“I’m From Driftwood” Digs Deeper Into The African-American Gay Experience
I’m From Driftwood, Nathan Manske’s queer storytelling project, is launching the Community Spotlight Initiative today. The idea is to highlight different underrepresented segments of the LGBT community each week.
The first series is a Black Community Spotlight, running through February 10 and including interviews with trans actress/activist Laverne Cox and spoken-word artist/storyteller Khary. In the debut clip above, Manske interviews gay artist/filmmaker Stephen Winter, director of Chocolate Babies and various queer shorts.
Manske first started IFD after watching Milk and seeing an image of Harvey Milk carrying a sign that read “I’m From Woodmere, NY.” Realizing the power of the LGBT community in small towns and big citis alike, he and his team joined the riders of the AIDS/LifeCycle and traveled the country on a 50-state story-collection tour.
Racism sucks. Bottom line. It also doesn’t help when you come from an interracial family. Then you deal with issues like you don’t look like one race or you look like the other. People ask you ‘are you adopted?’ if they see you with a parent that doesn’t look like you due to skin tone color. “Even if I was or wasn’t, she’s still my mom. You don’t need blood to? be family. Piss off.” And then you add LGBT issues, and it gets complicated….
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I love this. I belong to a group on FB where everyone there is black, queer identified in some way, and atheist. This raises a lot of key issues. One discussion we had there is about the sexual racism among gay men. Lucky for me, its a bit different with lesbians- we tend to be more concerned with the gender/dyke label spectrum. Lots of interesting things have come up.Kudos to the folks highlighting these issues.
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This is great I really appreciate stories like this. Being a black gay american living in Mississippi I often wonder if the climate of change will ever take place here in the good old boy south there are so many LGBT persons here but I think we are still afraid of the backlash from certain groups like the churches and our gov’t leaders..who won’t support us. If we can make one small change like no discrimination on the job because of being LGBT then maybe just maybe we can change things in Mississippi I can dream
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Thanks for highlighting this. Really cool. When I have seen the series in the past, I didn’t know if it was for everyone or not. I welcome images from Latino and Asian and low income communities too. That would also be really interesting hear people discussing their experiences.