In the early years of the 20th century, the rhymed lyric expressing the feelings of the writer was the dominant poetic form in America. It was the direct inheritance of British romanticism, whose greatest practitioners, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, were immortalized in English-speaking countries everywhere. The Romantic poet was known to have a sensitive heart but rarely did he strike the tone of confessional poetry that became dominant in the American lyric from the 1950s on. Poetic language and poetic thought veiled the poet’s joys and sorrows. (Check out Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems” for classic examples.)   But the lyric poem, more than any other literary genre, invited the speaker to lay out her sorrows, and if she were “queer — a woman — and colored,” to paraphrase Marita Bonner, there were plenty of sorrows to choose from. The Harlem Renaissance published reams of poetry, much of it by women – not so much the case with other literary genres. Predictably, the best-known poets to emerge, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, were men, but women’s contributions were substantial both in quality and quantity, as anthologies of Black poetry from the period attest. Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Helene Johnson, and Gwendolyn Bennett ultimately created a space for themselves in the canon. And they could strum their lyres to lament the lot of womanhood (“The Heart of a Woman” by Georgia Douglas) or address in surprising ways the pathos of being Black (“Bottled” by Helene Johnson”), and of course all could bear witness to the joys and sorrows of Love.             Of heterosexual love, that is. But what if the desire that moved a woman’s heart to poetry was for another woman? Lyric poetry was the most inviting vehicle to express desire, but could poetry acknowledge a queer desire sufficiently camouflaged so that it could be presented to the world, or did it have to remain private, hiding its “shameful” secret in a drawer? We have only two women writers who wrote of their queer desires, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké. In 1931, Dunbar Nelson wrote, “Love and beautiful love has been mine from many men, but the great passion of four or five transcended that of other women — and what more can any woman want?” But this was a diary entry, not meant for public eyes, and so Alice chose the private path of discretion.             Angelina Weld Grimké was quite another matter. The only child of Archibald Grimké, the bastard issue of a white man and his Black slave, Angelina lived in thrall to her stern, high-acheiving father. Archibald had married a white woman from a prominent midwestern family, but the couple separated after three years. Angelina’s mother took her girl back to her family in the midwest, but the pressure of raising a Black daughter was too much for her, and she returned Angelina to her father four years later. Then she committed suicide.   This alone would have provided grist for years of therapy, had there been such a practice in the first decades of the 20th century, but add to that her lesbian orientation, and it’s a wonder she was able to write coherently, much less produce a steady stream of essays, plays, stories, and poems while living under her father’s roof in Washington, DC between 1902 and 1930.   Though presenting herself as a spinster to the outside world, the lure of the lyric drove Grimké to express her passion for women and subsequent frustrated longing in ways that weren’t so veiled. Poems that she never shared during her lifetime, such as “Rosabel,” were explicitly addressed to other women, but one remarkable example, “El Beso,” published in 1909 is not so difficult to decipher.   El Beso   Twilight–and you Quiet–the stars; Snare of the shine of your teeth, Your provocative laughter, The gloom of your hair; Lure of you, eye and lip; Yearning, yearning, Languor, surrender; Your mouth, And madness, madness, Tremulous, breathless, flaming, The space of a sigh; Then awakening–remembrance, Pain, regret–your sobbing; And again, quiet–the stars, Twilight–and you.   What’s remarkable about this poem is how modern it is for 1909. Blank verse; short, tense lines; no genders; no verbs; melodramatic language; nouns and implied action revealed starkly and briefly as though lit by a strobe. The story is clear: a same-sex kiss between the poet and her beloved; the intense pain immediately following the unexpected flare-up of passion. And why is the title of the poem in Spanish? This is the most transparent of fig leaves. Yet these anguished attempts to both tell and hide the story result in a jolt towards modernist expression that was unique for its time.   Outside of Grimke’s poetry – a body of work still yet to be collected, evaluated, and incorporated into queer literary history – there’s little more to say about this topic. The conventions of literary expression were too patriarchal, too constricting, too conservative (in terms of sanctioning only heteronormativelove) to allow for anything more.   “And madness, madness.” SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Think about it. Up until the defeat of pleasing tonality by exponents of modern music some time in the 20th century, classical music sat at the apex of valued musical genres. Popular music was always more widely appreciated and influential, but a symphony or an opera was presumed to express the highest aspirations and achievements of a people or a nation – of Western Civilization.   