Arts & Entertainment
March on Washington Film Festival boasts stellar queer content
Hybrid format features films, panel discussions, theater, and VR lab
Kevin Kodama, a 26-year-old, queer, Asian-American filmmaker, was saddened and angered by the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. Then, he was a student studying film at San Francisco State University. “One of my professors encouraged me to channel my feelings {about the hate crimes} into a short film,” Kodama told the Blade.
Kodama took his professor’s advice. He wrote and directed “Shikata Ga Nai,” a poignant, compelling fantasy romance, set in a Japanese concentration camp where a lesbian couple attempts to reconcile their relationship as ghosts.
Kodama is one of the many filmmakers, theater legends and civil rights heros whose work will be showcased and honored at the March on Washington Film Festival (MOWFF) 2022 from Sept. 28 to Oct. 2.
MOWFF, in a hybrid in person and streaming format, will feature films, panel discussions, theatrical performances and the first-ever VR {virtual reality} Equity Lab in the Nation’s Capital.
From its honorees to its emerging filmmakers, the Festival has a strong queer quotient.
In its 10th year, the Festival celebrates African-American legends of theater and film who have advanced civil rights. Its theme this year is “STORY, STAGE & SCREEN.” To purchase tickets to the Festival, click here.
MOWFF was founded in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. Now in its 10th year, the Festival uses the power of film, music, scholarship to tell untold stories of the unsung heroes of the American Civil Rights movement. The Festival shares these narratives to connect the past to the present and the future. For information about the Festival go to: marchonwashingtonfilmfestival.org.
MOWFF is committed to highlighting stories at the intersection of racial and LGBTQIA+ justice, David Andrusia, executive director of the Festival, told the Blade.
“We want to correct stories that have been mistold,” Andrusia, who is gay, said, “Too many are silenced and kept from telling their stories.”
This year, the Festival will bestow the John Lewis Lifetime Legacy Award to Rep. Barbara Lee, a founding member and a Vice Chair of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus and the Chair of the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus.
MOWFF2022’s other honorees are George C. Wolfe, Tony-winning director of “Angels in America” whose upcoming film “Bayard Rustin” celebrates the gay rights legend, and pioneering lesbian publicist and producer Irene Gandy, a two-time Tony Award-winner.
Lewis, Wolfe and Gandy will be honored on the Festival’s opening night.
Gandy, 78, is glad that MOWFF is being held now. “So that young people can learn about and remember Black community activists and artists who’ve fought for civil rights,” she told the Blade.
It’s important that people not forget that Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson and other artists were part of the 1963 March on Washington, Gandy said. “We have to honor the legacy and continue the activism of these artists,” she added.
Gandy doesn’t go into meetings thinking “I’m Black” or “I’m gay.” “That deafeats everything for everybody. It crowds all the good things out.”
There’s a long way to go, but things are changing, Gandy, who for over 50 years has been the only Black female press agent member of the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers (ATPAM).
“There are more Black shows now – with Black actors and produces,” she said, “with more Black managers making decisions.”
In addition to being a groundbreaking press agent and producer, Gandy is a fashionista. In 2008, she became the first female press agent to be immortalized with a Sardi’s caricature. Known for her furs, in 2015, Gandy launched
a signature collection featured in “Vogue” and her Lady Irene Fur line debuted earlier this year.
On a recent evening as she walked out of a theater on to Broadway, Gandy had an awesome encounter with a father and his five-year-old child. “The child was trans,” she said, “the child was biologically a boy. But when the Dad called him by a boy’s name, the child said ‘I’m a girl.’”
“This little, trans person didn’t know who I was – that I had won the Tonys,” Gandy said, “but she said to me ‘I love your style!’”
If they know who they are, everyone has a story to tell, she added.
The stories to be highlighted at the Festival include “Maurice Hines: Bring Them Back,” an intimate portrait of the trailblazing Black entertainer; “Mankiller,” a documentary about Wilma Mankiller, who became the Cherokee Nation’s first Principal Chief in 1985; and “The Defenders,” about lawyers who fought for civil rights in Mississippi in the early years of the civil rights movement.
After his meeting with his professor, Kodama had the idea of doing a story set in the concentration camps where Japanese Americans were interred during World War II.
“It’s a way of bridging the history of anti-Asian policies of that time with the anti-Asian racism and hate crimes of today,” he said.
Queer people who were interred during the War had to be closeted. “For most of the decades after the War, queer people were left out of stories told about the camps,” Kodama said.
“Because of homophobia – discomfort with queerness,” he added, “people didn’t talk about it. Same-sex couples had to pass as friends.”
“Shikata Ga Nai” was filmed on the site of one of the camps – Manzanar in Inyo County, California (a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service). “One of the nice things about my film is it will get people to talk about it {queer people in the camps} who haven’t talked about it.” (The film will be shown at MOWFF as part of the Student and Emerging Filmmaker Competitions.)
