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

You hardly hear anything about the role of classical music in the Harlem Renaissance, do you? All anyone talks about are the pop, blues and jazz genres. Yet the Negro du jour whose portrait graced the cover of the magazine edited by Alain Locke that was later to be expanded into The New Negro was Roland Hayes , a tenor who performed art songs in French, German, and Italian. He had finally overcome his home country's prejudice after great success in Europe, including a command performance at Buckingham Palace, to receive grudging recognition for his enormous talent. African American musicians were welcomed and acclaimed in popular genres, but those who were attracted to the white preserve of classical music had to fight for their audiences. A generation earlier, Will Marion Cook , was unable to scale the wall of prejudice and turned to syncopated music half in desperation -- much to the benefit of ragtime and Broadway. Still, classical music and the advanced training that it required always attracted some African Americans. Hall Johnson, the composer of "Fi-Yer" featured in "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," was amongst the few composers -- among them J. Rosamund Johnson and William Grant Still -- who made their living through popular music but whose ambitions reached into concert halls. Born in 1888, Hall Johnson performed in orchestras led by James Reese Europe , Will Marion Cook, and in Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along . By the time of the Harlem Renaissance, however, Johnson had become interested in arranging choral music. (He formed the acclaimed Hall Johnson Choir in 1925.) Concert performances for spirituals were a staple of "serious" African American music and Johnson had a knack for their arrangements. But he wanted to compose his own music as well. When he read The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes' acclaimed first volume of poetry, he found the text he wanted to set to music: " Fire ." SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Langston Hughes published "Fire" in his first collection of poetry The Weary Blues . Here is the poem in its entirety. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I ain't been good, I ain't been clean — I been stinkin', low-down, mean. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! Tell me, brother, Do you believe If you wanta go to heaben Got to moan an' grieve? Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I been stealin', Been tellin' lies, Had more women Than Pharaoh had wives. Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! I means Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn ma soul! The speaker echoes the traditional Christian understanding that sinners will go to hell and burn forever. With radical honesty the man acknowledges his evil nature and that fire is his inevitable fate. But he asks a question, "Tell me brother, do you believe, if you wanna go to heaven (you) got to moan and grieve?" The implication is that perhaps the life of constricted virtue leading upwards is not worth the price of foregoing pleasure and sin. In any event, the man has made his choice and accepts his place in the Christian afterlife. When Hall Johnson sets this text to music, he erases all doubt or ambivalence. He repeats the initial stanza again and again and replaces the glimmer of pleasure in the original poem ("Had more women/Than Pharaoh had wives.") with further confirmation of eternal damnation: "Tell me, brother, can't you see/Dem fiery flames wrapped all 'round me." The final extended high note on which the song ends can easily be sung as a wail of despair. Nugent introduces "Fi-Yer" realistically towards the end of "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" when his autobiographical protagonist, Alex, attends a classical performance in a church with Beauty. "Fy-ah Lawd had been a success . . . Langston bowed . . . Langston had written the words . . . Hall bowed . . . Hall had written the music." But the obsessively repeated lyric, "fire's gonna bu'n ma soul," becomes a leitmotif that sounds throughout the scenes leading to the openly gay embrace. The fire of damnation has become the fire of passion. Rusty Watson 's powerful delivery nicely plays on this admixture of exaltation and despair. Hall's so-called modern spiritual can easily be flattened to a fatalistic acceptance of damnation. Nugent places it in positive context, transforming (perhaps) the Christian trope of fiery damnation into the ecstacy of physical passion. Rusty frees "Fi-Yer" from its art song origins and injects his mastery of gospel into his interpretation. His final soaring "s-o-o-o-u-u-l," the note that pushes Alex into a spontaneous manifestation of his love for Beauty, is overwhelming -- yet ultimately ambiguous. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

