Brother to Brother
2004
Brother to Brother focuses on Perry (Anthony Mackie), a young gay artist who has been thrown out of his family home after his parents find out he’s gay, and his friendship with Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson), a down-on-his-luck poet and artist who was in his youth an intimate of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and other famous figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
In an tale told in black-and-white flashbacks, viewers see the artistic, political and sexual struggles of the circle around Hughes interwoven with Perry’s experiences as a gay man in the black community, as a black man in the gay world, as a student and as an artist.
A controversial element of the film’s sex scenes is that, with one unclear exception, every single sex act is between a black and a white man. Perry and his friends do discuss the racial issues in his short affair with a white fellow student, but it’s still a surprisingly unexplored territory in the film.
The dearth of images of black gay men having sex in the movies can’t be overstated, and for that reason this one pretty much goes off the significance meter.
Hotness: 5
Romance: 5
Significance: 10
No comments:
Post a Comment