LGBT

xchrom

(108,903 posts) Sun Jan 15, 2012, 08:12 AM Jan 2012

A sister outsider in “Pariah”

http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2012/01/15/a-sister-outsider-in-pariah/

Seldom do I see my image anywhere, especially portrayed in non-stereotypical and non-heterosexist ways on the silver screen. As a matter of fact, if you Google “black lesbians” or “black lesbians in film” you’ll get a plethora of porn sites to visit.

But writer-director Dee Rees’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama “Pariah” gives me a glimpse of my younger self-growing up in Brooklyn.

“Pariah” is about Alike (ah-LEE-kay), a virginal 17-year-old African American lesbian high school student living in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn who doesn’t know how to come out to her parents, who’s eager to have her first sexual experience, and who’s not sure of the type of butch lesbian she wants to be — “soft stud,” one of the “Aggressive Lesbians,” a subculture of young butch lesbians who adopt a gangster hip-hop persona to complete for femme women, or something totally different.

“Alike knows that she loves women; that’s not the question. The question is ’how to be,’” Rees told the Boston Globe. “And so, in my own struggle, a large part of my question was how to be in the world.”

One of the ways of defining how to be in the world, especially for high schoolers, is through clothes. But with a mother — Audrey (Kim Wayans) — who demonstrates zero tolerance for her daughter’s non-gender-conforming ways, especially exhibited by Alike’s taste for non-frilly femme attire, we see Alike forced to be a gender chameleon — changing into her butch togs going to school and out of them going home.