AE: Brother to Brother has a very complex story line, how did it develop?
RE: It happened so long ago, it’s hard for me to remember. There are so many strands to it, just like the story itself. I had gone to OutFest in LA with a diary film I made called Close to Home. After the film’s showing, a guy in the audience asked if I ever thought about writing down my personal experiences — perhaps even staging it with actors, placing it within a more narrative, dramatic context.

The idea intrigued me, so I started writing about the stuff I had gone through.

But then I started thinking about how my life would have been different in another era, and that led me to the Harlem Renaissance, and specifically to the discovery of Bruce Nugent, who was openly gay during that time period. And so I started researching his life.

During the course of following this research, I met one of Nugent’s best friends. He shared a lot of Nugent’s unpublished work with me. He also had done about 25 hours of audio interviews with him.

So, I think it was this process of having started writing about my own life experiences, researching Bruce’s life and having many of the interviews he had done and a lot of the literary material he had written, and falling in love with him through the research.

I really wanted the narrative and the structure of the film to encompass the feeling that I had for Nugent and this love between the two generations.

AE: There’s a very tender relationship that builds between Nugent and Perry, the gay teenager.
RE: That was inspired by the fact that Bruce tended to hang out with a lot of younger people. He had a lot of friends who were teenagers and in their 20s. He had this way of talking with people at a very down-to-earth level where there was no generational gap. They felt very comfortable around him, and felt like they could express things to him that they couldn’t express to other people.

On some level, Brother to Brother stays true to the kind of person Nugent was and the types of relationships that he had.

AE: Being part of the ‘Niggerati Manor,’ Nugent considered himself an artistic rebel, didn’t he?
RE: Yes. The Niggerati was the younger, more rebellious generation within the Harlem renaissance. They were really taking a stance against a lot of the ideas that the elders of the Renaissance had, mainly that black art needed to uplift the race, and that art should be used in making social propaganda. They said black art should always put the best foot forward and show a positive spin about black life.

There was also this whole idea that the talented tenth, the most educated and enlightened 10 percent, should be the people chosen to speak for the entire race, and that would provide even more reasons for race equality.

The Niggerati took a stance against that. They said, ‘we’re interested in equality, but we’re also interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of the experiences that we see around us. They aren’t always positive or pretty, but we feel we have the right to deal with them in our work.’

So for the first time, there were black writers like Bruce Nugent dealing with homosexuality, or Wallace Thurman dealing about prostitution in a story called ‘Cordelia the Crude’ or Langston Hughes dealing with class issues.

They were the black artists that threw the gauntlet down and fought for the things that they wanted to say.

Page 1 / 2 / 3 - Next