You crowdfunded $17,384 as a first- time filmmaker. Because whiteness is often a standard in conversations around beauty, I didn’t want white talking heads talking about these ideas because they are deeply implicated. White people do have a space - as listener. I also chose to rock with an all-black cast and crew because black lives really do matter to me, and when we center them in critical conversations, we all get free. It means more to me that I’m doing it in a way that honors how I show up in the world. It meant a lot for me to have an all-black cast because so many other don’t, or they can’t commit to an all-black cast because they want the film palatable to a certain kind of audience. With an all-black cast, do white people and other races have a space in this conversation? The things that happen in our private lives very much so influence and determine how we show up in public. And we know from feminist scholarship that the personal is political.
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I’m thinking of desire as both a cognitive and emotional phenomenon that is informed by the environment around us and the media we consume.
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That is so because people are afraid of what it means to engage the messiness of our desires and how it controls a lot of our lives outside of the bedroom. You say that the documentary focuses on the “politics of desirability.” Explain what that is.įor so long, ideas around sex and sexuality have been relegated to the bedroom. I was experiencing using that as a model. He wasn’t interested in being seen in fragments and put out a very visual and explicit narrative that was really inspiring to me. I thought for a very long time about what he’d be talking about today had he still been alive and making work as someone who in the 1980s dared to talk about his life at the intersection of being black and gay. I have always admired the work of Marlon Riggs. Where did you get the idea to explore the thought process behind this statement in a documentary? Put simply, it’s prejudice masked as preference. Anything that reminds them of what the world thinks it means to be gay, they shun away from.
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The “no fats, no femmes” ideology is often used by gay men situating their desires within a framework that excludes particular kinds of bodies, mostly those fat, feminine, disabled, HIV positive and the list goes on. Using archival research and performance art, Lewis’ goal is to discuss the many ways individual desires are rooted in problematic conceptions of varying identities. The documentary will feature interviews with five black people: a disabled person in South Africa a queer New York rapper a PhD student and blogger in Missouri an agender writer of work on body positivity and a trans woman. Sprawled on many of the profiles were “no fats, no femmes” - along with things like “no blacks, no Asians, no ballroom kids.” Seeing the frequency of such language inspired Lewis years later to create a feature-length documentary to interrogate and explore race, desire and body image, and the ways in which they’re informed by media, pop culture and capitalism. While an undergrad at the historically black, all-male Morehouse College, he-she used queer social networking and dating sites to meet people. Originally from Atlanta, Lewis is a second-year graduate student in media studies at the New School by day and “cultural worker, performance artist and freedom fighter” by night.