Shoga Films

Shoga Films is the production company of Robert Philipson. Vimeo Link: http://vimeo.com/user6835725

Shoga is a Swahili word with a special meaning for g**s and women along the East African Coast. Shoga Films specializes in gay and le***an audio visual media.

10/08/2025

The October newsletter drops

And it’s all about Bessie Smith. Why? Because in one week’s time we launch our crowdfunding campaign entitled “Bessie Shows Her Ass.” Dr. Philipson covers the incident upon which the script is based in the opening essay. As he confesses in the First Person section, what he loves about the Harlem Renaissance is the gossip! – and he retails plenty of it,

Maintaining the focus on Bessie, the song of the month is taken from her last recording session, arranged by John Hammond. Perhaps you haven’t heard of it, but it will bring a smile to your face when you have h – and perhaps some drippings off your chin.

Le***an musical icon Linda Tillery talks about how she discovered and was influenced by Bessie in the introduction to this month’s Shoga Treat. You’ll also meet the director of our planned “Bessie” short, Cas Sigers-Beedles.

And lest we forget, October is LGBTQ History Month. We definitely got that covered. There’s LOTS of information in this month’s newsletter, but if you come away with nothing else, remember that OUR CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN BEGINS IN ONE WEEK’S TIME!

Hope you’re on the mailing list!
***rIcons ,

10/06/2025

Tomorrow, October 7, marks two years since the war between Israel and Hamas began. What started in violence has unfolded into one of the most devastating humanitarian crises of our time.
More than 60,000 Palestinians — most of them civilians, including thousands of children — have been killed. Independent estimates place the toll even higher, with tens of thousands more dead from starvation, disease, and the collapse of health and infrastructure. Entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. Families continue to endure hunger, displacement, and grief.

We cannot turn away from this reality. We mourn the lives lost on all sides, and we call attention to the immense suffering of Palestinians who remain trapped in conditions of siege and despair.

Art and storytelling hold the power to resist erasure, to remember the human cost, and to demand justice. On this anniversary, we stand with those who believe in accountability, ceasefire, and the protection of civilians.
October 7 must not be forgotten.

10/03/2025

October is LGBTQ History Month — a time to honor the trailblazers who dared to live boldly and reshaped art, culture, and freedom itself.

From Langston Hughes’s verse, to Gladys Bentley’s unapologetic blues, to Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues who lived and loved on her own terms — the Q***r Harlem Renaissance reminds us that our history is not hidden, it’s radiant.

This month, we’re lifting that legacy higher with our new short film, Bessie Shows Her Ass — the final chapter in our Q***r Harlem Renaissance trilogy. On October 15th, we’ll kick off our fundraising campaign to bring this vision to life.

Join us as we celebrate our past and invest in our future. Together, we’re keeping q***r history alive on screen, in story, and in community.

***rHarlemRenaissance

10/01/2025

Day of Atonement in a time of unjust war

Sunset of October 1 this year marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.. Leading up to and on that day, Jews traditionally ask for forgiveness for our wrongdoings from God and from those fellow humans whom we have wronged The shofar [ram’s horn]is blown at the conclusion of the final prayer service marks the end of the fast with a single, long blast.

The two-year destruction of Gaza has given the Jewish collectivity a lot to atone for, though not everyone sees it that way. One who does see it that way is Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, Director at UCLA Hillel, where he served for fifty years. The title of his opinion piece published in Monday’s Ha-aretz reads “This Yom Kippur, the Shofar Must Cry Out: Gaza Is Not a Just War!”

[T]his year we must blow the shofar with a new intentionality: To shatter the walls of disavowal that we have constructed around us, to wake up from our complacency and indifference. We must rouse ourselves from our complicity in a nightmarish narrative to which we have become prisoner. The shofar blasts are our cry, "this is not a just war!"

09/29/2025

“The Knowing” screens at Micheaux Film Festival in October

Our latest short, “The Knowing” is nearing the end of its festival run. It’s done well – ten acceptances in a field crowded with contenders – and we are particularly pleased that the up-and-coming Los Angeles based Micheaux Film Festival has selected it for its 2025 line-up.

Director Jonathan Rowan, also based in Los Angeles, will be attending. The festival runs from October 23-26. We don’t yet have a date and time – stay tuned – but September 27 was National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Given “The Knowing”’s theme, a story of AIDS before retrovirals, it seemed like an appropriate time to make the announcement.

The epidemic is not in the past and is far from over. Negative attitudes about homosexuality continue to discourage gay and bisexual men from getting tested and finding health care to prevent and treat HIV.

For another take on how HIV/AIDS entered to gay community in America during the 80s, listen to our podcast, “HIV Negative” on your favorite platform. Also linked in our linktree.
***rCinema

09/26/2025

Eric Walrond’s life and work complicate the narrative of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in British Guiana, educated in Barbados and Panama, he arrived in New York in 1918 and engaged deeply in the literary world of the 1920s. His masterwork, Tropic Death (1926), is a collection of ten vivid, haunting stories rooted in Caribbean landscapes and diasporic experience.

