Artists' Television Access

Prewinkle Cinema

Wednesday, July 18, 2018, 8:00 pm, $7-$10

For obvious reasons, gays and lesbians have been forthright in their discussions about their sexual preferences and attractions. Interracial couplings have always carried with them myths, judgments, and projections stemming from stereotypes that live in American culture. In the case of white-on-black desire, the cultural matrix provides a particularly rich gumbo of racism, historical oppression, master/slave scripts, and individual efforts to escape or acknowledge the stigma of “jungle fever.”This personal documentary explores the filmmaker’s attraction to Black men through autobiographical narration and interviews with other like-minded men as well as one black man who talks candidly about being the object of white desire. A filmed discussion conducted by the
Southern California chapter of Black and White Men Together sheds further light on the subject. Larger cultural themes of racism, contradictory histories, Mandingo fantasy, and artistic representation are broached through a montage of film clips, interviews, and dance. The opinions expressed won’t always be politically correct, but they will provoke discussion. Along with: work in progress screening “Congo Cabaret” is an adaptation of an episode from gay writer Claude McKay’s then-bestselling novel, Home to Harlem. Set in a small nightclub, this scene presents the little-known figure of a “wolf” (a masculine gay man) and features the performance
of a Bessie Smith song, “Foolish Man Blues,” which refers in a joking manner to “a mannish acting woman and a skippin’ twistin’ woman-acting man.”Discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening.


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