This was still the case in the America of the 1920s which witnessed the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. Although no one disputed the contributions and leadership of African Americans in so many vernacular forms (ragtime, blues, jazz), the “supreme achievement” of classical music remained a whites-only enclosure, ferociously defended by white critics, musicians, and impresarios.   That didn’t stop a stubborn minority of Black performers and composers, genuinely inspired by the classical tradition, from trying to make their mark. However, the unrelenting hostility of post-Reconstruction society either slapped these would-be acolytes down (e.g. Will Marion Cook) or forced them to incorporate grotesque elements of minstrel sensibility (e.g. Sissieretta Jones’ Black Patti Troubadours) into their performance.   Due to tectonic shifts in American society – the Great Migration and the widespread dissemination of recorded sound – a space was made for Black classical performers and composers to practice their art. The first African American recording company, Black Swan of 1921, was created by its founder Harry Pace specifically to record Black voices in various genres. “Companies would not entertain any thought of recording a colored musician or colored voice. I therefore decided to form my own company and make such recordings as I believed would sell.” Two of the first three pressings were highbrow offerings that appealed only to the Talented Tenth. This was the musical preference of Pace, a friend and colleague of W.E.B. Du Bois. He had no love for blues and jazz.   Black Swan, named after the sobriquet bestowed upon Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the best-known Black concert performer of the 19th century, would have died a quick, unmemorialized death had not its recording manager, Fletcher Henderson, and musical director, William Grant Still, not recognized that concessions had to be made to popular taste. White people weren’t going to buy recordings of Black classical artists and neither were most African Americans. They stumbled upon a young, unknown Ethel Waters who recorded two blues numbers for them – both smash hits – and the rest is history.   And what of Black classical music? It would not go away. Black voices of deep and genuine talent found white patronage and, usually after Herculean struggles requiring a European stamp of approval, were able to melt the wax of racial hostility blocking the ears of music aficionados. Any African-American, man or woman who was recognized as having scaled the Parnassian heights of classical music represented a badge of racial pride and provided proof that the Negro could be the equal of any White performer. (This last belief, that the artistic achievements of African Americans would forcibly open the minds and doors of white society, was a basic tenet fueling the early impetus of the Harlem Renaissance.)   In March 1925, Survey Graphic, a magazine focusing on sociological research, produced an issue on “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” guest-edited by Howard University professor (and closeted gay) Alain Locke. This was the opening volley of what was then known as “the Negro Renaissance” on the national stage. (All that material was later expanded into the stand-alone best-seller, The New Negro.) And whose portrait graced the cover of Survey Graphic? Renowned classical tenor Roland Hayes. The biography and career of Roland Hayes was prototypical of the Black artist overcoming all obstacles (poverty, lack of formal education, unremitting racism in the world of classical music) to realize his dream of becoming a celebrated tenor. Hayes was born in Curryville, Georgia in 1887, to tenant farmers on the plantation where his mother had once been a slave. At the age of twelve a visiting church pianist introduced the boy to some phonograph records of Enrico Caruso, “That opened the heavens for me,” he wrote. “The beauty of what could be done with the voice just overwhelmed me.” From such unpromising beginnings, Hayes wrested a musical education for himself, bulldozed his way through the racism that would not let him make a career in the music he loved, and eventually gave a command performance at Buckingham Palace in 1922. With European approbation, the American barriers fell, and when Hayes returned to the States in 1923, his career traversed a triumphal series of African American “firsts.” Having conquered the white preserve of classical music, Hayes was a canny choice for the cover of the New Negro Survey Graphic. This was as far from the minstrel image as one could get. But although Hayes lived in Harlem for most of the 1920s, he was never central to the Harlem Renaissance and was rarely enrolled then or later. And we end with one telling lacuna: out of all the essays in The New Negro discussing the various genres of music, there is nothing on the contributions of the Black performers and composers of classical music. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

