Documentaries About Black LGBTQ+ People You Need to Watch
October 28, 2021Black History Month is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the lives of Black LGBTQ+ people, remember their achievements and look forward to all the positive changes the future may bring for the community. Here is our list of the best documentaries about Black LGBTQ+ people. And remember don't stop learning about Black LGBTQ+ history just because October is over - make a commitment to do so all year long.
Paris Is Burning, filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, chronicles New York's drag scene in the 1980s, focusing on balls, voguing and the ambitions and dreams of the African-American, Latino, gay, and trans communities involved in it, who gave the era its warmth and vitality.
This Belgian-Dutch documentary film revisits the dancers who were part of Madonna's Blond Ambition Tour in 1990.
‘Jewel's Catch One’, directed by filmmaker C. Fitz, celebrates the legacy of a legendary Los Angeles nightclub, Catch One, and the life-changing impact its owner, Jewel Thais-Williams, had on her community breaking down racial and cultural barriers and building the oldest black-owned disco in America. Jewel's story celebrates music, fashion, celebrities and activism that helped changed the course of US history.
Black gay sex worker Jason Holliday is rigorously interviewed on his story and character, revealing nuanced truths about life and art. In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected ‘Portrait of Jason’ for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
‘Difficult Love’ is a portrait of internationally celebrated South African lesbian photographer, Zanele Muholi, and her highly personal take on the challenges facing black lesbians in South Africa today. The film features interviews with Muholi as well as with her friends, colleagues and peers, and provides a compelling overview of the artist, her life and her work.
Taking place in New York City ‘Kiki’ focuses on the drag and voguing scene and surveys the lives of LGBT+ youth of colour at a time when Black Lives Matter and trans rights were making front-page headlines. The documentary is considered an unofficial sequel to the influential 1990 film ‘Paris Is Burning’.
This experimental documentary seeks, in its author's words to, “...shatter the nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” The documentary investigates experiences of black homosexual men living in the United States of America.
Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003)
‘Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin’ is a documentary on Bayard Rustin, a largely unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement. In this documentary Rustin, best-remembered as the organiser of the 1963 March on Washington, gets overdue recognition.
This documentary shows a few days in the life of various members of Abdijan, Ivory Coast's gay and trans community. In the documentary we get to meet a variety of woubis, yossis, etc. The hero/heroine of the film is a statuesque young man named Barbara who is organising the annual year-end party of the Ivory Coast Transvestite Association, to be held December 27, 1997.