Queer and Black: the illuminated screen

Barry Jenkins’ Academy Award-winning Moonlight (2016) is regarded in modern cinematic pop culture as one of the more prominent triumphs of QTBIPOC (queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour) screen history. The overwhelming, deserved yet surprising success of Jenkins’ feature, co-written by queer playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, rocked the industry and put previously unexplored stories into the mainstream.

Though filmmaking as a craft is a powerful purveyor of the artistic zeitgeist, the film industry is primarily a business, in which box-office performance opens future funding avenues, determining which stories or storytellers get their voices heard. Jenkins’ hit, which grossed more than £52 million globally, has been influential in bringing more attention to the perspectives of people who have historically been marginalised – though there is still much work to be done.

Among the conversations in the QTBIPOC community, a consensus exists that authentic authorship in the face of an ever-evolving cultural and societal understanding around equity in representation is extremely prized. It’s not only visibility that’s important but also real remuneration for communities that have fewer opportunities and are consistently paid less. Who has space to dream, to play, to learn freely? These are the critical questions that frequent our conversations. Queer, trans and intersex Black people, specifically, are usually only given freedom and funding to develop stories into films that document our trauma. We’re nowhere near where we should be, but progress must be celebrated. With film technology now more accessible, a golden age for underrepresented filmmakers is approaching. But how did we get here?

The journey begins in 1967 with, perhaps unsurprisingly, a white documentary filmmaker called Shirley Clarke and her subject, a real-life queer Black man by the name of Jason Holliday (née Aaron Payne). Portrait of Jason was one of the earliest depictions of a queer Black man on screen. Filming in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, the director enlisted the help of interviewer Carl Lee to unravel not only Jason’s story but Jason himself. What transpired was a painful night of recounted tales, inebriation and a harrowing display of voyeuristic, almost fetishistic, filmmaking captured through a predominantly white gaze. The film’s enduring importance in the canon of QTBIPOC films paradoxically underscores the dangers of a lack of representation behind the camera, though Clarke ultimately defended her techniques and would come to be heralded as a key female filmmaker.

Nearly two decades then passed before the first film to feature a Black lesbian lead. The global rise of African-American music culture, and the evolution of Black cinema, in particular, afforded a gradual yet heightened visibility to Black and queer performers through the mid-80s, though the freedom to be openly queer both on and off screen did not necessarily follow. Among the most notable male performances of the era was tap dancer Maurice Hines’ dazzling turn in Frances Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984). With The Color Purple (1985), an adaptation of African-American author Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epistolary novel, the story of Shug (Margaret Avery) and Celie (Whoopi Goldberg’s breakthrough role) was thrust into the mainstream. The film’s success would lead audiences back to Walker’s original text, and an interrogation of director Steven Spielberg’s decision to downplay the novel’s complex, same-sex romance between Shug and Celie in what was deemed by some to be a deliberate erasure. Spielberg later admitted being at fault for diminishing some of the original story’s “more sexually honest” encounters.

By the late 80s something was bubbling beneath the surface, and against the backdrop of the Aids crisis and the establishment’s woeful response, a new fire was lit beneath the LGBTQ+ community. The request for tolerance became a rightful demand for acceptance, and with it a desire for documentation: for our stories to be immortalised. This urgency was all the more amplified in Black cultural conversations, where the aspirations and inhibitions of the civil rights movement, birthed in a bygone era, at times found conflict with the liberational, intersectional justice struggles of queer Black members of the community.

Enter Marlon T. Riggs – one of the most influential openly queer Black filmmakers ever. Born in 1957 in Fort Worth, Texas, to military parents, Riggs spent much of his childhood travelling between states and even living abroad, in West Germany. Excelling at school despite a prevailing sense of ostracism and near-constant discrimination from both Black and white communities, Riggs progressed to Harvard University, where he first articulated his homosexual identity. Upon realising that Harvard’s curriculum didn’t support homosexuality, Riggs appealed to the history department and pursued independent study into depictions of “male homosexuality in American fiction and poetry”.