When people ask where the name of my production company comes form, I flippantly reply, “Shoga is Swahili for faggot.” It’s a throwaway line with a lot of discomfort running around underneath. But let us begin – 1st person - with my encounters with indigenous forms of same-sex activity.   I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin getting a higher degree (and remember my honorific is Dr. Robert Philipson!) in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Black and African studies. I had decided that I couldn’t make any claims to a credible understanding of African literature without having tackled writings composed, not in the languages of the former colonial powers (French, English, and Portuguese), but in an indigenous African language. With its 400-year tradition of written composition, Swahili, the language that grew from the permanent commercial outposts that Arab traders (and slavers) established along the East African coast, was an obvious choice for me.   In 1985, I was studying Swahili language and culture on the Kenyan coast when I learned about (and saw) men who dressed and lived as women. The name applied to these men was used as a term of endearment between women, shoga. [plural, mashoga]. When denoting a man, the meaning became, to use the endearingly Victorian definition of the 1939 Standard Swahili-English Dictionary, “(2) a catamite; (3) an impotent male person who associates with women, often as a servant.” (One could spend pages and pages unpacking the assumptions of class, religion, and the state of medical knowledge behind these definitions, but let us not go down that rabbit hole.)   I saw the most mashoga in the remote, extremely traditional town Lamu. They walked the streets wearing colorful women’s wrappers (kangas) rather than the more subdued kanzu of male attire. They were noticeably effeminate but not ashamed or fearful. Some of them entered into domestic arrangements with other men, but these “husbands” were not mashoga.The term for them was basha, the king in a suit of playing cards. The Swahili seemed pretty relaxed about these kinds of relationships. There were also masculine-presenting men who had sex with other men, but these blended in with the others, and I learned no Swahili term to refer to them. I know they existed because I bedded one of them while in Lamu.   Three years later I spent most of 1988 at the University of Dar Es Salaam as a researcher in the Kiswahili Institute. Although Dar es Salaam is technically part of the Swahili coast, it had, under colonialism, burgeoned into a cosmopolitan city with populations from all over East Africa. The homophobic attitudes of the inland tribes combined with the catastrophic religious teachings of Christianity to make for a very unfriendly atmosphere. Whatever gay life that might have existed in Dar (and there surely was some) was invisible to me, and as a catamite, I felt completely isolated. I reluctantly returned to celibacy with occasional lapses into lust-powered friendships towards some of the men with whom I came into contact. All were presumably straight, and it was rare that I made anything approaching a pass. Sometimes I detected what I imagined to be reciprocal interest, but most of the time I simmered in silence. On one occasion a young man offered to spend the night with me, but I’m not a seducer by nature, and I couldn’t get beyond his passivity. And then there was Haroub in Zanzibar … (Read the Highlight of the Month.)   There are two discourses of same-sex desire in Africa. The Western one with which we are so familiar, “gay” and its variants, is a colonial and post-colonial import and has aroused all kinds of toxic opposition – xenophobic (“the white man brought it here”), religious (“Sodomite”), political (“my President advocates throwing them all in jail”). Indigenous forms of same-sex desire are sprinkled throughout the continent, but they exist in differing social conditions, lexicalized in different languages, and accorded different degrees of tolerance and visibility. There’s no uniformity about any of this, but nobody has proposed ridding Swahili society of its mashoga. They are a home-grown phenomenon and have been integrated for centuries.             “Gays,” however, are another kettle of swish. They can be ostracized, persecuted, and even killed with impunity. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Farrokh Balsara was born in Zanzibar’s Government Hospital on September 5, 1946 to Parsee parents, followers of Zoroastrianism. Farrokh’s father, Bomi Bulsara, came from Bulsar in Gujurat – hence the family name – and moved to Zanzibar to work in the High Court as a cashier for the British government. Farrokh’s first years of schooling were at the Zanzibar Missionary School, where he was taught by Anglican nuns. At the age of eight, his parents sent him to a Church of England school in India. When he was almost done with his secondary school and completing his final year back in Zanzibar, the 1964 revolution overthrew the ruling elite, and the Bulsaras permanently relocated to Middlesex, England. By this time Farrokh was calling himself “Freddie” and took on the name “Mercury” in 1971, one year after forming Queen. Queen went on to one of the biggest careers in rock music: 18 number-one albums, 18 number-one singles, 10 number-one DVDs, over 170 million records sold. Freddie Mercury wrote Queen’s most famous single, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and was the most flamboyant of the band members, but in the era of glam rock and heavy metal, Freddie’s style didn’t necessarily peg him as gay. Freddie’s deepest emotional relationship was with Mary Austin to whom he was engaged until he confessed to her that he was bisexual. They remained best friends. During the 80s, Freddie delved deeper and