family Dog SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

If asked to identify the most prominent gay member of the Harlem Renaissance, those who are deeply familiar with the subject might respond "Richard Bruce Nugent" based on his sensationally scandalous prose poem, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" published in 1926. Far more prominent -- and visibly effeminate -- was Alain Locke, America's first Black Rhodes Scholar, Howard professor of philosophy, cultural critic and the most prominent of the Black publicists of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke's best-known achievement was collecting the material for and editing The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) which announced the arrival of African Americans onto the literary, cultural and intellectual scene. Not only did he publish early works of major Black writers to emerge from the Renaissance, then largely young and unknown, his own introductory essay, "The New Negro," framed the place of African Americans in the country in innovative ways that immediately entered the discourse. Some of these sprang from Locke's gay sexual orientation as Jeffrey Stewart points out in his magisterial 2018 biography "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke." Locke successfully labeled the burgeoning arts movement a Renaissance -- then known as the Negro Renaissance -- in full knowledge that much of the first renaissance's sensibility was homoerotic, if not overtly gay. To quote Stewart, "Locke also was sexually infatuated with young writers and wanted to make young male bodies the icons of the Negro Renaissance just as they had been idols of the Italian Renaissance." Of course others who adopted the term were not aware of its origin, but the name stuck, although later modified to the "Harlem Renaissance." Due also to the traditional desire of the older gay man for a younger lover, Locke idealized (male) youth and did all he could to promote the careers of such young artists as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, and Richmond Barthé. (He was also a misogynist and at best paid lip service to the distaff side of the Renaissance with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston whose brilliance overrode her gender.) Because of his focus on youth, Locke introduced the idea of generations into the discourse about African Americans. Young people were the "new" in The New Negro, another label that stuck, although not original to Locke. Locke, however, repurposed it in a way that pointed towards new horizons in cultural achievement, giving African Americans their own agency and no longer defined by the stereotypes and strictures of white America. Locke pursued a failed attempted romance with Langston Hughes in America and Europe. Ultimately rejected, he nonetheless came to recognize the validity of Hughes' artistic focus on Black outsiders. He made space for this in "The New Negro," a space soon populated and amplified by young queer writers.  Locke was straight-up gay, never questioning his homosexuality or masquerading as heterosexual. He provided moral support and intellectual justification for homosexuality to young men whom he felt were similarly inclined, particularly Countee Cullen, but he described himself as "paralyzingly discreet." He may have believed he was in the closet and probably was so in the public eye, but his sexual orientation was apparent to his friends and close associates. Although his homosexuality never brought personal happiness, it alienated him sufficiently from the crushingly masculinist writing and ideology of the older generation (particularly W.E.B. DuBois) to seed new possibilities for Black identity. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

By 1925, year one of the "official" Harlem Renaissance (at least as we define it), 22-year-old Countee Cullen was at the peak of his fame. From the time he graduated from New York's DeWitt Clinton High School, during his years at NYU, Cullen won numerous poetry contests, published in national magazines, and built a reputation that culminated in the publication of Color , his first volume of poetry. That same year he entered Harvard for graduate studies. Color was acclaimed by both Black and white America containing, still, some of his best-known and most anthologized poems. Its masterful use of traditional poetic form to express a contemporary Black sensibility, while not unique, resonated with both the literary Old Guard (W.E.B. DuBois) and acolytes of modernism (Wallace Thurman). Given his fame and widespread appeal, Cullen became a star of what was then called the Negro Renaissance, continuing to put out books of poetry (less and less admired as time went on), editing an anthology of Negro poetry ( Caroling Dusk ), writing a regular column for Opportunity magazine, and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to live and study in France. Leaders and promoters of the Renaissance loved Countee Cullen and displayed him as one of the New Negro poster boys. The anointing of Cullen as New Negro royalty seemed to be sealed with his 1928 marriage to the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, Yolanda. The fly in the ointment lay in Cullen's sexual orientation. He was gay and entered into relationships with (white) men, mostly short-lived, throughout his life. He was anguished about being gay as a young man, but Alain Locke mentored him into an intellectual acceptance and even sent some sexual partners his way. Cullen tried to return the favor by introducing Locke to Langston Hughes, but that foray into gay matchmaking went spectacularly awry. There's justifiable speculation that Cullen's attraction to Hughes -- they had become friends early on -- contributed to a mysterious break in their relationship. And, of course, Cullen's sexual orientation insured the rapid failure of his marriage to Yolanda. Try as he might to keep his gay affairs under wraps, other queer writers knew his sexual orientation. Thurman snidely referred to Cullen's wedding as a drag ball. In letters to her father, Yolanda all but said it outright, but W.E.B. affected a willful blindness--a common response to the "open secrets" of many of the prominent players of the Renaissance. (W.E.B. himself was quite promiscuous.) It's hard to know to what extent heterosexual Harlem knew or cared. Cullen was always discreet and in 1940 married a woman with whom he appeared to share conjugal happiness -- all the while carrying on a sustained affair with another white lover, Edward Atkinson. Did Cullen write of homosexuality in his poetry? Not in any overt way. One can certainly apply gay readings to some of his verse, but these are interpretations. When race is the topic, specifically the burden of being Black in America, it is front and center no matter how elevated his rigid prosody and formal language (though fast becoming outdated). Tropes of disappointment in love or sexual longing could be veiled in the misty allusiveness of the 19th-century Romantic poets he emulated. In our estimation, Cullen was a Black poet who happened to be gay. You'd have to dig for a deeper connection. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

On May 23, 1921, Shuffle Along opened in a ramshackle "theater" (more a performance space; there was no orchestra pit) in New York City. It was the first Black musical to play on Broadway in twelve years. In spite of the landmark successes of precursors, most notably Williams and Walker's In Dahomey (1903), syphilis had wiped out the geniuses of that first generation. Much to everyone's surprise, Shuffle Along became a monster hit, running for 504 performances and proving that white people would pay to see Black performers on Broadway . Because of the show’s popularity, the entertainment profession witnessed the return of Black musical comedies on a regular basis. It was, in the opinion of Langston Hughes who saw the production when he came to New York in 1921 to study mining engineering at Columbia University, the opening salvo of what would become the Harlem Renaissance. Part of what fueled the Renaissance, particularly the "Harlemania" that peaked for white slummers around 1927-28, was the success of Black performers on Broadway: now-forgotten stars like Lottie Gee and Florence Mills, who came to fame in Shuffle Along, and the less-forgotten ones like composer Eubie Blake. (Paul Robeson sang briefly in the chorus of an off-Broadway production.) Taking advantage of the opportunities opened up by these trailblazers, Ethel Waters (bisexual) and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson shot to even greater heights during the latter part of the 1920s. Josephine Baker (bisexual) landed a gig in a 1923 road production of the musical. At age 16, she entered into a brief affair with Eubie Blake. Although still rooted in the demeaning theatrical traditions of Blacks performing in blackface, speaking in an artificially grotesque "Negro dialect," and perpetrating minstrel stereotypes, Shuffle Along broke boundaries. It catalyzed the desegregation of theaters below 125th St.; it introduced a chorus line of Black women modeled after the Ziegfield Follies; it brought the snap and syncopation of Black musical styles to Broadway. Most daringly, it showed to Black people falling in love onstage -- a previously taboo subject -- and introduced several hit songs proclaiming the reality of Black romance. One of these, "I'm Just Wild About Harry," entered the Great American Songbook and went on to have a strange and varied career, performed in blackface by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney (Babes in Arms, 1939) and adopted as Harry Truman's election 1948 campaign song. In the latest iteration -- so appropriate for this pop confection in its queer Renaissance origins -- "I'm Just Wild About Harry" is given a same-sex spin by Morgxn in the 2020 gay romcom The Thing About Harry. It's kind of catchy. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX0qh55aSR8 ) SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

On Friday, August 7, Kali O Ray, graphic designer extraordinaire and executive director of the San Francisco Black Film Festival, died shockingly and unexpectedly from a genetically inherited heart condition. He was a gentle, beautiful man in both body and spirit -- very much committed to the Black experience, living it as a baseline of strength and humanity. As a Bay Area filmmaker producing and directing documentaries, more often than not, on the Black queer experience, I was bound to run across Kali, and I did so shortly after he had moved back to the Bay Area from Atlanta in 2010 to shepherd the film festival that his mother, Ave Montegue, had founded. He had seen one of my screeners for a film that was playing across the bay and, at the Oakland International Film Festival, he approached me candidly expressing his ignorance of LGBTQ matters. He wanted to make sure that the SF Black Film Festival put out the welcome mat. I don’t know that he actively solicited my assistance, but from that point on, we were collaborators. It did not matter that I was white and gay; it did not matter that he was Black and straight. We bonded over film, over drinks at the Boom Boom room, over a shared love of jazz and Black history, over a mutual understanding of what constituted quality in art. For an underfunded, understaffed film festival, what Kali and his wife Katera programmed punched well above its weight. It drew young directors from all across the country and even from abroad. The festival hosted the best parties, the best music, the best bar scenes, and I was privileged to be a part of it. Kali made sure there was a representative feature film or block of shorts with LGBTQ material at each festival. He made a space for my own films and shared not only his film festival platform but his considerable talents as a graphic designer. He created posters for these films, refusing payment because we “did” for one another. But he was a personal inspiration as well. It was at Kali’s suggestion that I put together a program introducing a film representation of the Queer Harlem Renaissance that has gone on to a life of its own. For me, it was all exhilarating; for Kali and Katera, untold hours of overwork, exhaustion and putting out fires while the festival was in progress. Yet they did it not only for the love of movies but for the love of their community, Black artists across the world and as an affirmative statement -- “we are here; we will always be here” -- for the San Francisco community under siege. I mourn my Black friend, but if mourning is the price to pay for all the love and growth I experienced at his hands, then I mourn with a secret smile. Rest in peace, my brother. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

From 1919 when this Jamaican-born writer published a powerful set of poems in the left-wing little magazine, The Liberator, ClaudeMcKay became one of the most famous Black writers of the 1920s and 30s. He wrote in several genres but gained his earliest reputation as a poet. The publication of his searing sonnet, "If We Must Die," initiated this fame and the poem itself has gone on to a long, sometimes apocryphal afterlife. It also expressed a sea-change in the relations between African Americans and white Americans. In the face of white rampagers, lynchings and massacres, Black America would fight back. The impetus for the writing of "If We Must Die" was the endless series of race riots, lynchings, and civic unrest triggered by white America's fear of trained African American soldiers returning from World War I and the sharpened economic competition for jobs between returned Blacks and demobilized white soldiers. Though the "troubles" occurred throughout that year, James Weldon Johnson, a field secretary for the NAACP, coined the term for The Red Summer of 1919. Here's McKay's recounting of the poem's genesis from his autobiography. Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. . . . We stayed in our quarters all through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen. It was during those days that the sonnet, "If We Must Die," exploded out of me. Earlier generations of poets had lamented the plight of Blacks in genteel or indirect terms (e.g. Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask"), but McKay's poetry sounded a new note of defiance and an unvarnished depiction of white savagery. Published on the same page as McKay's famous sonnet is a searing "Roman Holiday" that takes no prisoners. Here is the first stanza: 'Tis but a modern Roman holiday Each state invokes its soul of basest passion, Each vies with each to find the ugliest way To torture Negroes in the fiercest fashion. Black Southern men, like hogs await your doom! White wretches hunt and haul you from your huts, They squeeze the babies out your women's womb, They cut your members off, rip out your guts! Small wonder that "If We Must Die" was anointed for fame. Furthermore, the poem's lack of racial specificity allowed it to be quoted by other underdogs in other times. There are apocryphal stories of Churchill reading it on a radio speech during the German Blitz and of it being found on the body of a prisoner after the deadly Attica Prison uprising of 1971. But McKay's militancy didn't stop with the passing of the Red Summer (though, interestingly, he was never so harsh or direct in his later fiction). When Alain Locke published a militant McKay poem in The New Negro (1925), he changed the title from "White House" to "White Houses," hoping to avoid the whiff of radicalism. This act of censorship severed the two men's friendship. " “No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects,” the affronted poet wrote to Locke, “when the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!” SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

It ain't all moanin' and groanin', and nobody knew that better than the first blues stars -- most of them women -- who brought their music to a broad audience. The very name, "blues," connotes a sad state of mind, and there was plenty for a woman to complain about, but that didn't stop her from punnin' and funnin'. "How Can I Miss You When I've Got Dead Aim?" Ida Cox sang in 1925. None of these women made their living, particularly early in their careers, solely as blues singers. They learned their craft in vaudeville and minstrel shows. They sang, they danced, they performed in skits where the humor was as broad as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom . They sang of heartbreak, but they could also be funny! Ma brought plenty of vaudeville humor to her recording career, and Paramount Records backed her up with hysterical graphic ads placed in the Chicago Defende r.   In her popular 1924 composition "These Dogs of Mine," Ma Rainey opens her tale of woe in the time-honored manner of a wronged woman summoning the world to hear her story. "Look-a here people, listen to me,/Believe me, I'm telling the truth." But it's not a triflin' man causing her sorrows. "If your corns hurt you, just like mine/You'd say these same words too." The Defender ad goes one better with its visual pun. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts