SHOGA BLOGS

Of the many visual artists born at the turn of the last century who came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, only one has been pegged (no pun intended!) as unambiguously gay -- Richmond Barthé. Perhaps because of this odd underrepresentation (I mean, isn't any boy who dabbles in the arts under suspicion?), the visual arts haven't figured much, or at all, in any inventory of the Queer Harlem Renaissance. (Not that there's been such an inventory, but rest assured, it's coming!)

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.

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