deeper into the gay life of London and New York, eventually modeling his look after the “Castro Clone” – tight clothes over a worked-out body, short hair, prominent moustache. It was an odd game of hiding in plain sight. Everybody in Freddie’s inner circle knew about his sexual orientation but he stayed silent on the subject for the rest of his life. Of course coming out in the 80s would have negatively affected his career and possibly the trajectory of the band as well. During the 80s, AIDS was spreading throughout that community. After displaying some signs of illness, his own HIV infection was confirmed by the late '80s. Even after developing AIDS, he denied reports about his illness and being gay. He was more upfront with his bandmates, but never told his family why he was ill .It wasn't until November 23, 1991, that he issued a statement that said in part: "Following enormous conjecture in the press, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV-positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private in order to protect the privacy of those around me." He died the next day. Freddie’s connection to Zanzibar is relatively slender, but Stone Town houses a small Freddie Mercury museum placing the first eight years of his life in socio-historical context and goosing up quotes from childhood friends and family that were curated after his death. As you might imagine in this conservative Muslim society, no mention is made of Mercury’s sex life or the fact that he died of AIDS at the age of 45. I asked a few Zanzibaris with whom I felt comfortable if they knew that Mercury was a shoga, and their response was a wry acknowledgment that of course, everybody knew! You just didn’t talk about it in polite society SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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

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

- A Slick South African Lesbian Romance Frameline 39 ended last week. The 10-day granddaddy of LGBT film festivals, always brings a rich array of queer-themed films and shorts from around the world. Africa is usually present with a handful of offerings – nothing on the order of what comes out of Europe and Latin America – but what comes is always interesting and usually, for Western audiences, educational. And Westerners might not be aware that the Republic of South Africa is a fully modern state, on the order of any country in the so-called developed world. Its film and TV industry is as technically competent and sophisticated as any of its Western counterparts. One need no further proof of that than the new South African independent film, While You Weren’t Looking, directed by Catharine Stewart. The film was financed, in part, by Out in Africa, the South African Gay & Lesbian film festival. As the festival proclaims on its website: South Africa led the world with its all embracing Constitution, granting homosexuals unprecedented freedoms and rights. This feature . . . takes a look at South Africa through the lives and experiences of a cross section of Cape Town queers. The film focuses on two sets of lesbian relationships. Dez and Terri, a mixed-race couple married 20 years and adoptive parents, they are the trailblazing lesbians of the New South Africa. But, have these freedoms guaranteed them happiness? Asanda, their 18 year old adopted daughter, is the poster child for South Africa’s diversity but describes herself as “an experiment”, being made up as she goes along. She meets Shado, an enigmatic Tommy Boy [butch lesbian] from Khayalitsha, a township on the edge of Cape Town, and a different picture of the New South Africa emerges. While You Weren’t Looking is nothing if not sophisticated. The cinematography is striking, oftentimes beautiful and self-consciously artful. Dez and Terri’s house is a gorgeous aerie of pool and balcony and exquisite furniture. The acting is uniformly excellent; the dialogue more than serviceable. It is thoroughly enjoyable to watch. And, being South African, there’s no lack of political discourse or overt examination of class difference. Interestingly, although Dez and Terri are a mixed-race couple, theirs seems to be a perfectly post-racial relationship, both rich and privileged and leading fabulous lives. But Dez is cheating on Terri, and much of the narrative’s drama hinges on that common bomb in domestic relationships. Asanda is so smitten with the lower-class Shado that she travels to the township to spend a candlelit sex-filled night with her. By didactic coincidence, neighborhood tsotsis break into the house the following morning searching for stolen drugs and Asanda is mugged and nearly raped. This sends her scurrying back to her pool and balcony. I am struck by the split between the personal and the political in this movie. Although the political is present, it is present through overt lecturing about queer freedom or references to South Africa’s gay and lesbian history. Some of the couple’s party guests wonder if their revolutionary impulse hasn’t been coopted by constitutional fiat. And there is a (white) professor of Asanda’s who shows shocking pictures of sexual behaviour (a dyke with a large strap-on) and opines that queering all binaries leads toward ultimate freedom. Yet the center of the film is the emotions and interrelationships of its principals – rather than its principles. Of course the romance of Asanda and Shado will founder upon the rocks of class difference, but