Looking natty in his plaid sport jacket, leopard print hat, bright shirt and tie, In The Life (ITL) guest host RuPaul Andre Charles welcomes us to an hour-long exploration of African-American queers and their contribution to our culture and history. Charles may identify with ITL's subjects "as a brown-skinned person," but whether or not you're brown-skinned is entirely irrelevant: This is queer history all of us need to know.
First up is a brief examination of Martin Luther King's associate Bayard Rustin, who was pushed out of the civil rights movement because of his homosexuality. Rustin was recently honored at an Atlanta rally organized by Charlene Cothran.
"It's very important, particularly here in the souththat the gay and lesbian movement be a part of the Civil Rights movement," Cothran says, "and, more specifically, the African-American gay and lesbian community take homage of Bayard Rustin for being an out Black gay man in the 40s. We need that as a positive role model to help break up the silence."
Fast forward to today, with ITL's story about Keith Boykin, former head of the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum. After college and law school, Boykin worked in several presidential campaigns and the Clinton White House, where he helped with the historic presidential meeting with national gay and lesbian leaders. But despite such accomplishments, Boykin also struggles, including which element of his identity should come first: Race or sexuality?
"It's important not to fall into the trap of creating a hierarchywhere one part of your identity becomes more important than another part," Boykin says. He recalls Mel Booser, who said, "I've been called a 'nigger' and I've been called a 'faggot.' And I can sum up the difference in one word: None."
For his upcoming book, One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America (to be published later this year), Boykin attempts to chronicle the experience of being black and gay. The results of his research, in which he spoke to both straights and gays, surprised him.
"I learned that black people are not as homophobic as most people seem to think they are," Boykin says with a smile. "They are in fact less homophobic than other communities." Boykin believes those impressions of black homophobia stem from the beliefs of specific individuals, including Rev. Louis Farrakhan. Boykin and the NBGLLF called for gay black men to join the Million Man March, a presence that was ignored by the mainstream media, which regularly played up Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and misogyny but seldom his homophobia. This segment exemplifies ITL at its best. Its superb conclusion features a wondrous smattering of Jonathan Atkin's celebratory photo essay of gay men at the march.
The segment about Rev. Irene Monroe (which features some material previously broadcast) focuses on her relationship with Thea L. James, M.D. and personalizes Monroe's already moving storyshe was abandoned as a baby and raised by nunsand makes ITL's examination of Monroe's studies at Harvard Divinity School an even more fascinating study.
James Baldwin biographer Randall Kenan discusses the importance of the writer's celebrated Giovanni's Room, which contains one of the most important depictions of same-sex romance in the American literary canon.
"I don't think a lot of people realize how significant [the publication of Giovanni's Room] was," Kenan says. "It was the late 1950s, and not too many people had published works about same sex love. For Baldwin to do it, in only his second book, was a very bold and brave act."
This segment also reveals that Baldwin was scheduled to speak at the original civil rights march organized by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Leadership Conference. But the SLC's "very homophobic" leadership would eventually deny both men their chance to actually participate in the very event they helped create.
"At the last minute, they refused to let Baldwin speak on stage," Kenan says, "one of America's greatest losses."
But Baldwin was resolute about accepting his sexuality, even if he harbored reservations about words like "gay."
"[Baldwin] felt already as an African American that that label was in and of itself restrictive when it was defined by someone other than himself," Kenan explains. "So he had a distrust for using the term 'gay' because he felt it was not a term that he himself defined. But he in no way allowed that to define who he fell in love with."
ITL turns its attention to HIV prevention and education efforts in black communities through two stories, a brief mention of Balm in Gilead, a national organization that works to stop AIDS through a presence in black churches, and by a longer piece about Chicago activists battling the rise of transmission among black gay men. A recent New York City study found that nearly one-third of black gay youth in this city are already infected, this segment's timing is horrifyingly perfect.
Michelle Lopez, an HIV-positive lesbian is the mother of two children, 14-year-old Rondell and 11-year-old Raven, who is also HIV-positive. By day, Lopez works as an HIV peer educator in the Bronx. But her entire life personifies the struggle of being a single mom with HIV: "We run around, caring for everyone else," Lopez sighs, "but we neglect ourselves."
Lopez also targets the sexism inherent in queer America around gender-based assumptions, asking aloud why gay men are allowed the freedom to sleep with women but why "lesbians have to explain why we sometimes go with men?"
"Speak Out" segments feature artists Toshi Reagon and Pamela Sneed. ITL previews two films by rookie directors including Sidra Smith's Luv Tale, which examines the love relationship between a young woman and an older magazine publisher. Smith hopes to shoot more footage and expand her forty-five minute short into a feature in the near future.
Patrick Ian Polk's feature Punks, a story about black gay men living in West Hollywood, premiered at Sundance the same year as The Broken Hearts League, a story about white gay men (and one black gay man) living in West Hollywood. But Punks sat on a shelf while The Broken Hearts League flew into the hands of a distributor and got released last fall. Punks will finally open in a few major citiesSan Francisco, Los Angeles and New Yorklater this year. But if you're still wondering whether the difference in the way these two films were received had anything to do with race, you're watching the right show.