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.”
a&e features
Award-winning D.C. chef reaching new culinary heights
Anthony Jones of Marcus DC competing on ‘Top Chef’
In Anthony Jones’s kitchen, all sorts of flags fly, including his own. Executive chef at award-winning restaurant Marcus DC, Jones has reached culinary heights (James Beard Award semifinalist for Emerging Chef, anyone?), yet he’s just getting started.
Briefly stepping away from his award-winning station, Jones took a moment under a different set of lights. Recently, he temporarily gave up his post at the restaurant for a starring small-screen slot on the latest season of “Top Chef,” which debuted in March. (The show airs weekly on Bravo and Peacock).
Before his strategic slice-and-dice competition, however, Jones, who identifies as gay, draws from his deep DMV roots. In the years before “Top Chef” and the top chef spot at Marcus, he was born and raised in Sunderland, Md., in southern Maryland, near the Chesapeake.
Early memories were steeped in afternoons on boats with his dad bonding over fishing, and wandering the garden of his great-grandparents spread with fresh vegetables and a few hogs. “It was Southern, old-school ethics and upbringing,” he said. “Family and food went hand in hand.” Weekends meant grabbing bushels of crabs, dad and grandma would cook and crack them. Family members would host fish fries for extra cash. In this seafood-heavy youth, Jones managed time to sneak in episodes of the “OG” Japanese “Iron Chef” show, which helped inspire him to pursue a career in the kitchen.
Jones moved to D.C. after graduating from college, ending up at lauded Restaurant Eve, and met famed chef Marcus Samuelson, who brought him to Miami to be part of the opening team for Red Rooster Overtown. After three years, Jones moved back to D.C., where he ran Dirty Habit, reinventing and reimagining the menu, integrating West African flavors and ingredients.
Samuelson, however, wouldn’t let a talent like Jones stay away for too long. Pulling Jones back into his orbit, Samuelson elevated Jones to help him open his namesake restaurant Marcus DC, which has been named a top-five restaurant by the Washington Post. Since then, Jones has been nominated as a semifinalist for the RAMMYs Rising Culinary Star in 2026 and won the Eater DC’s Rising Chef award in 2025.
Samuelson’s Marcus is a tour de force interpreting the Black Diaspora on the plate, from the American South to West Africa, along with his signature “Swedopian” touches. Yet it’s Jones who has deeply informed the plate, elevating his own story to date. Marcus DC is primarily a seafood restaurant, which serves Jones well.
“Where I’m from is seafood heavy, and as I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve moved away from meat.” Veggies and fish are hero dishes. His own dish, Mel’s Crab Rice, was not only lauded by the Washington Post, but is framed by his youth carrying home the crustaceans from Mel’s crab truck. It’s a bowl of Carolina rice, layered with pickled okra, uni béarnaise, and crab. Jones also points to a dish on the opening menu, rockfish and brassica, paying respect to a landmark D.C. institution, Ben’s Chili Bowl. Jones reverse engineered a favorite bowl of chili that’s seafood instead of meat forward, leveraging octopus and rockfish along with different riffs of cauliflower: showing his intellectual, creative, and cultural sides.
While “Top Chef” is showing Jones’s spotlight side, he also lets his identity show at work. “In the kitchen, I make sure we’re inclusive. We don’t tolerate discrimination. Everyone that’s here should feel confident to express themselves. There are so many different flags in the kitchen.”
Jones says that he didn’t fully express his gay identity until fairly recently. He felt reluctant coming out to certain family members, “you’re scared to tell them about being different,” he says, and while that anxiety ate at him, “I’m lucky and fortunate to have unconditional love and that weight off my shoulders.”
Today, “I’m me all the time, Monday to Sunday. I’m honest with people, and my staff is honest with me.”
“Being a chef is hard,” he says, “and being a chef of color is even more difficult.”
Yet his LGBTQ identity is a juggling act, he says. “I need to keep that balance, because once someone finds out something about you, their opinion can change, whether you want it or not.”
Being on a whole season of TV cooking competition, however, might mean millions more might have an opinion of him (Jones has appeared on TV already, on an episode of “Chopped”). To prepare, he says, “I’ve just kept a level head. It’s just an honor to be on top chef with amazing people happy to be there.”
Plus, this season is set in the Carolinas, and Jones attended Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. “It’s a full story of my life, now a monumental moment for me.”
Jones also recently was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. “JBF has been a north star, a dream for so long. I always had this goal on my wall.”
Being at the top spot at Marcus DC, making waves through his accolades, and cooking on Bravo means that Jones is highly visible. “I think that if someone has a similar background to me, and can see our story, trajectory, and success, they can have more ability to be themselves. This is my goal.”
Back at Marcus, Jones has plenty up his chef’s white’s sleeves. A new spring menu is in the works. He’ll be launching a new tasting menu “dining experience,” he says, and has plans to work on more events and collaborations with chefs and friends to bring in new talent and share the culinary wealth.
Movies
Trans-driven ‘Serpent’s Skin’ delivers campy sapphic horror
Embracing classic tropes with a candid exploration of queer experience
It’s probably no surprise that the last decade or so has seen a “renaissance” in horror cinema. Long underestimated and dismissed by critics and ignored by all the awards bodies as genre films, horror movies were deemed for generations as unworthy of serious consideration; relegated into the realm of “fandom,” where generations of young movie fanatics were left to find deeper significance on their own, they have inspired countless future film artists whose creative vision would be shaped by their influence. Add to that the increasing state of existential anxiety that has us living like frogs in a slow-boiling pot, and it seems as if the evolution of horror into what might be our culture’s most resonant form of pop art expression was more or less inevitable all along.