Though he became part of Harlem’s literary circles—contributing to Opportunity, Negro World, and other periodicals—Walrond never abandoned his Caribbean lens. His writing pushed the boundaries of the Renaissance, insisting on a broader, diasporic imagination.

Let’s remember: the Harlem Renaissance was never just American. It was—and remains—transnational.

09/24/2025

Shoga Speaks: “Mr. & Mrs. Pumpkin”

My mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, had grown up in the first decades of the 20th century chafing against the bourgeois restrictions of Cleveland Jewish society. She went to the University of Chicago where Thorton Wilder frightened her out of serious literary effort and learned photography. She also got involved with the Communists there as a result of a trip she had made to the Soviet Union. The combination of visual arts and left-wing politics fused into a determination to become a documentary filmmaker.

This ambition took her to New York where she worked for Paul Strand and Mexico, where she took photographs exhibited under the title, "Portraits By Marion Michelle and Man Ray." In Hollywood she met the man who was to determine the next five years of her life, Joris Ivens, the famous left-wing Dutch documentary filmmaker.

"Mr. and Mrs. Pumpkin" details the adulterous passion that swept her into Ivens' exciting, nomadic, resolutely Communist world during and after World War II -- Hollywood, Australia, the new Soviet republics behind the Iron Curtain, and finally Paris.

—Robert Phillipson

09/22/2025

🌈 Did you know? According to Gallup, 57% of LGBTQ+ adults in the U.S. identify as bisexual, making them the largest group in our community.

Yet bisexual people are often told:
❌ “You’re confused.”
❌ “Pick a side.”

This double erasure fuels stigma, isolation, and silence.
On Bi Visibility Day, we say loudly:
💜💗💙 Bisexuality is real.
💜💗💙 Bisexuality is valid.
💜💗💙 Bisexuality is powerful.

✨ Share this to show your support and help make bisexual lives visible every day.

09/19/2025

Claude McKay’s Bisexual Envoi

“Envoi” is the closing verse of a poetic farewell. As Dr. Philipson explains in his discussion of the sonnet “Rest In Peace” published in 1922 in “Harlem Shadow,” this poem memorializes the hard and bitter life of a deceased Harlem resident whose gender, while not specified, is undoubtedly male, which makes the final line, “Farewell, oh, fare you well! my friend and lover.,” striking and surprising.

Even more surprising is the fact that nobody at the time commented on this. This is an early example of the many times McKay alludes to or specifically calls out q***r culture and relationships in his poetry and prose. McKay was married early on and had a daughter (whom he never met) and conducted affairs with both men and women, so his bisexuality is not in question.

To find out more about how McKay’s q***r sensibility manifested in his writings, follow the link in our linktree to our blog, “Claude McKay’s Bisexual Peek-a-boo.”
***rLiterature ***rCulture ***rWriters

09/17/2025

Claude McKay’s poetry gave the Harlem Renaissance its rebellious heart. As a bisexual Black writer, his words carved space for stories that dared to be both radical and deeply human. His art continues to inspire q***r liberation today.
***rHistory ***rArt

09/15/2025

Countee Cullen, Bisexual

In anticipation of Bisexual Awareness Week, which starts tomorrow, we point out that one of the most well-known poets (and closeted homosexual) of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen, was, in all likelihood, bisexual himself. Cullen’s first marriage in 1928 to Yolanda du Bois, daughter of the formidable W.E.B., was a spectacular train wreck. The marriage fell apart within the first year without it ever having been consummated.

Cullen’s homosexual proclivities were an open secret at the time, and his various affairs with (white) men have been documented over time. So it must have been a surprise when Cullen tied the knot a second time to the secretary of his adoptive father, Ida Mae Roberson. (She divorced her first husband in August of 1940 and married Countee one month later, so there’s undoubtedly some historical tea waiting to be spilled.)

While we’ll never know what did or didn’t happen in the bedroom, Cullen’s second marriage was a successful companionate one and lasted until Cullen’s untimely death six years later. With today’s editors and biographers not so squeamish, Cullen’s sexuality is widely assumed to be gay, but it’s more probable that he was bisexual.

Read our blog, “Gay Poet Laureate of the New Negro,” to get an entertaining and informative overview of this important Renaissance writer. You can find the blog via our linktree.
***rWriters

09/12/2025

Today we celebrate Alain Locke, the Father of the Harlem Renaissance.
As the first Black Rhodes Scholar, Harvard-trained philosopher, and Howard professor, Locke reshaped culture by championing a new generation of Black voices.

Editor of The New Negro anthology, he uplifted talents like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, artists who would define an era.
Locke was also openly q***r in private circles, reminding us that LGBTQ+ voices have always been central to Black cultural movements. His legacy continues to inspire how we talk about identity, justice, and creativity today.

Let’s honor his vision by amplifying the brilliance of Black artists, past and present.

Learn more at ShogaFilms.org
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***rHistory , we celebrate Alain Locke, the Father of the Harlem Renaissance.

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