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Dr. Philipson writes about queer Black history, the Harlem Renaissance, Black-Jewish interrelations, the perils and pleasures of allyship, and sometimes his pet peeve of the day.
Films featuring queer Black characters used to be a rare phenomenon. Now they're everywhere, but we have a particular perspective that you won't find anywhere else.
SHOGA BLOGS
Shoga Blogs are an eclectic mix of history, race, music, Black queer movies and more. On occasion, they're about Dr. Philipson's pet peeve of the day. We can't guarantee the topics, but we can guarantee that the writing is always top-notch!
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PROFESSORIAL FORAYS
We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews.
These lines, published in a much-anthologized poem written in 1966, spurted from the
pen of the most influential and widely known Black writer/poet in America, Amiri Baraka.
The poem, “Black Art,” advocated a poetry of violence and revenge: “Poems that
wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons/ leaving them dead/with tongues pulled
out and sent to Ireland.” Other enemies of Black liberation get their meed of bile, but
Jews are called out three times, including the invocation of “Another bad poem
cracking/steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth.”
In 1950, the superstar singer and actor Ethel Waters checked off another box in her list of
African American firsts when she starred in a weekly television series, Beulah. As the name
indicates, Beulah was a maid whose raison d'être was to serve her white employers, "Mr. and
Mrs. Henderson," and act as a nanny to their son, "Donnie." Although Waters brought as much
warmth and humor as she could to the stereotype, the other Black characters portrayed were
even flatter and more offensive: "Bill," the unemployed beau who is a braggart and a screw-up;
and "Oriole," a ditzy maid (played by Butterfly McQueen, no less!) who works for the family next
door.
In 1931, James P. Johnson wrote and recorded a song, "Go Harlem," extolling the extraordinary life of New York's Black Mecca. Among the lyrics: "Like Van Vechten/Start inspection'./Go Harlem!/Go Harlem!/Go Harlem/ Startin' right now."
Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, journalist, photographer, and tastemaker, was such an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance that within the artistic and intellectual circles of the movement he needed no introduction. Hence, the lyric penned by the incomparable Andy Razaf.
In the fall of 1922, two young American writers, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, traveled
together to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for research on novels that both were writing at the
time. Toomer, of mixed ancestry, was oftentimes light enough to pass for white but did not wish
to do so on this particular occasion because his subject was Negro life in the rural South. Waldo
Frank was a Jewish writer, famous at that time in modernist circles, who had also conceived of a
novel (“Holiday”) that dealt with race in the Deep South. Through the medium of a literary
correspondence (Frank lived in New York; Toomer, Washington, DC), they discovered
themselves to be kindred spirits, striving to bring about the upheaval of spiritual yearning and
frustration below the surface of ordinary life.
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SHOGA LENS
Being 17, the latest offering of the acclaimed French auteur, André Téchiné, at 73 is a visually gorgeous film.
HBO will air a biopic of Bessie Smith, one of the highest paid Black singers of the 1920s and a foundational voice (she still sounds fabulous) in the development of the blues.
In 2004 a first-time filmmaker, Rodney Evans, edited and produced a narrative film, Brother to Brother, that encompassed an extended and serious portrayal of the queer Harlem
One of the most unsettling features of “Kuchu” are interviews with Giles Muhame, the smirking 22 year-old editor of Uganda’s Rolling Stone Tabloid.
SHOGA FILMS is a 501(c) (3) non-profit production and education company. We create multimedia works around race and sexuality that are intended to raise awareness and foster critical discussion.
