For the Love of Black Queer Cinema: A Conversation with Stephen Winter
For the Love of Black Queer Cinema: A Conversation with Stephen Winter
Stephen Winter’s subversive, imaginative work simultaneously celebrates Black queer culture and fiercely threatens cinematic and societal conventions. In conversation as in his work, the director, producer, and writer deftly balances a warm wit with strikingly incisive honesty. Winter has played several roles throughout his career, producing Jonathan Caouette’s acclaimed documentary Tarnation in 2004 and the recent fictional podcast series Adventures in New America. But it’s in his own films that his singular voice most clearly comes through. In 1996, Winter broke onto the scene with his incendiary feature Chocolate Babies, which imagined the exploits of a gay street gang who call themselves “Black faggots with a political agenda.” The film was a merciless critique of the government’s response to the AIDS plague and an audacious portrait of queer life. Nearly two decades later, in 2015, Winter released his second feature, Jason and Shirley, which radically restages the creation of Shirley Clarke’s landmark 1967 film Portrait of Jason.
Although Winter’s work has been less remarked upon than the filmographies of his queer compatriots Gregg Araki and John Waters, he has created scenes just as shocking. These cinematic moments have resonated with the likes of playwright Jeremy O. Harris and avant-garde cinema pioneer Jonas Mekas, who remarked after viewing Jason and Shirley that the film was so “amazingly true,” he felt he was “back in Shirley’s apartment.” Suffused with a punk ethos, Winter’s worlds leave a lasting impression.
With both Chocolate Babies and Jason and Shirley now available on the Criterion Channel, the artist spoke with me about the racist inequality of the Hollywood system; his influences, ranging from Marlon Riggs to Adam West’s Batman; and the debated existence of a current queer cinema.
Can you tell me about what you remember from your days starting out in the New Queer Cinema of the nineties?
Well, I came to New York at a really exciting time. New Queer Cinema was breaking new ground not only in the kind of stories that could be told, with queer protagonists, but also in the forms used to tell these stories. We were drawing from disparate influences. Godard, Cassavetes, Spike Lee, Stan Brakhage. You could see all that stuff in the films of Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, Cheryl Dunye, and all of us who were bopping around in the nineties back then.
The eighties were a terrible time for Black film. The seventies had the so-called blaxploitation movement, where a whole bunch of wild and wonderful films were made, but the operational powers of the film industry did not allow for Black directors, producers, or writers to succeed. The films were dominated by their stars, but these stars were more or less not allowed to do anything except those Black films. And then when the eighties came, and the Spielberg of it all began, Hollywood said, okay, that’s enough Black stuff for now.
Aside from Eddie Murphy’s films, or the occasional big-budget drama like The Color Purple—also, by the way, directed by a white person—Black people disappeared from film in the eighties. It wasn’t until Spike Lee started breaking that new ground that that began to change. So when I arrived in New York in the nineties, it was very exciting. Everybody kind of lived in the same neighborhoods; we all went to the same bars and the same dinner parties and screenings. Film festivals were not only business conventions but also a real, central opportunity to grow relationships, many of which I still have to this day. But the opportunity for my films to be presented was somewhat limited by the structures of that day.
How so?
Well, queer film back then, for the most part, meant white film. I sort of naively thought, if I make a good film with great characters, and it’s an expression of my particularity, then that is part of what is the currency of today’s marketplace. Everybody was working from their particularities. But the combinations of Black and queer and punk rock . . . Chocolate Babies premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, which was very fancy. And I appreciate even more now how rare of an opportunity that was. We’d play festivals across the country and across the world, and we’d always get great audience reactions and whispers of winning awards, but we always left empty-handed and without distribution, which was disappointing.
I feel like a film like Chocolate Babies would be much more difficult to make today, not even because of the content but because the landscape of the industry has become much more averse to truly independent filmmaking.