I spent the year 1988 doing dissertation research in Tanzania. I was looking to activate four years of classroom Swahili with an immersion experience in a nation and culture where Swahili was the language of daily communication. I had also been an out gay man for almost a decade when I went to live there, and the pervasive homophobia of African culture sent me temporarily back into the closet. Swahili coastal culture, as I discovered, was different from the culture of the interior. The Swahili people -- indeed the language itself -- had evolved over centuries of intermingling between Africans and Arab colonizers who had established outposts and cities on the East Coast of the continent. Consequently the Swahili people, particularly in precolonial times, possessed a cosmopolitan culture that encompassed a greater knowledge of the world and its variety than the mainland tribes upon whom they often preyed as slave-traders.  In fact, about 30% of Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic, including the word shoga, which was used as a term of endearment between women. But shoga also had a secondary meaning, acknowledged even by the Victorian Standard Swahili-English Dictionary published by the Inter-Territorial Language Committee for the East African Dependencies in 1939. Shoga's secondary meanings are "(2) a catamite; (3) an impotent male person who associates with women, often as a servant." When I tell people shoga is Swahili for faggot, that is a flip approximation that occludes the richness and nuance of Swahili culture. I saw shogas -- men who dressed and walked as women -- in Lamu and Mombasa, but I never spoke to them. This was an indigenous style of homosexuality that partook of no Western influence and was somewhat intimidating to me for that very reason. (And, of course, I was back in the closet. I wasn't attracted to effeminate men, anyway.) The Swahili language has moved on in a big way since 1988, and perhaps shoga does mean faggot now. The online translation site bab.la only defines shoga as "gay" or "lesbian." (Actually, lesbianism has its own terms, sagana, which means "to grind against one another.") And I ran across the poster pictured at the top for a home-grown video by what appears to be an East African counterpart to Nollywood. So what does shoga mean? Let's say it means "queer," as in non-normative. I think even Swahili speakers would agree with that. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Ah, the shame of it all! How could one despised minority climb out of their oppression on the backs of another despised minority? Cultural critics have theorized that the best way Jewish entertainers could establish their American credentials was by blacking up, at least during the time period when that was acceptable. By donning blackface, Jews could hide their own ethnicity and join the minstrel lineage that stretched back to the 1830s when "Daddy" Rice made a career out of blacking up and acting the buffoon to a little ditty called " Jump Jim Crow ." American audiences, both Black and white, couldn't get enough of it, and minstrel shows were by far the dominant form of live entertainment during the 19th century. The conventions they established outlived the form itself and snaked their way into new and diversifying types of entertainment: vaudeville, musical comedies, radio, and movies.   The expansion of these entertainments provided space for talented children of immigrant parents, many of them Jewish, to establish themselves in a country where other avenues of achievement were either blocked by class privilege or anti-Semitism. If you didn't have the education or opportunity to go to law school, the world of entertainment provided a rough meritocracy of talent. And so, in the early part of the twentieth century, several Jewish performers who went on to have big careers put on burnt cork. Some only had early episodes, such as Sophie Tucker; some kept it as a permanent part of their shtick , notably Eddie Cantor and . . . Well, we'll just wait on that. The thing is, in the first decades of the 20th century, many people performed in blackface, including Blacks themselves. It was accepted as a showbiz convention, not deeply analyzed, and certainly appealing to the white majority, which was where the real money was. If Dad had donned blackface and had spoken an artificially mangled dialect when he was a minstrel performer, why not do it as well if that's what the market demanded? The most famous Black performer of his day, Bert Williams, chose to perform in blackface long after many of his peers had forsaken or repudiated the practice. In 1921, the Black-produced musical Shuffle Along created a theatrical sensation with its introduction of syncopation and Black performing styles on Broadway. Langston Hughes hailed it as a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance, but the show was stuffed with blackface performers, including the comic leads. In a spectacular bit of historical irony, the show's hit song, "I'm Just Wild About Harry," was reprised in the 1939 Hollywood music, Babes in Arms , in which Judy Garland sings and dances with a blacked-up Mickey Rooney and chorus . Mickey and Judy were far from the only Gentile performers to bring a little blackface fun well into the midcentury. Bing Crosby, Shirley Temple, and even Joan Crawford are on that list.  So why then does there seem to be special opprobrium reserved for blacked-up Jews? In part, I believe, it's because Jews, overrepresented in entertainment, easily borrowed, adapted, stole (you choose) Black innovations in music, singing, and comedy to fashion their own sometimes spectacular careers -- a kind of cultural blackface that was otherwise invisible. But what nailed Jewish blackface permanently to the historical wall of shame was the technical innovation, the high production values (for its time), and the blithely unconscious moxie of . . . The Jazz Singer . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts