NAACP Image Awards and Noah's Arc

The NAACP Image Awards were handed out recently. I'm of two minds when it comes to the fact that Noah's Arc was not nominated. On the one hand, the canceled show was groundbreaking because the central characters were gay black men. Some recognition from an award show that recognizes black achievement would have been nice. On the other hand, the show wasn't very good so I can understand why it may not have received a nomination. A better made show could have been an excellent jumping off point for a conversation about sexuality in the black community as seen in pop culture. It would have been interesting to see the NAACP confront the issue head on. This is certainly true after the recent incidents with Isaiah Washington and Tim Hardaway. For his part on Grey's Anatomy, Mr. Washington won an Image Award this year for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series. These issues are broader than race. Sexuality is hard to express in America in general. Men are a taught a limited range upon which to express how they feel and desire. As Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes points out, there are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed in the black community about masculinity, treatment of women and treatment of gays. I'm hoping that these issues are not going to be brushed under the rug. The reality is that black male sexuality of any kind is not something pop culture has been comfortable showing. I don't mean the pornographic fantasy kind of sexuality we see on display in gangsta music. I mean the kind where things are complicated. Images of black men desiring real sex or being vulnerable enough to need love are rare stories in pop culture. It's on this level that I can understand why people embrace Mr. Washington's performance. He's playing a complicated black man with a sexuality. The idea of showing complicated black men with a sexuality is what made Noah's Arc such as interesting idea. Too bad, the show didn't live up to the groundbreaking nature of the idea behind it. After viewing a few episodes, I asked myself would I watch this show if it weren't about gay black men. The honest answer I came to is no. My only hopes going forward are that this isn't the last show that we see about gay men of color and the NAACP's reasoning behind not nominating the show is the same as mine. However, if I'm wrong, and it's not the quality of the show, and the reasoning is something concerning the sexuality of the characters, then I hope that the NAACP Image Awards in the future will remember Ossie Davis's acting and what Coretta Scott King had to say about gay marriage. I hope the NAACP remembers Bayard Rustin in case anyone has forgotten the role of gays in the civil rights movement. These are the people that I've chosen as examples of how to live my life. I would like to believe that when I achieve my ambition of directing my first feature that I can count on organizations like the NAACP to remember that we don't have people to spare.