And yet, despite the mainstream claims that homosexuality is a recent enigma, Shoga Films’ documentary, Queer Harlem Renaissance: A Prospectus, is fighting to re-establish the history of Black Queerness and its struggle against the Black Elite’s steady social concessions for the White mainstream.
KS: There’s something to be said for making “real” the previously buried, marginalized, and silenced histories of queer Harlem Renaissance artists.
To see the history of queer black artists in film, colorized, complete with music, style, and dance is help individuals get an immediate sense of the importance of queer subjects within history.
CL: Was there something about the Queer Harlem Renaissance that you felt similarly explores the nature of your past conversations Shoga Film’s has explored in queer, Black America?
Queer Harlem Renaissance artists were engaged in many conversations, not just about sex and sexuality, but also intersectionality, passing, code-switching, multi-racial subjectivity and families, class bias, colorism–all the concepts that people of color and queer folk have been discussing and engaging in.
