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.

06/08/2026

Everyone in Harlem knew them as the Two Ethels.

Singer Ethel Waters and dancer Ethel Williams lived together as lovers in the early 1920s. Their friends had a name for them; their whole world knew the truth. Then Waters's career exploded — Black Swan, the Cotton Club, Broadway, Hollywood, one of the highest-paid entertainers in America — and she spent the rest of her life keeping that chapter out of her own story.

It survived anyway. One of the only known photographs of Ethel Williams still exists. So does the record of the two of them.

Remembered now on their own terms.

06/05/2026

You know the song. You've never known the name.

Porter Grainger was Bessie Smith's piano from 1924 to 1928 — more than a dozen sides for Columbia, the Mississippi Days r***e, and the room at Carl Van Vechten's apartment in 1928 where the Empress made her famous scene. He led his own Get Happy Band with Sidney Bechet. He literally wrote the manual on singing the blues.

In 1924 he cut "In Harlem's Araby" with Fats Waller and slipped in a verse that never made the printed sheet music: you can't tell "B" from "G" — boys from girls — a wink at a Harlem where the drag balls and pansy clubs blurred every line. He put q***r Harlem on a record and sang it himself.

One honest note: we don't have proof of how Grainger loved or lived, and he's often pulled into q***r-history posts that overstate the record. What's documented is the work — the gay verse he chose to sing, the scene he moved through, and the song that outlived him.

Because the other thing he co-wrote, back in 1922, you already know by heart: "'T'ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do." The first blues song to say that how you live is yours alone. Bessie sang it. So did Billie, Nina, and a hundred years of voices after.

The song is everywhere. His name is a footnote in other people's stories. We make the footnotes the headline.

06/03/2026

In 1928, Paramount sold "Prove It On Me Blues" with a drawing of Ma Rainey in a man's suit, courting two women while a policeman watched from the corner. The ad copy asked: "What's all this? Scandal?"

That's one story in this month's Shoga newsletter. The rest: how Thomas Dorsey wrote a million-selling dirty-blues hit overnight, then left it all for the church. What Washington felt like for a gay man in the Reagan years, when the White House said nothing. The historian who spent his life putting q***r artists back on the record. And why Pride started as a riot, not a parade.

Five stories. One issue. Subscribe free — link in bio.

06/01/2026

The first Pride was not a parade. It was six nights of people refusing to be arrested quietly.

June 28, 1969. The police walked into the Stonewall Inn expecting another easy night. The bar fought back, and kept fighting. The people on the front line weren't the faces history likes to frame — they were drag queens, trans women, and kids with nowhere else to sleep.

A year later they came back to the street, fists still up, asking for nothing but their rights.

Pride was a riot. Remember who built it.

05/29/2026

A granite cave in Zimbabwe holds a painting of men together — made by hunter-gatherer artists thousands of years before any European arrived.

The archaeologist who recorded it, Peter Garlake, was brave enough to prove Great Zimbabwe was built by Africans, against a government that insisted otherwise. But faced with this image, the best his era could offer was the word "egregious."

Scholars now read figures like these through San beliefs about trance and bodily potency — belief made visible, not a documentary photograph. Whatever else it is, it's a record of male intimacy older than the languages now used to judge it.

The painting didn't change. The eye looking at it did.

Source: Peter Garlake, The Hunter's Vision: The Prehistoric Art of Zimbabwe (1995).

05/27/2026

Once a year in Makunduchi, at the southern end of Zanzibar, the men beat each other with banana fronds while the whole village watches.

Then the elders build a small hut from sticks and palm. A dignitary steps forward and sets it alight. People throw stones at the flames until there is nothing left.

In 1988, the man behind this footage wrote in his notebook that he had no idea what any of it meant. No one he asked would explain.

The answer came years later, from a Swahili teacher far from the island. The festival is Mwaka Kogwa — the Shirazi new year. For one day the ordinary rules come apart. Old scores get settled in the open. Men dress as women. Everything you would rather forget from the year behind you goes into the hut, and the hut burns. You begin again with nothing weighing on you. A clean slate.

There is a saying for the day: Waliyo hai hawaachi kuonana. The living do not stop seeing one another.

Zanzibar 88, Part Two — listen wherever you get your podcasts. Link in our Linktree.

Mwaka Kogwa · Makunduchi · Zanzibar · 1988

05/25/2026

On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, ten thousand recently freed Black people held a parade to honor 257 Union soldiers buried in a mass grave at the Washington Race Course — a Confederate prison camp. The freed population unearthed the bodies, gave them proper burials, and laid flowers. The Charleston Daily Courier and the New-York Tribune both reported on it. Historian David Blight calls it the first Memorial Day.

Three years later, General John Logan made it official. By 1971, when Congress turned Memorial Day into a federal holiday, nobody mentioned Charleston. The official birthplace became Waterloo, New York. Cleaner origin story.