There was a window there where what people wanted was something that was truly independent. That window kind of shut. As soon as Chocolate Babies was out there, the next era of independent film demanded that there be stars with name recognition in your film, even if the film was very inexpensive. The film was no longer the event; it was the star plus the film. This is going back to the Hollywood-controlled star-power situation. In the eighties and nineties, you didn’t get a plethora of Black stars able to go out and make their own way. Even when they were interested in independent film, financers would say, “That isn’t enough. You need to get somebody white in your film in order to raise the money to make it.” Today, there’s not only a bunch of Black moguls, who have their own kingdoms or queendoms where they get to greenlight and develop stuff, there’s a galaxy of big-name Black celebrity actors and actresses who are now taken much more seriously as being viable for projects. Independent film notwithstanding, it’s just a great thing to see how different the landscape is now.
I’m just going to throw out an example. Nia Long, who was in Boyz n the Hood and Love Jones and is always great and was a star, could not get financing for an independent film back in the nineties. Any number of white actresses would immediately get put on an “it list.” It was incredibly unfair, and the great thing about the way that the 2020 uprising affected the culture is that creative Black people from all the industries started coming forward with their stories about being boxed out. Fashion, tech . . . it was always the same situation.
Chocolate Babies is a film that depicts queerness as rebellious and irreverent. It came out at a time when queerness was still incredibly sensationalized in magazines and on TV. This film plays into that essentially fearful attitude in a very direct and very funny way. Why was it important to you to lean into provocation and wield humor like you did?
The reason there’s so much humor is because that’s the way I live my life, and that’s the way I live my art, and that’s the way I was raised. The corner of the queer community that I came up in, especially the Black queer community, was very humor-forward. I hung out with exuberant, clever, brilliant people who translated their pain into something that would make sense, which was humor. Many of the things that people say in the film are things that my friends actually said. I would write them down and remember them and they got into the script somehow. I felt it was part of my calling to raise up those voices, as well as my own, and I do like to have a laugh. I didn’t gravitate toward the deadly serious aspects of what was being represented about queerness at that time.
The film is very much about cultural and personal responses to the AIDS crisis. There are a lot of obvious similarities between that plague time and the one we find ourselves in now. The tactics that the characters in the film use to protest and confront those in power are pretty similar to the real-life methods that were used by groups like ACT UP. Did you have any firsthand experience with activism that informed those moments?
Oh, yeah! I went to my first protest in Chicago, where I grew up, at age sixteen. I was in ACT UP at eighteen. And I was part of the Black Nationalism movement. Shutting down the streets, throwing confetti in a politician’s face to make a point: I gravitated toward the theatrics of that and also the intensity of putting yourself bodily out there. So this was not so much a satire but a fantastical what-if. One of the great things about ACT UP is that everybody could do whatever it was they wanted to. My fantasy was, what if an ad hoc Black trans queer group and this Asian guy decided to do their own thing, and they did it? I guess it was also kind of influenced by the Batman TV series.
Oh, hell yeah.
Wham! Blam! You know?
Adam West is still my favorite Batman.
I mean, I like to be high-minded and talk about the first time I saw A Woman Under the Influence, Red Desert. Those were indelible moments for me, but I also watched every episode of The Monkees, every episode of Adam West’s Batman.
The characters in this film—“a roving gang of faggots,” as the news calls them—are mostly HIV positive, and are performers, drag queens, outrageous, daring, hilarious. They’re also ultimately quite sad people. It was evident that someone had to die in this picture of queer street life. What were your thoughts about death at the time you were making the film?
I would come into the world and meet these incredible Black gay activists like Marlon Riggs and Ortez Alderson, and poets like Essex Hemphill, and we had these intense connections, and they’d be so beautiful, and within a year they’d be dead and I’d be going to their funeral. Because back then, AIDS was not a chronic manageable disease, it was a ticking bomb. Between government inaction and how vicious it was, the life expectancy was very small. So all these fathers of mine, I got to meet them briefly, and then they were gone. Which was a generational experience. We’re the orphaned generation. AIDS took away all the people I wanted to mentor me.
In that way, I guess, that’s why I made the majority of the characters in
Chocolate Babies older than I was. They were all in their thirties, and I was newly twentysomething. The experience of watching them die was something that had to be part of what the story was. That’s why they were acting so out-there. They had nothing to lose. It’s an interesting way to look at the world today. Between the unfair economic inequality and the way that so many aspects of the world are rolling, again so many people have not a lot to lose. That’s one of the reasons why I think the film resonates today.
