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I think it's about that time to dig back into Black queer representation in film and television. Crank up the AC and spend some time with me. (THREAD)
This is a continuation of another thread I made on this subject. Thanks to all the wonderful people who posted addendums and additions, sending me into the archives to broaden my own base of information, I figured a follow up was necessary. https://twitter.com/ChanceCalloway/status/1253482380720914432
Last time, folx were asking about my personal links, so here they are:
https://moneyyy.me/$csrcalloway for Cash, PayPal or Venmo donations
https://books2read.com/b/3GdwjP if you want to buy my latest novel.
I'm currently homeless and hosted in emergency pandemic housing, so anything is helpful!
https://moneyyy.me/$csrcalloway for Cash, PayPal or Venmo donations
https://books2read.com/b/3GdwjP if you want to buy my latest novel.
I'm currently homeless and hosted in emergency pandemic housing, so anything is helpful!
I want to go back a little further than I started before by looking at some representation from the seventies, but first let's hit something that's currently in the zeitgeist thanks to Netflix and the work of the folx behind Strong Black Lead. MOESHA.
Some of you may have already (re)watched the second season's "Labels," a (mostly) nuanced story about sexuality and acceptance written by the amazing @dbady. I briefly mentioned this episode in the previous thread. https://twitter.com/ChanceCalloway/status/1253548433559810049?s=20
About that "mostly" - it's clear where executive meddling came in, which Bady has been open about in previous interviews. Against his wishes, a character was written in whose sexuality - specifically, the way his sexuality was expressed - grossly became the punchline.
A charming moment between a queer-coded character and the straight lead is disrupted by a character who is clearly meant to represent the “undesirable” parts of gay sexuality - cattiness, femininity, etc. Now queerness becomes the dark side, positioning Moesha in the light/right.
Compare that depiction of femme queerness to the iconic Lindy from Car Wash (portrayed by Antonio Vargas and written by the late Joel Schumacher). The other characters may mock him, but he is nobody’s punchline, honey.
Saluting Lindy, who knew who she was all the way back in 1976.
With more representation like Lindy, so many black queer kids of all generations and expressions would feel like they had solid roots that they shouldn't feel ashamed of.
With more representation like Lindy, so many black queer kids of all generations and expressions would feel like they had solid roots that they shouldn't feel ashamed of.
Lindy of course led the way for Lamar Latrell from Revenge of the Nerds (1894).
Played by Larry B. Scott over a decade in all four of the Nerds films, Lamar - like Hollywood Montrose three years later - is an interesting case of representation that challenges the concepts of how we want to be represented *outside* of the intersection.
Outside of sexy-ass Bernie Casey, Lamar was the only notable Black character, so his flamboyance could be misconstrued as a negative reflection on either of his communities. That’s the thing about representation in straight white spaces - it’s so easily reduced to tokenism.
In 1989, Cleavon Little won the Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series Emmy for his performance in the series Dear John. At only 90 episodes, the show is never rerun in syndication, so this performance and show feels lost to history.
Cleavon is best known for his Tony Award-winning performance in Purlie and his role as Sherrif Bart in Blazing Saddles.
N is a good time to talk about the impact that a lack of representation can have. Looking for gayness in characters that may not be intentionally coded that way satiates when actual queer characters aren’t represented. (Sometimes this is real life subtext.)
But this can be very individualistic. Example: I read all three of these characters as queer. You may read zero. If one of them was queer in canon, we might read that one character as queer and the rest as straight.
Keep this in mind as we move into the age of out Black gay people, personas, and personalities. Knowing someone Black was LGBTTQQIA could do a lot for a person. Claiming others who were not out at the time could arguably do just as much.
Very much this. https://twitter.com/cysinblack/status/1298016908818751490
1994 brought us the real life love story between Real World castmember Pedro Zamora and his boyfriend Sean Sasser.
Though Pedro died the same day the season finale aired, Sean carried on, speaking at the inaugural White House AIDS conference and being appointed to the Presidential Advisory Council in HIV/AIDS.
Let’s talk about Ru. In 1992, she burst on the scene with “Supermodel (You Better Work)” from her 1993 album Supermodel of the World. It was a mainstream hit and little Black boys like me were introduced to drag for the first time.
RuPaul was ushered into pop culture with her appearance on The Arsênio Hall Show - which is where anyone who was anyone made an appearance in those days, from Bill Clinton to Michael Jackson.
A few years later she had her own show on VH1. I still remember a joke from comic view about the finest woman in the world being a man named RuPaul.
RuPaul was an anomaly, a drag queen disembodied from drag culture. In those pre-internet days, the ball scene was unknowable to many who knew her.