Queer audiences, of course, have always understood that horror provides an ideal vehicle to express the “coded” themes that spring from existence as a stigmatized outsider, and while the rise of the genre as an art form has been fueled by filmmakers from every community, the transgressive influence of queerness – particularly when armed with “camp,” its most surefire means of subversion – has played an undeniable role in building a world where movies like “Sinners” and “Weapons” can finally be lauded at the Oscars for their artistic qualities as well as celebrated for their success at providing paying audiences with a healthy jolt of adrenaline.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boldest and most biting entries are coming from trans filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun (“I Saw the TV Glow”) – and like Australian director Alice Maio Mackay, whose new film “The Serpent’s Skin” opened in New York last weekend and expands to Los Angeles this week.
Described in a review from RogerEbert.com as “a kind of ‘Scanners’ for the dolls,” it’s a movie that embraces classic horror tropes within a sensibility that blends candid exploration of trans experience with an obvious love for camp. It centers on twenty-something trans girl Anna (Alexandra McVicker), who escapes the toxic environment of both her dysfunctional household and her conservative hometown by running away to the “Big City” and moving in with her big sister (Charlotte Chimes). On her first night in town, she connects with Danny (Jordan Dulieu), a neighbor (the only “hottie” in the building, according to her sister) who plays guitar in a band and ticks off all her “edgy” boxes, and has a one-night stand.
The very next day, she starts a new job at a record store, where she connects – through an intense and unexpected incident – with local tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Faust), a young woman she has seen in psychic visions, and who has been likewise drawn to her. The reason? They are both “witches,” born with abilities that give them a potentially deadly power over ordinary humans, and bound together in an ancient supernatural legacy.
It goes without saying that they fall in love; together, they teach and learn from each other as they try to master the mysterious magical gifts they both possess; but when Danny coincidentally books Gen for a tattoo inspired by his earlier “fling” with Anna, an ancient evil is unleashed, leading to a string of horrific incidents and forcing them to confront the dark influences within their own traumatic histories which may have conjured this malevolent spirit in the first place, before it wreaks its soul-stealing havoc upon the entire community.
Confronting the theme of imposed trans “guilt” head on, “Serpent’s Skin” emanates from a softer, gentler place than most horror films, focusing less on scares than on the sense of responsibility which seems naturally to arise just from being “different.”. Both McVicker and Faust bring a palpable feeling of weight to their roles, as if their characters are carrying not only their own fate upon their shoulders, but that of the world at large; blessed (or cursed) with a layer of awareness that both elevates and isolates them, their characters evoke a haunting sense of responsibility, which permeates their relationship and supersedes their personal desires. At the same time, they bring a mix of respect and eroticism to the sapphic romance at the center of the film, evoking a connection to the transgressive and iconic “lesbian noir” genre but replacing its sense of amoral cynicism with an imperative toward empathy and social responsibility.
All of this helps to make the film’s heroines relatable, and raises the stakes by investing us not just in the defeat of supernatural evil, but the triumph of love. Yet we can’t help but feel that there’s something lost – a certain edge, perhaps – that might have turned up the heat and given the horror a more palpable bite. Though there are moments of genuine fright, most of the “scary” stuff is campy enough to keep us from taking things too seriously – despite the best efforts of the charismatic Dulieu, who literally sinks his teeth into his portrayal of the possessed version of Danny.
More genuinely disturbing are the movie’s scenes of self-harm, which both underscore and indict the trope of trans “victimhood” while reminding us of the very real fear at the center of many trans lives, especially when lived under the oppression of a mindset that deplores their very existence.
Still, though Mackay’s film may touch on themes of queer and trans existence and build its premise on a kind of magical bond that makes us all “sisters under the skin,” it is mostly constructed as a stylish tribute to the classic thrillers of an earlier age, evoking the psychological edge of directors like Hitchcock and DePalma while embracing the lurid “shock value” of the B-movie horror that shaped the vision of a modern generation of filmmakers who grew up watching it – and even if it never quite delivers the kind of scares that linger in our minds as we try to go to sleep at night, it makes up for the shortfall with a smart, sensitive, and savvy script and a rare depiction of trans/lesbian love that wins us over with chemistry, emotional intelligence, and enviable solidarity.
What makes “The Serpent’s Skin” feel particularly remarkable is that it comes from a 21-year-old filmmaker. Mackey, who built the foundation of her career behind the camera with a series of low-budget horror shorts in her teens, has already made an impact with movies ranging from the vampire horror comedy “So Vam” (released when she was 16) to the horror musical “Satanic Panic” and the queer holiday shockfest “Carnage for Christmas”. With her latest effort, she deploys a confidence and a style that encompasses both the deep psychological nuance of the horror genre and its guilty-pleasure thrills, rendered in an aesthetic that is grounded in intimate queer and trans authenticity and yet remains daring enough to take detours into the surreal and psychedelic without apology.
It’s the kind of movie that feels like a breakthrough, especially in an era when it feels especially urgent for trans stories to be told.
A “No Kings” demonstration was held in Anacostia on Saturday to protest the Trump administration. Speakers at the rally included LGBTQ activist, Rayceen Pendarvis. Following the rally, demonstrators marched across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge.
(Washington Blade photos and videos by Michael Key)
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