Riggs’ first feature documentary, Ethnic Notions (1986), homed in on the brutalities of anti-Black stereotypes spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. In Tongues Untied (1989), he blurred the boundaries between artist’s moving image and self-implicating documentary, using poetry to illustrate the complexity of internalised racism and homophobia. While working on Tongues Untied and his next film, the Peabody Award-winning Color Adjustment (1992), Riggs was diagnosed with HIV after suffering near-fatal liver failure. Affirming his legacy and truth over fear, Riggs continued lecturing and making documentaries, speaking candidly at a time when narratives around HIV were actively being silenced. His landmark feature documentary Black Is… Black Ain’t (1995) would be his last offering, bravely interrogating homophobia in the Black community as it simultaneously exalted Blackness, and filmed from Riggs’ hospital bed as he succumbed to his illness, aged just 37.

Sir Isaac Julien carries a distinctively British torch as a pioneer in authentic queer Black filmmaking. An east London-born son of St Lucian parents who immigrated during the Windrush wave, and a graduate of the prestigious Central Saint Martins, Julien came of age against the tumultuous backdrop of Brixton uprisings, the birth of the Black Cultural Archives and a reinvigorating new chapter in hybrid Black British consciousness.

Co-founding Sankofa Film and Video Collective at the dawn of the Black and South Asian workshop movement with contemporaries Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood and Robert Crusz, Julien has developed a repertoire in a unique space, oscillating between artist’s moving image and narrative fiction film. His oeuvre casts an intimate, authentic and intersectional lens on class, sexuality and race, against perpetuations of the linear and binary. The sublime Looking for Langston (1989) illustrated the avant garde as it paid homage to the poetry of Harlem Renaissance luminary Langston Hughes. Sankofa-produced films such as The Passion of Remembrance (1986) and Julien’s impressionistic This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement (1987) stand tall as blueprints for experimental queer film, artistically establishing him as one of queer and Black cinema’s finest, and lending context to the contemporary popularity of the world-renowned gallerist, whose seminal works continue to inspire BFI National Archive restorations and retrospectives.

It would be fitting to hail Julien’s last major feature film release, 1991’s Young Soul Rebels, as aesthetically significant in signalling the next wave. Indeed the mid-90s ushered in an explosion of queer films, expanding the cinematic landscape. Among the rich tapestry of offerings, the works of Liberian-born, US-raised filmmaker Cheryl Dunye evidenced an extraordinary filmmaker whose talents ventured both within and beyond the queer cinematic canon, provoking radical reimaginings of the politics of belonging in overwhelmingly cis-, white- and male-dominated spaces. Like the queer filmmakers who came before her, Dunye used that perspective to propel herself forward, but unlike them she navigated the turbulent industry as a Black lesbian woman, with a very specific lens that gravitated towards human stories not explicitly shaped by the inescapability of trauma. Early notable shorts include the interracial teen drama Janine (1990), and the wittily self-narrated Greetings from Africa (1995), exploring mysteries of the lesbian dating scene.

Yet it was 1996’s The Watermelon Woman that delivered the career-defining cinematic landmark – a film that by Dunye’s own admission she never predicted would have such lasting cultural resonance, but today is regarded as a pivotal piece of cinematic history, offering one of the first depictions of Black lesbians in the mainstream. In 2001 she delivered yet another critically acclaimed project, the compelling, HBO-produced women’s prison drama Stranger Inside for television. Beyond the 2000s, Dunye’s directorial slate, from cinema to groundbreaking shorts (such as the 2014 transgender drama Black Is Blue) and across myriad television series including episodes of Afrofuturist sci-fi hit Lovecraft Country (2020) and Netflix’s Bridgerton (2020-), has remained eclectic, as Dunye’s intuitive style continues to connect with new generations.

An exploration of foundational milestones in Black queer filmmaking wouldn’t be complete without also paying respect to the impressive works of directors Campbell X (Stud Life, 2012), Dee Rees (2011’s Pariah), Angela Robinson (Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, 2017) and Yance Ford (Strong Island, 2017), whose screen visions enrich the community, amplifying the experiences of QTBIPOC communities and evolving a newly textured filmic language for the expression of queer identities.

QTBIPOC filmmakers now have greater visibility, and festivals such as Outfest Fusion (Outfest LA’s QTBIPOC-specific film festival) continue to thrive almost two decades on. We may have been historically marginalised, and problems persist, but globally a queer Black cinematic movement invigorated by a plethora of new and established screen artists is stepping into its power on screen and behind the camera: out and proud, unafraid to exalt its truth, empowered by the present and standing on the shoulders of the luminaries who paved the way.