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 youll get a plethora of porn sites to visit.
But writer-director Dee Reess 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 doesnt know how to come out to her parents, whos eager to have her first sexual experience, and whos 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; thats 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 daughters non-gender-conforming ways, especially exhibited by Alikes 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.