In Conversation with Michaela Eubanks on Black Queer Cinema
Think of filmmakers who are well renowned, people who are considered to have made the best films of all time, producers of popular blockbusters and cult classics alike. Out of all the people who instantly come to mind, how many of them are Black? How many of them are queer? How many of them are both? Since the invention of the moving picture, the film industry has been dominated by cisgender white men.
In the early years of cinema, the film industry was extremely segregated. Black people were limited to playing performers and servants in film. Black filmmakers wanted to give their peers more options and wanted to create more accurate representations of their lives as well; thus, the “race film” genre was born. A pioneer of this genre and one of the first major Black filmmakers was Oscar Micheaux. He created 42 feature films in the span of 29 years from 1919 to 1948. As Micheaux said, Black cinema was all about seeing Black lives “dramatized on the screen as we are living it, the same as other people, the world over.”
Although we got to see inklings of white queerness early in film’s history, we didn’t see a depiction of Black queerness until the late ’60s with white experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason,” which featured an interview with Jason Holliday, a Black gay sex worker and cabaret dancer.The first popular film made by a Black queer woman didn’t come out until 1996, only 26 years ago, with Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman.”
Since then, we’ve had amazing, groundbreaking films such as 2011’s “Pariah,” a semiautobiographical film by director Dee Rees, and 2016’s beautiful “Moonlight” by Barry Jenkins. But unlike cisgender white cinema that has been allowed to flourish and prosper since the creation of the medium in 1888, Black queer creators are just getting started with sharing their stories on the big screen. Michaela Eubanks is one of those creators. The 24-year-old Atlanta native works in the film industry with post-production editing, preproduction writing, and on-set gaffing, lighting, and electricity. I had the pleasure of speaking with about the future of Black queer cinema and how people can get involved in the industry.
What is your opinion on the current state of queer cinema & Black queer cinema specifically?
I like the idea of where it’s going, but I don’t like the execution. There are very few shows, in my personal opinion, that have properly shown representation for queer,
Black and Brown communities without being distasteful or performative. I think we’re progressively getting better, but it almost adds insult to injury whenever we have those moments where we do have queer representation in media, but the actor/ writer/producer is not actually queer.
We’re multifaceted, we have stories and human experiences that are not inherently related to our Blackness or our queerness. We have regular ass experiences just like cishet people, and our experiences are equally valid and equally normal.
Some of the content that is geared specifically toward Black people makes me want to projectile vomit. It’s just so disheartening because there are so many cool ass Black writers, especially in Atlanta, that have so many good stories to tell, yet we keep on getting the same content that is centered around abuse, slavery, and being abused in slavery. It’s also annoying when we have Black writers like Jordan Peele who made this great movie [that was] comical but also served as a critique on so many of the stereotypical tropes, especially in horror, and then non-Black people try to replicate his work, but they make it worse and more traumatic, and we just get stuck in this cycle.
Do you have any advice for anyone who wants to get into filmmaking, specifically in Atlanta? What kind of opportunities are currently available for Black filmmakers? We all have to start from somewhere, not everybody has the luxury to work with expensive video editing software or even has the time to learn how to use them. With that in mind, my advice is to find people in your field (or outside of your field) who can support you, because that is the most important thing… It’s so nice to have someone in your corner that’s doing the same thing as you.
Also, befriend your professors, because the film industry is all about who you know. and be ready to share your work at any time. It could be on a Wix site or on YouTube or even an unfinished reel.
As far as specific places you can go to learn filmmaking or places to make films: Atlanta Film Society, Atlanta Film Festival and Georgia Film Academy are great options. If you go to the State of Georgia’s website, there is a specific tab that shows a schedule of different productions that are going on in Atlanta, what studio they’re filming at and what PA jobs are available. There’s this great place, Mixdeity, it’s this studio in Atlanta where you literally pay $15 a month and you get access to their studio whenever you want!
You can find Michaela Eubanks on Instagram @squadtographer and online at mceubanks.com.