There’s a line in the film about the ostensible villain, a closeted politician, that feels so prescient of our moment, when identity politics and hollowed-out representation have trumped any commitment to legitimate progress. “She still votes fascist. But is nationally renowned as the first gay congressman of color.”
Yeah, well . . . [Long pause.] I mean . . . there are some LGBTQ politicians in the public eye who I find horrific. It’s no longer surprising when I meet a fellow LGBTQ person who goes, “I used to love ‘X.’ I can’t believe I did.” Yeah. Roy Cohn, Ed Koch . . .
I want to talk about Jason and Shirley. It’s an imagined making-of about Shirley Clarke’s film Portrait of Jason. I remember seeing Portrait of Jason and being disturbed by its ending. Your film takes the subtle tension in the confrontational aspects of Portrait and blows it up in a maximalist way. What made you want to invent your own account of the film?
Portrait of Jason has always been a troubling experience for me and many other Black LGBTQ people. In the cinematic canon, it’s the most spotlighted film that has a Black gay person at its center. You know, Moonlight just happened, but prior to that, this was the only one. Although Jason is relentlessly probed, the film seems to always entirely miss the point of who he actually is. In the end, when he’s brought to a nervous breakdown, it’s kind of unlike anything else in the vérité world. That doesn’t happen to the Grey Gardens ladies. That doesn’t happen to the Rolling Stones at Altamont. But it happens to Jason. And we wanted to experience more from him. Our perspective was, this is not just a street person and a hustler and a would-be cabaret singer; he is an extremely experienced performer of life. The reason he’s able to hold the attention of a whole feature film is because he’s got these incredibly well-rehearsed stories. Where do we find the Jason Holliday who resists? Where do we find the Jason Holliday who shows other sides of himself that humanize the insanity of his existence? That’s where we found our film.
Although Portrait of Jason was and still is hailed as transgressive and open, it still sensationalizes queer identity. Jason seems so clearly positioned as this captivating other.
Yes. I wanted to un-other him. I wanted to find the Jason within myself, and for everyone who sees the film to find the Jason within themselves. And to see how heroic he is. It’s a heroic thing to stand up for ten hours and be interviewed and interrogated. He comes off as a winner in our film, and I don’t believe he comes off as a winner in Clarke’s documentary. I wanted to spotlight him as a historical figure, not merely as subject matter but as a person, as significant a street poet as any of his contemporaries—Ginsberg, Lou Reed, you know? These other people’s lives were seen as less than completely reputable but were protected by their whiteness. Not only is Jason’s life not protected because of his Blackness, the unsavory aspects of his biography are also put into the shade.
Watching Jason and Shirley, I was not expecting such a freewheeling account of the making of the film, and I certainly wasn’t expecting Sarah Schulman in the most outlandish hat in the world playing Shirley Clarke. She plays Shirley as a quietly venomous, almost Bravo-TV kind of character. What was it like directing her?
[Laughs.] Well, the great thing about Sarah Schulman is that she knows who she is, she knows what she wants, and she knows what she thinks is right. We were always in firm agreement about what was going on. Her absolute refusal to allow Shirley Clarke to be a caricature was one of the main reasons I knew this film was going to work. She was not going to succumb to vanity by trying to get the audience to like her, or pretty up aspects of what was going on. Shirley was a person who was doing her work. She was making everything happen. That for me is one of the most important parts of the way that characterization came through. And the hat just helps.
You say she’s just directing her film, but obviously there’s something underneath that you’re getting at.