the script opts for a spectacular, violence-filled break rather than life’s usually slow and unspectacular realization that this just can’t work. And the trajectory followed Terri and Dez is familiar to all who love Lifetime movies: a chance discovery leading to suspicion; suspicion confirmed; crisis (this one involving, to me, obscure symbolism about throwing dresses into the swimming pool); resolution. “Don’t leave me, Dez.” While You Weren’t Looking is, at heart, a romance. There’s nothing wrong with this. Not everything that comes out of Africa has to be focused on race, political dictatorship, the disaster of war, disease, and poverty. It’s good that the continent can produce lighter fare, even in the contested area of sexuality. While You Weren’t Looking inhabits the same class as the power lesbians of Capetown, one in which the personal can take precedence over the political. But homophobia, even though constitutionally condemned, is alive and lethal in the townships and tribal areas of the country. As a Tommy Boy, Shado’s life in the township is dangerous and defined by her class; the film is clear about that. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

I can do no better contextualizing the social origins for this accomplished documentary than quoting its first-time director, Jamal Sims. “[I]n1971, Ms. Shirley Middleton, a Jackson State University majorette, put down her baton and started thrusting her hips on the football field and started dancing to popular music. That style became what is now known as bucking. All of the HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges) majorette teams adopted this style and over the years made it more edgy and hip. The young men of the LGBTQ+ community in the South who went to the schools wanted to do the dance, but knew they couldn’t because of social stereotypes. They took it to the underground gay clubs, created teams, and created a community around this particular style of dance.” When the Beat Drops is primarily a group portrait of the bucking team, Phi Phi, created by the dance craze founder, Anthony. Immediately we are struck by how atypical Anthony is as a dance fag. He’s HUGE, well over 250 pounds. He not only pioneered the Black gay male style of bucking but drew like-minded men to him who also responded deeply to this athletic, socially stigmatized (for men) style of dance. Not only is Anthony large, he’s masculine, obviously very kind, and unapologetic about being gay. I suspect that Southern culture produces a kind of post-Stonewall identity that is more relaxed than its urban counterparts in other parts of the country. Unlike the ball culture of New York first profiled in Paris Is Burning, these J-Setters (a term also originating at Jackson State) are not necessarily transgendered, not homeless, not scrabbling on the streets to get by, not even effeminate, though some are. Lynell, one of the dancers profiled, is a college graduate who teaches high school band and has founded an organization to advance music and fine arts programs in high school.  Napoleon, another high school music teacher, also runs a non-profit to promote music education. These men have fears that if they were outed as J-Setters (which, of course, the doc makes inevitable), they might lose their jobs or the respect of their peers. Look at the picture at the top of this post. The mix of athleticism and the “feminine” uniforms is both disorienting and exhilarating. I was struck by the parallels and differences between bucking and MTF cross-dressing. Both are stigmatized by straight society and many of their fellow gays because of the embrace of femininity or certain aspects of it. But a man in is more constrained by her “role” than are the J-Setters. (In that regard, the community profiled in Paris Is Burning is far more homogeneous). However the courage they have in following their passion is the same. And as with all stigmatized communities, a sense of family and fellowship ensues. One of the loveliest scenes of the documentary chronicles a party at Anthony’s where members of Phi Phi banter and interact. Sims, a successful dancer and choreographer, wisely focuses on the dance aspect of this subculture, giving the bucking sequences, particularly in the climactic battle for national supremacy, enough time to delight and astonish. The unpleasant realities of Black life in America occasionally intrude – Anthony is shot in an attempted auto theft mugging; Flash’s aggro lesbian mother battles a crack addiction – but Sims doesn’t descend too deeply down these rabbit holes.  As a first-time documentarian, Sims has produced something that is polished, entertaining, educational, and witness to the diversity within the Black gay spectrum. They’re not all snap queens, tragic victims, or closeted players. As a group portrait, When The Beat Drops is supremely successful. Going against current documentary dogma, Sims doesn’t choose his characters and make sure they each follow an arc. And yet, he has fashioned a 90-minute portrait that sustains our interest and demands our admiration. As dancer/athletes these men are astonishing! SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