Here’s the infamous moment from the MTV Movie Awards where she was paired with Milton Berle.
Here’s the infamous moment from the MTV Movie Awards where she was paired with Milton Berle.
With queerness so stigmatized in the mainstream, the indie circuit was a wonderful place to find fully realized stories and documentation of LGBTQ identify. Looking to understand drag and ball culture? There’s a reason Paris is Burning is so revered.
You’ll have to go back to 1968 for the first drag documentary, “The Queen,” the source of Crystal LaBeija’s epic quote, “I have a right to show my color, darling! I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!”
Tongues Untied (1989) can still be found in the hidden reaches of the internet, an experimental documentary mixing poetry, storytelling, and dance.
The same year brought Looking for Langston, which combined scripted scenes and newsreel footage for a visual journey through the Harlem Renaissance. I LOVE THIS FILM.
Cheryl Dunye brought us The Watermelon Woman in 1996, the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian, and - countering what I noted in the previous thread about cinematic depictions if Black lesbians - the love interest is a white woman.
Discovering queer films from earlier periods is like stumbling past a hidden river in a sandy desert. They’ve been there, they’ve been nourishing, we’ve just been surrounded by and focused on a whole lot of nothing.
For example, Portrait of Jason is from 1967.
For example, Portrait of Jason is from 1967.
1970 gave us The Boys in the Band, a major motion picture. But you all know what I hear when I read “Bernard,” don’t you?
I’m fucking up the order of these because I’m hungry. I meant to bring up The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995), starring Nicole Ari Parker.
The issue with films from the eighties and before is the same as it is with independent pictures or even shows / films your parents wouldn’t watch or wouldn’t let you watch. Access. I had far more access to RuPaul than I did to The Boys in the Band Or The Watermelon Woman.
It’s one of the reasons I’m glad younger generations have what they have. It’s validation. It’s love. It’s saying, we see you and you matter, no matter where you are in your journey.
ACCESS. There were many characters I only recently learned about. Whoopi in Boys On the Side. Vondie Curtis-Hall as Dennis in Chicago Hope. Representation that was there that I couldn’t reach.
Whenever I’d get to see me on screen, it would have to be Trojan horsed into our household. Like Randall and Kyle in Get On the Bus (1996). Ironically, I didn’t sit through it (pops and I did not overlap much in the film enjoyment area) so I missed these two.
Side note: I remember watching The Celluloid Closet on cable in our living room and hearing my mom turn the bedroom tv until her audio matched mine and loudly asking, “THE CELLULOID CLOSET? WHAT’S THAT?” to my dad, but *really* to me and he grunted and I changed the channel.
"Black shows" -especially sitcoms- were the best way to get exposure to any hints at Black queer life. One of the earliest examples is the little-remembered Sanford and Son spinoff, Sanford Arms (1977). Alfred Martin wrote a great analysis of the episode. https://thiswastv.com/2013/03/04/searching-for-queerness-in-televisions-past-sanford-arms/
I shouted out Living Single in the previous thread, but I wanted to provide an example of the excellent writing that mixed legitimate humor with social commentary.
Like, check out this scene from a 1995 episode of In the House’s second season.
Again, RuPaul was pop culture! Crooklyn, The Brady Bunch movies, Wong Foo, Hercules, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Walker Texas Ranger, Nash Bridges, and Sister, Sister for starters!
In many cases these queer storylines were reduced to one-off characters, or recurring characters at best. The Hughleys had the supremely talented Amy Hill for three episodes, though she never returned after the episode where her character revealed her sexuality.
In a case of Black sitcoms embracing queer lead characters, Half & Half (2002-2006) had Alex Mapa as a main cast member, playing the equally openly gay Adam Benet.
Refreshingly, the series Girlfriends (2000-2008) had bisexual Lynn as one of the titular leads for all eight seasons. (I can never get into this show, but I salute the fact that one of these “group of friends” shows finally made someone openly LGBTQ+.)
On the big screen, we got Jangle Leg (Bernie Mac, pictured) and Biscuit (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.), lovers serving their respective prison sentences in the Eddie Murphy-Martin Lawrence comedy Life (1999).
In one of the film’s many unforgettable scenes, Biscuit has to come to terms with his identity when he realizes he’s getting released.
With that, I feel we can move safely into the new millennium (hah, remember when it felt new? I guess it still is, relatively) right after I salute three Puerto Rican performers who did their thing, inspiring us Black queer kids, too, all in very different ways.
One of the amazing things about My So-Called Life (1994-1995) is how much of an imprint it made on so many with just one season aired. The best thing it did for the culture was give us nineteen episodes of Wilson Cruz as Rickie Vasquez.
