Pariah Is Not Another Gay Black Film

During pride month I did a art show at Galeria de La Raza. A really gay indigenous art show, and at the end of the show a young woman walked up to me and thanked me. She asked me if my hair was real before she asked me if I would take a photo with her by one of the art panels, I thought that was random so there was a possibility in my mind that she was an artist as well. A mutual friend she had come with told me she was a film maker and to check out her film "Pariah" and in a light way I said "yeah f'sho".

"Pariah" the name of the film is hard to forget. As seen in the beginning of the trailer the meaning of pariah is "a person without status. A rejected member of society. A outcast". After a couple of weeks I looked for the trailer and wow, the trailer itself made me regret how light my "yeah f'sho" was when I met Dee Rees, the director of Pariah.

On a very fitting night to watch the film, National Coming Out Day, I went to a premiere by Focus Feature Films and Monica Anderson with Kin Folkz and Sista2Sista (a really dope womens network and support group for queer women of color). The film begins with a young woman in a club watching a woman dancing and sliding up and down a pole. While other women are watching the woman slide up and down the pole with their dollars out, Alike(the main character) is in awe. She stands there watching, looking socially awkward because there is a sort of newness to this experience. The "newness", Alike is a young black woman slowly dealing with her sexuality because she is gay and this is one of her first gay experiences.

This film is not another gay black film. The film maker wrote the film in a way where it goes deeper in the perception of lesbian labels on the gender spectrum. Exploring issues with family, issues in school, exploring identity and humanizing a face people see, that often times gets misconceived in perceptions of lesbian labels in media.

You can find a Zora Neale Hurston in this film or a Alice Walker in the way its written. Telling a story in detail to the miniscule that it' becomes as real as the vulnerability in silence that the audience had when Alike comes out as her mother chokes her before she can say that she is a lesbian again. You can see the way it can move the crowd in the familiarity of going to a gay club for the first time, the first kiss, heartbreak, or the rejection of a mother as a lesbian. And most of the time those moments and these stories have been kept in secret because of possible situations of being choked or rejected by a mother or maybe worse in that nature. It is that thing that makes this film very classic, not only as a film but you can compare it to a literary arts classic, that for queer people will make a mark in history. It will be the first time for some people to finally see their story told on big screen and as a 60 year old woman in the audience quoted Sam Cooke "its been a long time coming", to tell a history that for a long time has been forced in secrecy for safety.

In one of the last scenes, Alike reads a poem very fitting to end the film, leaving open possibilities of what next after "coming" out or rather breaking free. It is written by the director as she too can tell her story through this film, no longer in secret.

"I am broken open. Breaking is freeing. Breaking is freedom. I am not broken, I am free."-Dee Rees

Pariah will premiere in December at selected theatres.