Black soldiers fought in every American war. They came home to segregated VA hospitals, GI Bills that didn't apply to them, and lynch mobs. In 1917, thirteen Black soldiers were hanged after the Houston Riot in trials that lasted days, executed before their families could appeal. In 1932, the Bonus Army March included thousands of Black veterans demanding pay Congress had promised. MacArthur drove them out with tanks.

The gap between the speeches and the reality holds the actual story. Memorial Day could name the soldiers executed by their own Army. Acknowledge that service and citizenship meant different things depending on who wore the uniform.

Instead we get mattress sales and three-day weekends. The graves get decorated. Someone mentions valor. And the history stays buried deeper than the soldiers.

The City of Charleston installed a marker at Hampton Park in 2017, 152 years after the parade. Today, name it.

Sources: David Blight, Race and Reunion (2001); NY Tribune and Charleston Daily Courier, May 1865; Library of Congress; National Archives.

05/22/2026

Today is Harvey Milk Day. May 22 was Milk's birthday — the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, assassinated in office at 48, the man who gave us "Hope will never be silent." He is rightly remembered. The holiday is rightly his.
But the story the holiday tells is incomplete.

Sixteen years before Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a Colombian-Spanish American WWII veteran and drag performer named José Julio Sarria ran for the same seat. The year was 1961. He was the first openly gay candidate for public office in American history. He came ninth out of thirty-four candidates. He won more than 5,600 votes, and in doing so he proved to San Francisco's political establishment that a gay voting bloc existed in the city.

Sarria worked nights at the Black Cat Café in North Beach. He performed in drag, led raids in song, and closed each evening with his own anthem — "God Save Us Nelly Queens," sung to the tune of "God Save the Queen." When the police raided the bar, Sarria sang anyway. He campaigned for office in heels.

After his run, Sarria founded the Imperial Court System in 1965. Sixty-one years later, it remains one of the oldest and largest LGBTQ+ organizations in the world, with chapters in more than sixty-eight cities across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

On October 28, 1978 — one month before he was killed — Harvey Milk stood on stage with José Sarria at the Empress Coronation of the Imperial Court of San Francisco. They held hands. They were raising money to buy uniforms for the first-ever Gay and Le***an Freedom Marching Band. The photograph above is from that night.

Honor Milk today. Honor Sarria too. The first openly gay candidate in American history was a Latino drag queen who ran in heels and lost gloriously. Say his name.

Sources: Britannica, José Sarria; National Park Service, José Sarria; Joe Castel, Nelly Queen: The Life and Times of José Sarria (2018); Harvey Milk Foundation statement, August 2013; Harvey Milk Photo Center archives.

05/20/2026

Queen Nzinga Mbande (c. 1583–1663) ruled the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba — present-day Angola — for forty years. She fought the Portuguese empire to a standstill. She also did something the Portuguese could not categorize.

In the 1640s, Nzinga declared herself king, not queen. She took the title ngola. She wore men's clothes. She kept male concubines whom she required to dress in women's clothing and to address her as king. She ruled with an all-female bodyguard.

This was not invented for her. Pre-colonial Mbundu society had a third-gender role — the chibados — men who lived as women, held ritual authority, and served at the royal court. Previous female rulers of neighboring Kongo had also declared themselves men. Nzinga inherited and intensified an existing tradition.

The record we have on her comes mostly from a hostile witness — the Italian Capuchin priest Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, who spent years at her court and published his account in Bologna in 1687. He meant the book as evidence against her. It is now evidence of her instead.

Nzinga is also complicated. She funded her wars against the Portuguese by participating in the trans-Atlantic slave trade — raiding neighboring peoples and selling captives. The same record that names her q***rness names her complicity. We do not get to honor one and ignore the other.

She held off a European empire for forty years. She ruled as ngola. The first sources we have on African gender and African same-sex practice were written by the people trying to destroy them. The evidence survives anyway. Say her name.

Sources: Linda Heywood, Njinga of Angola (2017); Giovanni Cavazzi, Istorica descrizione (1687); Britannica, Nzinga.

05/18/2026

Around 2400 BCE, two men were buried together in a royal tomb at Saqqara. Their names were Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. They were royal manicurists — among the few people in ancient Egypt permitted to touch the pharaoh's body. The reliefs in their tomb depict them embracing nose-to-nose, holding hands, standing side by side at equal scale.

The iconography is the iconography ancient Egyptian art reserved for husband and wife.
Some Egyptologists have argued for decades that the men must have been brothers, possibly twins. Both men had wives and children, who appear in the tomb as small background figures. The two men themselves appear at the center, at equal scale, in poses of intimate parity.

The q***r-scholarly reading — Reeder, Dowson, and others — is straightforward. The artists who carved these reliefs followed strict iconographic rules. The intimacy depicted between Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep is the intimacy of marriage. The wives are not part of that intimacy in the imagery. The men chose to be buried together. They chose to be remembered touching.

They were African. Egypt is in Africa. The first same-sex couple in the historical record is older than the pyramids of Giza are old now.

Sources: Reeder, World Archaeology (2000); Dowson (2006, 2008); Moussa & Altenmüller (1977 — original tomb publication); Wikipedia, Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum.
African Homosexualities, Vol. III.

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