- A Gay Black Man Revisits   A few years before he died, the visionary arts philanthropist Jim DeSilva told me a story that I have not forgotten. DeSilva, who famously returned to school at age 50 to study art history at Columbia University, recalled an afternoon visit to one of New York’s museums. Strolling through the galleries, he came upon a post-modern work that utterly confounded his sensibilities. Observing DeSilva’s look of perplexity and disdain, another patron – a significantly older man – approached and posed a single question: “Yes, but how does it make you feel?!” If I remember correctly, this incident happened before DeSilva had any thought of taking up formal graduate studies. The future benefactor of the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego, said that this moment immediately and forever changed his perspective on art, and his story has forever changed mine as well Still, as I prepared recently to revisit writer-director Marlon Riggs’ groundbreaking 1989 film Tongues Untied for the first time in 15 or more years, I found myself wondering what I would think of the film and not so much how I would feel about it. Could the concerns conveyed by the film now seem closer to pre-Stonewall perspectives than to perspectives that drive today’s queer discourse? It is one thing to look on the viewpoints of another age in a traditional documentary and judge them as artifacts of history. It is another matter to consider them in a film such as Tongues Untied, which is part documentary, part poetry, part performance art. Insofar as Riggs wanted his film to be a work not only of its time but also expressly for its time, would the film’s particular voice be one that could reach viewers from subsequent generations or would that voice seem dated? I prepared myself for disappointment, and I feared that my worry was appropriately placed when I re-encountered the performance-poetry device upon Riggs heavily relies and that seemed to be a staple of African-American stage work in the 1960s and beyond. I need not have feared. Jim DeSilva had shown me the way forward. Indeed, perhaps even the performance-poetry device has been more a distraction of the head than of the heart. Riggs (“Silence is my shield….”) wanted his film literally to free silenced tongues, so that they might speak of all-but-unspeakable wounds and speak to the fundamental strength and belonging of a people, so that in speaking these tongues might help all of us to heal. It is precisely on these terms that Tongues Untied succeeds. And, yes Riggs absolutely did seek to succeed for all people, understanding that no one person can be truly healed unless all are healed, that no one community can be truly healed unless all communities are healed. As I re-watched and remembered Tongues Untied, I swiftly transitioned from the head game of critical scrutiny to the felt conviction that the film succeeds admirably. In one hour, Riggs presents what for many gay African-American men, for many African Americans period, for many LGBTQ people period were among the defining hallmarks of a decade, from snapping and voguing to increased recognition of the prevalence and insidious, horrific impact of bullying, gay bashing, religious hypocrisy, internalized homophobia and racism, LGBTQ invisibility in African-American communities, and African-American invisibility in queer communities. And he presents all with a hip-hop cadence that was not then typical of films reaching large audiences, though it was commonplace in recorded music. Riggs shows gay African-American men living their reality, and here is the key: He does so never as an observer but always as both subject and object of the film. While gay African-American men supply the voices and the faces of the complex panoply that is Tongues Untied, what these men--and Riggs--experienced was emblematic of what countless others endured then and endure today. We may comprehend this universality more readily now than we could in 1989. There were surprises, too. It is 1989, and yet for the first three quarters of the film there are only oblique passing references to HIV. Then, after 45 minutes, deliciously provocative themes of lovemaking and eroticism that have been interspersed throughout the film explode into one of the most memorable of poet-activist Essex Hemphill’s many memorable lines: “Now we think as we fuck.” (Hemphill’s commentary, that of author-activist Joseph Beam, and Riggs’ own prose-poetry are consistently trenchant.) On this viewing, and from nearly the outset of the film, I found myself wondering how many of the men depicted in Tongues Untied are alive today. In 1989, to what extent did I consciously ponder how many of the men would survive another five, ten, or now 25 years? Riggs is reported to have learned of his own HIV+ status during the making of the film: “I discovered a time bomb ticking in my blood.” He would die of HIV-related causes in 1994 at age 37, and one cannot help imagining how Riggs’ HIV diagnosis may have changed the course of the film. Another surprise: the stunning physical beauty of the men. Many of the men embody non-traditional, non-conventional standards of beauty; yet the beauty is so utterly evident that I found it mind-blowing. Marlon speaks to it: “I was blind to my brothers’ beauty and now I see my own.” My feelings upon revisiting Tongues Untied were numerous. To be sure, I felt anger and sadness about how little has changed. I know that this film depicts the reality, virtually unchanged, of too many lives today. I also felt an ongoing multi-layered grief with respect to HIV’s impact. I also felt gratitude because of course there has been movement in our communities. Despite the layers of sorrow, I felt joy and