Derrick L. Middleton, a talented, 35-year-old, Black, gay filmmaker, uses his art to tell stories.
Middleton, born in Harlem in New York City, knew as a little boy that he was different. “I wasn’t yet labeled as ‘gay,’ but I felt like I didn’t fit in,” he told the Blade.
“It felt unnatural to try to be masculine in the way I was expected to be,” he added.
He, like other Black queer men, ran up against hyper-masculinity, when he went to a barbershop.
“Barbershops are critically important to the Black community,” Middleton said, “I want to honor them.”
When Black people were enslaved, one of the few things they could learn was how to cut hair, Middleton said. “When they were freed, owning a barbershop was one of the few businesses they could run,” he added.
But, heteronormity rules in many Black barbershops. Subtle or overt anti-queer slur often make you feel unsafe if you’re queer and Black in a Black barbershop.
“I had already come out to my family and friends,” Middleton said, “but I felt, to be safe, I had to go back into the closet when I went to a the barbershop.”
One day, he became angry and scared when he went to a Black barbershop. “The barber told me that he didn’t cut hair for sissies,” Middleton said.
He was so frightened that he couldn’t think of anything to say and ran out of the barbershop.
Out of this experience, Middleton made “Shape Up: Gay in the Black Barbershop,” an eye-opening, engrossing, moving documentary short about the stories of himself and other queer Black men in Black barbershops. The film premiered in 2016 at the White House and was awarded the Grand Prize for Emerging Documentary by the March on Washington Film Festival.
“I never thought that I, a boy who grew up in Harlem, would get an award at a White House ceremony when the country had a Black president,” Middleton said, “It was a dream come true.”
This year, Middleton has been selected for a VR Equity Lab and Fellowship. His work will be showcased in the Festival’s VR Equity Lab. Middleton’s VR Equity Lab project “Shape Up: Gay in the Black Barbershop” (The Series). The series is a spinoff that takes viewers on a journey to barbershops from different countries in the African Diaspora, using 360-degree video and animated interactive scenes to give viewers an immersive experience from the perspective of LGBTQ people.
“I hope that the Series will be mainstreamed on a platform like Hulu or Netflix,” Middleton said, “so that people who aren’t able to access it through VR will be able to see it.”
Movies
Deliciously queer ‘Dead Boy Detectives’ a case worth taking on
A light-hearted, smart, and complex sensibility behind the fantasy
Believe it or not, there was once a time when the Hollywood entertainment industry didn’t take comic books very seriously — but then, neither did anyone else.
In the early days, comics were dismissed by most adults as childish fantasy; indeed, those with a penchant for clutching pearls saw them as a threat to their children’s intellectual development and therefore to the future of America itself. Their popularity could not be denied, however, and Hollywood, ever eager to capitalize on a trend, was certainly hungry to get a piece of the action.
The problem was that the studio lackeys assigned to adapt the comics for the screen during those “golden years” were never actually fans of the comics themselves. The result was a parade of kitschy – if occasionally stylish – low-budget serials, kiddie matinees, and “B movies” which operated, for the most part, at the level of cartoons, and mindless ones at that. Even in the 1960s, when comics like “X-Men” had begun exploring mature themes and turning the comic book into a counterculture phenomenon, the best that Hollywood – now deploying the then-relatively new medium of television – was a “Batman” series that felt even campier than the corny serials of three decades before.
Yet despite being treated as a throwaway genre with no cultural significance or intellectual value, the popularity never went away – and with the generation that grew up with comics now old enough to be working in Hollywood themselves, a new burst of creativity began to infuse the screen’s version of the genre with the kind of nuance and sophistication that fans had always known was there. Fast forward to 2024, when comics-based content dominates not just our movie screens – nobody needs to be told about the way it has shaped (some would say crippled) the mainstream film industry for the last decade or so – but all our other screens, as well. And while much of the material that has resulted from this obsessive fascination with comics (and comics-adjacent material like “Star Wars” and other similar fantasy franchises) often suffers from the same safe “appeal to the LCD” mentality that robbed the vintage stuff of its potential, the artistry of creators who are fans themselves has also resulted in a lot of genuinely good storytelling.
In the latter category, we offer up “Dead Boy Detectives” – a new series derived from a supplemental thread in renowned comics creator-turned-bestselling author Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking “Sandman”, which debuted last week on Netflix – as a counter to the increasingly popular notion that comic books have hamstrung the industry’s creativity.
Based on characters and storylines that emerged during the original run of Gaiman’s iconic book (published by DC Comics via its Vertigo imprint), it’s a fresh, funny-yet-emotionally engaging supernatural saga in which two ghosts who died in their youth – the titular “Dead Boys” – operate a detective agency in London, solving mysteries for other spirits who need closure before moving on to the afterlife.
The boys themselves – Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) – are not quite ready to depart the earthly plane, themselves; on the contrary, they operate on the lam, making sure to keep one step ahead of Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste, reprising her role from Netflix’s acclaimed “Sandman” adaptation) so that she can’t drag them out of it before they’re ready. Something of a mismatched pair (both died at the same English boarding school, but 60 years apart), they nevertheless have established a fondness for each other and a dynamic together that makes them an excellent team in solving the supernatural crimes they encounter in their work. Their biggest handicap is the difficulty of dealing with the living – who, for the most part, cannot see or hear them – when it becomes necessary in an investigation. Fortunately for them (and for the story, of course), they find a solution to that issue during episode one.
Enlisted by the ghost of a Victorian child to rescue the human medium – Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson), possessed by a former boyfriend who was actually a demon (David Iacono) – that has been trying to help her “cross over”, the detectives find themselves with living ally who can not only interact with them, but also with the “real” world in which they do their work. With Crystal on the team, they are soon called to an American seaport town to investigate the disappearance of a child – who, it turns out, has been abducted by a witch (Jenn Lyon) intent on draining her youthful essence in pursuit of her own immortal beauty. We don’t want to give anything away, but during the course of the case they not only incur her wrath, but set off alarm bells on the “other side”, calling attention to the fact that two AWOL souls are still lingering in the human world.
Things get worse for them in the second episode, when Edwin attracts the interest of the local “Cat King” (Lukas Gage, “White Lotus,” “Down Low”) and subsequently finds himself cursed to remain until he has “counted all the cats” in town – a daunting and maybe impossible task.
Though jumping into the second installment might feel like getting ahead of ourselves, it’s important to look ahead for the sake of exploring the show’s deliciously pervasive queerness, so forgive the spoiler-ish jump; because it is Edwin, who died in an era long before being openly attracted to other boys could even be discussed, let alone accepted, that serves to root the story’s tension into a real-life context that helps all the supernatural nonsense connect with relatable real-world experience and emotion. Uncomfortable more than a century after his death with the secrets of his own sexuality, he finds himself hampered by his jealousy of the obvious growing attraction between his literal BFF and the new girl psychic who has joined their team – as well as vulnerable to manipulation from both the witch who has it in for him and the Cat King who… well, let’s just say his cat-counting curse could be easily lifted if he would only accept another way to appease the libidinous (and far from unappealing) feline monarch.
It’s best we stop there, before we reveal too much; the series – developed by Steve Yockey and produced by (among others) original author Gaiman and out queer TV impresario Greg Berlanti – sets up its story arc very plainly from the beginning, so savvy viewers will read the subtext long before any definitive events take place, but much of what makes it fun is watching how it all unfolds.
Suffice to say that, with engaging performances from all its players, a light-hearted, smart, and complex sensibility behind all of its fantasy elements, and a palpably queer vibe that leaves plenty of room for allies to jump on board, too, it’s one of the more worthwhile (and meaningful) “comic book” stories to hit our screens in a long while.
Maybe more importantly, it’s also entertaining, which makes it easy for us to recommend “Dead Boy Detectives” as a case you’ll definitely want to accept.
Celebrity News
John Waters released from hospital after car accident
Crash took place in Baltimore County
BY TAJI BURRIS | Baltimore filmmaker John Waters was released from the hospital Tuesday morning following a car accident.
The 78-year-old released a statement saying that although he was hurt in the Baltimore County crash, he did not sustain major injuries.
The rest of this article can be found on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
Arts & Entertainment
Washington Blade’s Pride on the Pier and fireworks show returning June 8
The annual Pride on the Pier Fireworks Show presented by the Leonard-Litz Foundation will take place on Saturday, June 8 at 9 p.m.
The Washington Blade, in partnership with LURe DC and The Wharf, is excited to announce the 5th annual Pride on the Pier and fireworks show during D.C. Pride weekend on Saturday, June 8, 2024, from 2-10 p.m.
The event will include the annual Pride on the Pier Fireworks Show presented by the Leonard-Litz Foundation at 9 p.m.
Pride on the Pier extends the city’s annual celebration of LGBTQ visibility to the bustling Southwest waterfront with an exciting array of activities and entertainment for all ages. The District Pier will offer DJs, dancing, drag, and other entertainment. Alcoholic beverages will be available for purchase for those 21 and older. Local DJ’s Heat, Eletrox and Honey will perform throughout the event.
3 p.m. – Capital Pride Parade on the Big Screen
3:30 p.m. – Drag Show hosted by Cake Pop!
9 p.m. – Fireworks Show Presented by Leonard-Litz Foundation
The event is free and open to the public. The Dockmasters Building will be home to a VIP experience. To learn more and to purchase tickets go to www.prideonthepier.com/vip. VIP tickets are limited.
Event sponsors include Absolut, Buying Time, Capital Pride, DC Brau, DC Fray, Burney Wealth Management, Infinate Legacy, Leonard-Litz Foundation, Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, MISTR, NBC4, The Wharf. More information regarding activities will be released at www.PrideOnThePier.com
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