Dear White People and the Issue of Sexuality
Years ago I went to see Dear White People with a dear friend. The movie was electric. I quipped later that I could write an article every month for a year and wouldn’t feel as though I exhausted things to say about it. One of the central characters, Lionel Higgins (played by Tyler James Williams brilliantly), is the outcast many of us were at some point in our lives. The way that Dear White People addresses issues of sexuality is superb. Without ruining the movie–trust me, EVERYONE should see it, even your racist grandmother–Lionel is taken through several trials regarding how he deals with the intolerance surrounding him. He’s rejected from all the major cliques on campus because he’s introverted, weird, black, and most importantly gay. He’s not in the closet. He’s not fronting for the black community. He is who he is.
That scares many people. The white bros bully him. The black students interrogate his blackness, THEN bully him.
The black audience loved it. They ate it up. When he gets his first on-screen kiss, my theater erupted in groans of disgust. “What is this gay shit?” “Nasty!” I leaned back in my seat, and loudly said “Y’all are so progressive!” What I really wanted to say is if you can be up in arms about the racial tension in the movie, but applaud the degradation of a homosexual man, y’all are fucked up. I mean, really fucked up. You can’t see the connections between the terrorization of LGBTQ and the terrorization of black folk? In this case, Lionel’s terrorized for his blackness, his sexuality, AND his introversion.
When I left the theater, people could not remark on the clever way the film answers this issue, but instead focused on how a movie garnered to black people could include homosexual topics. One moviegoer remarked “didn’t they know they were making this for black folk? Putting that gay shit in there.” These theater patrons missed the whole point. The movie is titled Dear White People, but it just as easily could’ve been called Dear Black People. Many of the issues that play out in the movie are internal to the black community and is only exacerbated by the presence of willfully ignorant whites.
Homosexuality is one of them. I read an article in which the Morehouse football team cheered when Lionel is being beat up outside of a party because he’s gay. I was aghast, but not surprised. They are the very reason he doesn’t interact much with other people of color. Problem is, we equate blackness with heterosexuality, specifically to be a black man, you must be straight.
The focus on Lionel’s hair is fantastic. It’s huge. It’s wild. It’s practically, as Lionel put it, “developing sentience”. I think there’s a reason for that. Hair, throughout the movie, is a marker for each black person’s role within the community. The crisp STRAIGHT line ups indicate the swaggering black men who represent the “good brothas”. Lionel’s appearance already isolates him from the group. Yet, despite his isolation, Lionel is a person that cannot be ignored. People attempt to dismiss him, but he fills the room. He represents the issue of homophobia in the black community which we pretend we do not see. He cannot be admitted into the black community as “one of us” because he is different, and his difference is marked by his hair.
See the movie. Develop your own opinions. Dear White People is more nuanced and clever than many people–who’ve resisted it before seeing it–believe. It’s not a long rant about racism, it is a probing look into which issues are straw men, which are still relevant, and which ones we haven’t even addressed yet. The movie should really be titled Dear Willfully Ignorant White People. Dear Homophobic Black Pseudo Revolutionaries. Dear Mainstream. Dear Predominantly White Institutions. Dear Self Loathing Black Girls. Dear Bullies. Dear Post-Racial America. Dear Every Fucking Body.