There were no characters like 15-year-old Rickie on television before or for years after (think of the few teenage characters covered so far in these threads). For many Latinx youth he was a mirror. For the rest of us, he was a marvel.
In the case of Jon Huertas, this was the perfect storm. I was finally old enough to stay up late and watch tv by myself. It was 1999 and MTV gave us season one of Undressed.
A late night teen soap opera / anthology series with rolling storylines, this slice of Undressed starred Jon as Evan and Bryce Johnson as Cliff. It was intriguing to me to see Cliff just kind of roll with Evan’s sexuality without homophobia being the driving narrative.
It helped that Jon was brown-skinned. I connected with that. (Remember Jon in Why Do Fools Fall in Love? And Moesha? And Sabrina? Every time I saw him I remembered him in Undressed.)
*Brown-skinned and HOT. I connected with THAT. This wasn’t even a case of shipping, because I did not want Cliff to end up with Evan. Their antagonistic/friendly dynamic worked better with the chemistry of the actors and the writing served them.
Oh, Jon. I saw him once a few years ago in Santa Monica and I wanted to tell him about how much his role in Undressed meant to me, but I decided to leave him alone. 
(I wonder how much of this show imprinted on me and influenced @PrettyDudesWeb)
(I wonder how much of this show imprinted on me and influenced @PrettyDudesWeb)
In 2003, Camp was released, feauturing (Sasha Allen! Anna Kendrick! Stephen Sondheim! No, seriously!) Robin de Jesús as teenager Michael Flores. He was awkward, beautiful, and he had a rockin fro.
In the film’s opening musical sequence, Michael shows up in drag and I fell in love with him. I think when I rented this from Blockbuster to watch with all my friends, they realized I was for sure gay. (The fact that I knew Sasha from VH1’s Born to Diva was another reason.)
In 2000, Nia Long portrayed a lesbian in a segment of “If Walls Could Talk 2,” opposite Michelle Williams, Chloë Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne, and Amy Carlson (kinda seems like Clea Duvall shoulda been here somewhere)
The same year, Nia appeared as one half of a lesbian couple in the very gay (and very white) Broken Hearts Club, an indie costarring Billy Porter.
2000 brought a separate legendary gay film into the world - Patrik-Ian Polk’s little-seen Punks. Like TBHC, the central character is a photographer. Unlike TBHC, it has Rockmond Dunbar, who won a Black Reel Award for his performance as Darby.
Telling the story of four queer friends (Seth Gillam, Dwight Ewell, Renoly Santiago, and Jazzmun) and their new - straight - neighbor (Dunbar), Polk’s film foreshadowed his most notable contribution to the culture to date. (But we’ll get to that later.)
Punks is hard to find due to distribution issues regarding the rights to some of the music that’s inextricable to the plot, but it’s a must-watch! If it screens near you, go!
Cheryl Dunye came back with her second feature, Stranger Inside (2001) for HBO.
The film follows the lives of Black lesbians in prison through the eyes of Treasure (Yolanda Ross), a juvenile offender who gets transferred to the same prison facility as her mother after she turns eighteen.
HBO also had Billie Keane from Oz, black, gay, and not seen after season one.
But in 2002, HBO put The Wire on our screens, and Black queer representation in the mainstream would never be the same.
The Wire gave us two Black, fierce characters on the queer spectrum. Lesbian detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) and thief Omar Little (Michael K. Williams).
With those two leads came their live interests. Kima’s partner Cheryl and Omar’s boyfriends Brandon, Dante, and Renaldo.
For the first four seasons of the show, Kima and Cheryl are shown in their domestic existence, eventually sharing a son, Elijah.
Omar Little is heralded as one of the greatest television characters ever, and The Wire as one of the greatest shows of all time.
One of my college professors pulled me and another Black student aside after class because she had just started watching The Wire and she “didn’t know it was like that for you guys.”
Let’s stick with HBO and talk about this mothafucka.
Jeffrey Wright (aka Commissioner Gordon) won a Tony Award for Angels in America in 1994, winning a Golden Globe and an Emmy when he reprised the role of Belize in the cable adaptation.
Jeffrey Wright (aka Commissioner Gordon) won a Tony Award for Angels in America in 1994, winning a Golden Globe and an Emmy when he reprised the role of Belize in the cable adaptation.
I mean, look at the material!
“Can I ask you something, sir?”
“Sir.”
“What’s it like after?”
“After?”
“This misery ends.”
“Sir.”
“What’s it like after?”
“After?”
“This misery ends.”
“The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.”
