Cheryl Dunye, Greetings From Africa, 16mm on dv, 10min., 1994
Jocelyn Taylor, Frankie and Jocie, video, 20min., 1994
Dawn Suggs, I Never Danced the Way Girls Were Supposed To, video, 7min., 1992
Aarin Burch, Spin Cycle, video, 5min., 1991
Shari Frilot, What Is A Line? , video, 10min., 1994

A showcase of films from the 1990s by black queer women filmmakers, exploring the trials and traumas of navigating dating and love at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. The films intermix humor, fiction, experimental visual tactics, and candid dialogue to examine relationships with family, community, romantic partners, and self.

Along with its well-documented history of mixed cultural spaces during the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, where people of diverse racial, gender and sexual identities interacted, Harlem has remained a crucial site of Black cultural production, community building, and resistance since the early twentieth century. Maysles Cinema, the only independent cinema north of Lincoln Center, is committed to creating a democratic space that provides educational outreach to the local community as well as pay-what-you-can screenings. Maysles is located near the former site of Wellworth’s, a down-low lesbian bar in the 1950s-60s – it was a straight bar in the front and lesbian bar in the back (as documented by lesbian scholar Bonnie Zimmerman). In the midst of racial exclusion, alienation, and racist experiences in predominantly white lesbian and mixed spaces, places like Wellworth’s provided rare access to public sociality for Black lesbians.

Curator: Vivian Crockett