For the queer black and brown women who find themselves fractured into racist or sexualized stereotypes in the media, look no further than your internet browser for the antidote to bad representation.
Queer women of color who are writers and film-makers are circumventing Hollywood gatekeepers to tell their own stories online. In the web shows Brown Girls and 195 Lewis, queer women of color are the norm. They support and uplift one another. They think deeply and love fiercely. They thrive in social enclaves where community, discourse and art are the tools of resistance.
And white people don’t exist.
Brown Girls centers on the close friendship between Leila, a South Asian Muslim writer, and Patricia, a black musician, both of whom are navigating sex and relationships among a group of queer people of color living in Chicago.
In the first episode, a perpetually frazzled Leila (Nabila Hossain) wakes up to her aunty’s relentless scolding over the phone: was she sleeping in? Is she going to mosque later for Eid? Was she just having sex? Leila pretends she’s at work and says she must go before the goras overreact to hearing her speak “Muslim words”. She hangs up in exasperation as her on-again-off-again lover Miranda rolls over to greet her. Still in her first shaky steps of being queer, Leila awkwardly deflects when Miranda initiates the dreaded “what are we” conversation, in effect ending their casual hookups.
The show’s creator, Fatimah Asghar, said she had funneled her personal experiences as a queer Muslim woman into Leila, unpicking the threads of family, religion and desire tangled within her own sexual identity.
The show fleshes out the contours of Leila’s queerness, wading in the infinite desires that dwell in the spectrum between gay and straight. After Leila and Miranda’s fallout, the unabashedly frank Patricia (Sonia Denis) recalls a time when Miranda stalked Leila to the home of Mark, her older married boss whom she was also sleeping with.
“Queerness is complicated,” Asghar said. “Some people would see that as a contradiction, but it’s not. Leila could operate on both desires and still be queer.”
Meanwhile, Patricia practices an emotionally distant, Tinder-based approach to sex positivity to combat feelings of abandonment after her boyfriend leaves the country. Patricia now swears by her mantra “single girls club forever”, rebuffing her mother’s suggestion to reconnect with her ex and calling an Uber at 4am for a one-night stand.
Leila and Patricia’s interweaving storylines unfold through a series of intimate conversations with friends, family members, lovers and coworkers that exude a palpable authenticity.
Asghar said she wrote Brown Girls as a “love letter” to her best friend and as a restorative for her circle of artists and activists to laugh with. “I wanted to create something that’s not just about our struggle, but also celebrated the joys of what it means to be a person of color,” she said.
Asghar said she hoped increased representation translated not only into self-recognition for queer audiences of color but also opportunities for aspiring film-makers of color to get paid for their work.
The director Sam Bailey said making a web show allowed for creative freedom to parse out the nuances of marginalized identities that are often flattened in the mainstream. “Web series for me have always been an equalizer where people of color can share their stories and that levels the playing field a little,” she said. “There are more of our stories being told on the web than there are on TV.”
Of the paltry 47 LGBT characters in 126 major studio film releases in 2015, 34 were white, according to Glaad’s annual report. LGBT characters on primetime TV and streaming services have been steadily increasing, but the racial gap persists.
Bailey emphasized that Brown Girls did not represent all women of color, but rather portrayed a slice of life. “I’m not interested in [Brown Girls] being the voice of queer women of color. I’m interested in adding to that voice,” she said. “So often we get pigeonholed into one way of being. [Characters] don’t get the room to be complex and messy but also lovely – all the things that white characters always get to be.”
While the critically acclaimed Insecure (which started out as a cult web series) and the Oscar-nominated Moonlight depict young black women and black gay men through a POC lens, stories of queer women of color remain curiously absent from the media landscape.
When queer women of color do appear on screen, they seem to be plucked from their communities and dropped into a fantasy of diverse coexistence that may not reflect the lived realities of those who form bonds based on shared politics and experiences. Perhaps not since The L Word has a show about queer women and transgender people depicted the melange of friends and lovers known as “chosen family”.
The L Word inspired the creators of 195 Lewis to write their own version based on the queer black women they met after moving to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, said Rae Leone Allen, a co-writer and actor.
“There’s a lot of beautiful black women [in Bed-Stuy] and that’s my weakness,” she said. “They have natural hair, they read books – we were very inspired by the space and running into a lot of interesting things, like polyamory.”
The dramedy lays bare the anxieties, stigmas and competing attractions that arise in the open relationship of Yuri (Allen) and Camille (Sirita Wright) without making a hypersexualized spectacle out of non-monogamy. Director Chanelle Aponte Pearson used the phrase “radical honesty” to describe the tightroped vulnerability involved in telling a partner about wanting to be romantically involved with more than one person.
“We have plenty of examples of how non-monogamy is done very poorly, all the cheating and lying and how from an entertainment perspective, that’s the source of drama,” she said. “We don’t have a blueprint for how this is done responsibly.”
The complications of Yuri and Camille’s relationship develop in the embrace of a close-knit community of queer black women, who dance together under sensual pink light, host femme of color brunches and pepper flirtations with flakes of critical theory.
“For me, this is a project about black women loving each other,” Allen said. “We’re black, we’re queer, we’re women – we all have a lot of luggage, and that comes out in these relationships.”
While the series was originally intended for online release, the showrunners are also looking for a larger platform following a strong premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December. “Knowing that our community wants content like this, the internet is the most accessible way to share it,” Aponte Pearson said. “But there was something really special about getting folks in a room and having a shared experience of the show, so we want to build on that.”
“Nobody can tell our stories like we can tell our stories,” Allen said. “My perspective is particular, I come from a certain place, my ancestors are powerful, and we have important things to say.”
- Brown Girls premieres on 15 February. Find local screenings here
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