Capping off this mini HBO appreciation-fest, we have one of their crown jewel characters, Lafayette Reynolds from True Blood (2008-2014), played by the great Nelsan Ellis.
“Tip yo’ waitress.”
Seven seasons of magnificence. The girls were eating.
Showtime was doing something of significance with The L Word, starting biracial actress Jennifer Beals as biracial lead Bette Porter.
More Black lesbians got the spotlight on screens big and small including:
Zoë Saldaña in After Sex (2007)
Marsha Thomason in White Collar (2009-2014)
Jada Pinkett-Smith in The Women (2008)
Valarie Rae Miller in Dark Angel (2000-2002
Zoë Saldaña in After Sex (2007)
Marsha Thomason in White Collar (2009-2014)
Jada Pinkett-Smith in The Women (2008)
Valarie Rae Miller in Dark Angel (2000-2002
Spike Lee made She Hate Me in 2004 and I think the premise is icky, but it stars Anthony Mackie as a man who is requested to impregnate his ex-girlfriend and her girlfriend and then offers services to other lesbians looking to be inseminated.
I haven’t seen it, but... it just sounds like the kind of movie a straight man would make about lesbians. I’d love to know what other queer people who’ve seen this movie think of it.
(Y’all still with me? Whew! We’re almost there.)
The next year, Anthony Mackie starred as a gay man who befriends Bruce Nugent in Brother to Brother.
(That’s Daniel Sunjata as Langston Hughes.)
The next year, Anthony Mackie starred as a gay man who befriends Bruce Nugent in Brother to Brother.
(That’s Daniel Sunjata as Langston Hughes.)
2005 gave us the big screen version of Rent, making characters like Collins, Joanne, and Angel Dumott Schunard available to a worldwide audience.
Onstage, there was nothing like Rent. The film adaptation was muted and homogenized. (An commitment ceremony with two sets of loving and approving parents in the 80s is a little... my disbelief can only be suspended so far.) But it immortalized these characters.
Now I’ll quickly salute Calvin, who is NOT kissing Sebastian Stan here (and now you can’t unsee it)
ABC Family premiered Greek in 2007, giving us Calvin (played by Paul James), a Black athletic legacy who dated several (white) men over the course of the series. But no worries. The 2000s gave us one series with oodles of Black on Black queer love.
From 2005-2006, we had Noah’s Arc. Noah, Ricky, Chance, Alex, Wade, Junito, Baby Gat, and so many more instantly electric and identifiable characters, with a cast full of actors who deserved more attention and characters who deserved more seasons.
Created and written by Patrik-Ian Polk, you can see the shared DNA with his earlier Punks, but this time with room for the characters and couples to experience a variety of successes and challenges.
Airing on LOGO, this was the first time any of us had serialized representation of what I’m calling “Black on Black gay.” Their friends and lovers and their ISSUES were undeniably Black and undeniably queer.
Also, bonus points for introducing Wilson Cruz to new generation.
The series was followed up with a film (and a recent, COVID-set reunion), Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom.
We were repped at GLAAD. We were repped at the NAACP awards. We existed, and not as tokens. Noah’s Arc was Black and queer from head to tail. I will never fail to pay homage.
And get into this vogue session with @darrylstephens, @DougSpearman, and @GaryLGray. One of my favorite moments in the movie. #WorldHoldOn
Okay, holy fuck. From Crystal LaBeija and Jason Holliday to Darryl Stephens and Patrik-Ian Polk. Our culture as Black and queer people is rich and deep and varied, and even though we have a long way to go, it’s fascinating to look back at how far we’ve come.
Also, this thread by @justxhenry is full of solid points. This one in particular: https://twitter.com/justxhenry/status/1297992432961945603
Support the culture! Rent one of these films! Tell some of these people what they meant and mean to you. They were so we could be. They are so we can.
That’s all I got. I love you like I love myself.
(I also now have way too many pictures of Bernie Casey and Jon Huertas added to my collection.)
(I also now have way too many pictures of Bernie Casey and Jon Huertas added to my collection.
)
***Mad at myself because I told myself I wouldn’t forget this one.
I find it interesting how othered both Mercutio and Tybalt are in Baz’s 1996 Romeo and Juliet adaptation. Both flashy and fabulous, both men of color, both killed as plot catalysts.
I find it interesting how othered both Mercutio and Tybalt are in Baz’s 1996 Romeo and Juliet adaptation. Both flashy and fabulous, both men of color, both killed as plot catalysts.
And I should have known it was going to circle back around to RuPaul somehow. Here he is in 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader - out of drag in a role as a counselor at a conversion therapy camp. (Rufio! Sunshine! Mr. LeAnn Rimes!) 