exhilaration watching the film more than anything else. I felt these things because Marlon Riggs captured a world and time that might otherwise might be lost. Tongues Untied is a documentary in the most literal sense, and an important one. In commentary that is included on the Tongues Untied DVD edition that I watched, Black AIDS Institute founder Phill Wilson reminds us that in the film Marlon Riggs exposed himself when few others did. He took this step with the conviction that people cannot love whom they do not know. So let black gay men be known – let the world know us. The film continues to move and inform because Marlon, willing to let himself be seen, proceeded to create his film from a place within himself of the purest motives and intentions. Who can say what legacy Marlon Riggs might have created had he lived another 20 or 50 years? Yet Riggs is a man who in this film and in a tragically short career did reveal himself to a rare degree. Because he did this and enlisted others to do the same before the camera, more of us now know, can love, and often do love African-American men and women, gay men and women, transgender brothers and sisters, and in general more people of more creeds and colors. This fuller capacity to love graces and enriches us all. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

If you had told me that the best, most artful film to come out of East Africa so far was an anthology of shorts about the difficulties of being gay and lesbian in Kenya shot in black and white, I would have been incredulous. In fact, I’m still a bit incredulous. Stories of Our Lives was produced by The NEST, a Nairobi multi-disciplinary art space and collective made up of ten artists. Among these is Jim Chuchu, the director of Stories and a bona-fide homegrown genius. The artistry and assurance of Stories is breathtaking. The stories themselves are common fare, which makes their resonance even greater. A gay tea picker, in love with his straight best friend, ultimately leaves the farm where they are both working to escape the pain of seeing him flirt with women. Half of a lesbian couple pretending to live as sisters, explores her nighttime fears of community violence and fantasizes about turning into a man to ward off attacks from the neighbors. A young man is beaten up by his violently homophobic friend who sees him leaving a gay club. The stories filmed are only five out of the over 200 that were collected by the NEST and will come out in a book of the same name as the movie. What is remarkable is that Jim Chuchu doesn’t appear to be gay nor is the NEST collective an LGBT organization. On its website, the NEST proclaims, “We … find ourselves exploring, dissecting and subverting the layers of how Africans are Seen and Unseen, what Africans Can and Cannot Do, where Africans Can and Cannot Go, and What Africans Can and Cannot Say.” One of the things that Africans cannot say is “I’m gay” or “I’m lesbian.” (Bisexuality and transgendered identities are still off in the future.) In general, modern African culture is hostile to Western conceptions of homosexuality that have nurtured the difficult identities of those who find themselves attracted to members of the same sex. Kenya is no different in that regard, though not quite as murderous towards gays as its neighbor, Uganda. But, in spite of its artistry and the acclaim the film is garnering in the West, Stories was rejected for distribution and screening by the Kenya Film Classification Board, on the grounds that the film "promotes homosexuality, which is contrary to national norms and values" of Kenya. Executive producer George Gachara was subsequently arrested for filming without a license. Nonetheless, the film is out there, and it is a thing of wonder. Shot in black and white on a single DSLR camera with amateur actors on a budget of $15,000, its artistry should put to shame all of the Martin-Scorsese/Quentin-Tarantino wannabees coming out of film school with their highly burnished technical education and wealth of resources. This is the power of art, birthed by social engagement and made beautiful through an unerring aesthetic. Though not gay and lesbian themselves, the NEST has created the most piercing and eloquent piece of gay and lesbian advocacy to come out of Africa. As of this writing, Stories premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has screened at a handful of others, including San Francisco’s Frameline, where I caught the first of its two screenings there. In my own casually Western arrogant way, I went in expecting something that was well-intentioned but hobbled by lack of funds and technical experience. Boy, was I humbled! SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Enough said, right? Or maybe you were looking at the boobs?  