Oh, yeah. The historical record of the making of Portrait of Jason includes the love triangle—the love-hate triangle—between Jason, Shirley, and her lover, the actor and artist Carl Lee, who was a very important figure in the Black theater at that point. What was clear is that Jason had been telling stories around town that he was hooking up with Carl Lee, who was a friend of his. Part of the reason that the film came together is that Shirley Clarke was, in her own words, trying to “get” Jason. The climax of the documentary is a confrontation about this issue, depicted brutally, with Jason crying and apologizing. It was also clear, at least to a Black person watching it, that Carl Lee and Jason Holliday have a relationship. Carl seems angry about the gossip, but he’s also working to help Jason come to a conclusion with his performance—Black man to Black man, Black artist to Black artist. And we wanted to give that its due. When you watch the documentary, nothing is explained. You have no idea who all these other voices are who are yelling at Jason. When I first saw the film, I thought the crew had turned on him. But it’s Carl Lee, fellow artist, fellow Black man, fellow heavy drug user. And a fellow street player who is not only lashing out at Jason but also getting him to a place where he can be as emotional as possible. We wanted to take that and show it from a different angle.
Here’s a general question I was thinking about after I saw Chocolate Babies. What are your thoughts on the awful sexlessness of current mainstream cinema?
Sexiness in movies is definitely not what it was.
But I mean in terms of how films even approach sex.
I watched Chocolate Babies this spring with Lee Daniels, the director, and he hadn’t seen it in many years, and when we got to the sex scene—there’s no nudity, by the way, my actors didn’t want to be nude, and I thought that was fair . . .
Well, not in the sex scene. But there is nudity in the film.
There’s nudity in the film but not in the sex scene. And I didn’t see that as an impediment. We figured out a way to design and choreograph the sex scene so that, although there’s no nudity, it’s definitely sexy. After it was over, Lee Daniels looked up and said, “That was a moment!” [Laughs.] Which is the best review I’ve ever gotten. When I rewatched Jason and Shirley recently, I realized it is sexy all the way through. It is filmed on VHS, so it has that kind of illicit, X-rated quality to it.
There’s something electric about it.
The way that Jack Waters plays Jason is sexy. The way that the two boys interact with him, they play it sexy.
Very “pool boy” attitude.
Yeah, but with a lot of agency. There’s a Black drug dealer character who comes through; they depict the act of buying and taking drugs as a seduction. What can I say? I’m a sensualist. I love Ken Russell, I love Paul Schrader.
Have you seen the new Paul Verhoeven movie, Benedetta?
No, not yet. I’m gonna say, I’m not so much a Verhoeven. I like Verhoeven, but he’s not one of my guys.
Isabel Sandoval is a trans filmmaker Criterion has worked with, and she refers to herself as “the queen of sensual cinema.”
Yes. She is. Verhoeven is—this is going to sound funny . . . he’s almost a little too vulgar. He’s fun but vulgar. I’m more of a fan of the Ken Russell approach. Fun but sensual.
What do you make of the state of queer cinema today? Do you think there’s still something that we can recognize as queer cinema right now?
[Long pause.] When you go to the streaming services and they’re dividing things up for you, they don’t say “queer cinema,” they say “LGBTQ.” Where is queer cinema now? It is laced within that category. It is no longer a genre unto itself that has any force in the world. It sits next to the teen coming-out rom-com that just came out on whatever it was. I’m not talking about anyone in particular—there’s five already, there’s ten coming out next year. But as for a cinema that is queer and political and transgressive and cool and influential, people have to go out and find that. It still exists, but it needs to be sought after. It’s not going to be fed to you, the way things are happening now. It has to be discovered.
The other side of that is people can stumble onto it and also appreciate what’s going on. A lot of heterosexual people come up to me and talk about Jason and Shirley and Chocolate Babies. They frickin’ love it, perhaps because it’s so outside of their lived experience but so very human and relatable.
Everything has to evolve. I want to see queer cinema win Best Picture. Is Moonlight a “queer cinema” film? It’s not directed by a queer person, and the characters in it might not call themselves queer, and it can be claimed by heterosexual Black church people and any number of people who could be moved by such a beautiful expression of humanity.
And when you look back at the New Queer Cinema of the nineties, my experience was far too white-centric. It was a moment in time that was great, but not without critique. I don’t feel nostalgia for that time. I feel nostalgia because it was my childhood, but I’m still relatively young, and I like where I am right now.
I’m glad. It’s a good place to be.
