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Cinema – whether it’s high or low, prestige, blockbuster or B – has avoided black gay males in lieu of Everyone Else. There’s no need to do this scientifically cuz black gay male bit parts don’t get a participation trophy for showing up. in Less Than Zero or even Chris Pratt in Her – still just pulling random titles for your amusement. That’s not a supporting role with a wealth of emotional detail or dramatic impact on par with Beatrice Straight in Network or Robert Downey Jr. How about RuPaul in But I’m a Cheerleader? Yes, a glorified cameo as a bossy drag mentor who flashes some “You betta work!” wisdom, then vanishes. Wasn’t there a black gay guy in The Boys in the Band? Yes, and he did nothing in comparison to the other characters – the white guys. Brokeback Mountain – all day and all night, yo! So long as they white! I could list films all day, many of which I admire or love, and not find a black male protag in the bunch. The Kids Are All Right – they sure are! Cuz they ain’t black. Check any list of Queer Movies To Watch before or after Stonewall that inevitably pop up in June. How about films by LGBTQ for LGBTQ? They don’t give you black gay men either. That’s nothing to concern oneself about, tho, eh? Just give the proles a run for their money. Even though he’s ripping off Michael Jackson, who in turn, was deeply influenced by the tan drag queens and queer vaudevillians he met on the “Chitlin’ Circuit” with his brothers. Cuz who cares about that? Hip-hop is more fun when Andy Samberg satirizes it, and black gayness is safer when Justin Timberlake makes sideways references to it. But you’ll never see a black gay guy lead of a Fosse film, or a Lumet movie. Bob Fosse, who ripped the dance moves and overall vibe from white girl strippers and black gay male culture, to give but one example. American pop culture wouldn’t exist without the inventions and influence of black gay culture. In other words, Prince in Under the Cherry Moon is the gayest black character of the ’80s, and in context of that film, he’s heterosexual. In cinema, all the gays are boys, and all the boys are white.
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And it has scant to do with dreck like Mannequin. ‘Cause this is what watching gay characters and gay films is like when you’re not white – bereft. I am a filmmaker who is queer, biracial, Jewish, Rasta, black, yet fully versed in cinema history, I want to ruin all your cinematic experiences going forward as they have been ruined for me. I tell it in hopes to make it your problem too. Meshach did not have to say the truth of it all: “It’s the best part in the show available to me. Rueful laughter ensued between the old pals. But I play a mothafuckin’ candleholder and … I don’t have any hands.” The Lumière costume was tricked up to look as much like the cartoon as possible, and Taylor’s arms were locked into the props.
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At that time, he said to my friend John, also a genius actor of stage and screen but a white guy (they met as stars of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as the Boy and the Negro, respectively), “Yeah, John, it’s a good gig. Like all black actors of his day, Taylor was also an accomplished theater performer and about 15 years ago he played the candelabra, Lumière, in Broadway’s boffo Disney musical Beauty and the Beast. A decade before Morgan Freeman himself and Brad Pitt would play similar homo-social games in Se7en, it was Taylor alone who held the flame aloft for black gay dudes in cinema. Taylor wasn’t the lead, but provided the only sparkle in a dud film that stood as the most widely seen and appreciated depiction of a gay black character in the same rich era that gave us the sweltering bromance of goofy white “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and brooding black Keith David in John Carpenter’s genius They Live.
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Meshach played “Hollywood Montrose,” a flamboyant gay window-dresser who befriends a dim straight white boy called Jonathan Switcher (haha!) in a dumber-than-bricks ’80s B-movie, Mannequin. There was once a great black actor, Meshach Taylor, a hair younger than the Morgan Freeman generation, the brilliant black heterosexual thespians capable of embracing their feminine side (all that Shakespeare training, perhaps).