Well, let me put this in a bit of context, since the context brings in an intriguing mix of gay history, personal history, and literary history. In 1981 Oscar Wilde (that's it for the gay history, folks) wrote a one-act play in French, Salome, based on the Biblical narrative of Herod's stepdaughter attempting to seduce, then demanding from the besotted Herod for whom she has danced the Dance of the Seven Veils, the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Wilde wrote a strange and stagey text lensed through particularly vaporous fin-de-siecle aesthetic movements: Symbolism, Pre-Raphealite sensibility, Decadence. There's a reason that Salome never gets produced. Now for the personal history. The famous nude wrestling scene in Ken Russell's Women in Love shocked me with film's power to arouse and move. In 1969 sex-positive depictions of eroticism between men were few and far between. Ken Russell went on to a long and controversial career filled with sometimes glorious, sometimes wretched excess. One can see why he was drawn to staging Salome, which he presents as a play-within-a-film set in a Parisian brothel. Wilde's boyfriend/lover Lord Douglas is cast as John the Baptist and is the object of much high-flown verbal slobbering on Salome's part. Salome's Last Dance definitely scores high on the wretched excess spectrum, but that can have its own pleasures. (I like Boz Luhrmann, thank you very much.) So what's with the Black executioner and his strategically placed sword? John the Baptist's executioner didn't make it into the gospels, so Ken Russell, British by birth and training, was free to let his imagination roam. And a super-hunky Black executioner would certainly make an impact. Of course, it's a non-speaking part. As I've written elsewhere, schlock reveals a culture's fixations and phobias with the least artistic screening. This is high-class schlock, but it does show that the Mandingo fantasy has its counterpart on the Continent. With the long history of the British in Africa, this needn't be a borrowing from American culture. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1997, a French/Guinean film set in West Africa opens, shockingly, with two young men kissing each other wildly and passionately in the front seat of a car parked in the countryside. Dakan told the story of an impossible homosexual love ultimately triumphing in a traditional, deeply homophobic society. It was predictably banned in its home country, made a bit of a splash on the film festival circuit, and disappeared. That’s too bad. It deserves to be remembered far more than the current iteration of this same old same old currently depicted in the Kenyan film, Rafiki. Rafiki is the Swahili word for “friend,” and the film charts the predictable path of a lesbian relationship that blooms between the daughters of two competing local politicians in a lower- working/class outskirt of Nairobi. The plot arc is familiar: the first timid steps toward passion, girlish courtship, consummation, closeted relationship, discovery, forced separation, eventual (though, from a script standpoint, unbelievable) reunification. We have seen this story told over and over in the West and now Africa. Which isn’t to say that Rafiki isn’t engaging and fun to watch. The film is professional on all levels. As a director Wanuri Kahiu makes a competent Western-style movie with some nice color choices, particularly pink ‘cause, you know, this is a girl story. Sammantha Mugatsia plays Kena, the butch, shy-but-super-intelligent daughter of a convenience store operator. As a first-time actor, she does a fine job with her role, but Sheila Munyiva, enacting Ziki, her effervescent femme love-interest, spurts out of the predictable aspects of her role as much as the colorful locs on her head. Her performance alone makes the film worth watching – along with the fascinating backdrop of a hybridized African society that has lost most  (though not all) of its traditional folkways. As a co-writer of the script, one loosely based on a prize-winning 2008 short story by the Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko, Kahiu is less successful. (Even though only 12 pages, the story is way better, broader in scope, and much more African than Rafiki.) The film’s story is well-worn, “redeemed” by an implausible coda that ignores the continued impossibility of a public lesbian life where homosexuality is punishable with up to 14 years in prison. (Also, predictably, the film has been banned in its home country.) I sat through the truly clichéd sequences – especially the carnival-fun montage and the gauzy make-out scenes – waiting for the bracing jolt of life brought by those characters not overdetermined the requirements of the plot: Kena’s flawed-but-undestanding father and the wonderful township gossip, Mama Atim. The greatest disappointment of the film is its choice of sappy Western music to evoke a romantic atmosphere – this from a continent that reverberates with original musical genius of its own. But let me not be too negative. The movie will do its cultural and political work in places where it’s allowed to be shown. It’s no great work of art or film, but it has its merits and gives Western audiences a window into a (somewhat cleansed) African society that most are unfamiliar with. Personal note: I lived in Tanzania for a year in 1988 while researching a dissertation on a mostly-untranslated Swahili playwright. Although my Swahili is gone now, I did witness, from afar, a non-Western style of men who identified as women. This type of person was referred to as a shoga, and that is the origin of the name of my production company. One lone, miserable shoga is cameo’d, and mocked, in the film. A silent kinship is established between him (?) and Kena when she sits alone, after being publicly reviled and further rejected by the traumatized Ziki. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to forge a friendship or alliance between the two. In the best Hollywood tradition, Kena finds personal--and only personal--redemption in the unearned fantasy of a happy ending. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts