"Quaring" Black Manhood in Brother to Brother: A Film Review Essay

Abstract

Released at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother is a film linked not only in name, but in context to a rich tradition of works centered on the experiences of black gay men. Specifically, the title evokes Essex Hemphill ’s edited anthology of the same name. Published in 1991, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men compiles the works of writers and poets from Melvin Dixon to Charles I. Nero. The anthology’s black gay male camaraderie theme undoubtedly echoes through the on-screen exchanges of the young painter Perry Williams and the aging Harlem Renaissance poet Richard Bruce Nugent. Yet even as Brother to Brother’s title invokes themes of black gay male solidarity, it also calls attention to the black male hetero/queer binaries. Indeed, the title and film signify on the heteronormative rhetoric of Black Nationalist movements that have tethered straight masculinity to black authenticity and empowerment, meaning that gay identity was not only socially unacceptable but also counterrevolutionary. By signifying on this radically gendered discourse of black (straight) male solidarity, the film exposes the gendered problems of Black Nationalist postures and shines a light on black men’s experiences across hetero/queer lines. Usefully troubling Black Nationalist discourse on black manhood and cultural authenticity, the film’s reliance on static hetero/queer binaries to frame queer resistance movements reproduces rather than explodes prescriptive, one-dimensional notions of black manhood. With an eye toward troubling queer political stances that propagate hetero/queer binaries, this film review