Gay feelings while looking for Langston.

It is uncommon to experience a film where there’s a perfect confluence between a directors vision and what is presented on screen; Looking for Langston 1989 has always struck me as one of those scattered gems in gay cinema history.

Here the filmmaker is so unafraid and bold with the subject matter.

Isaac Julien does not leave the film to code itself into obscurity like so many of his peers did and still do, but pitches a perfect peak of black gay pride.

‘Sometimes on the edge of sleep, these faces and others are projected against the walls of memory…we were linked by our homosexual desires’’

One of the films glaring quotes; Isaac Julien in a stroke of wit intentionally leaves out all detail of Langston’s life so that we feel more than see Langston.

He does so through poems and prose from Langston’s inner circle of friends: punctuating James Baldwin with Essex Hemphill, painting Bruce Nugent’s long pauses with Hilton Als in black and white jazz strokes.

He takes us so close you start to feel like a compatriot of Langston in renaissance Harlem.

I identified a lot with this style as a gay black man who sought out gay black friends more than I did lovers to reflect me as I reflect them.

There is always a security in friendships and as a gay man, there is a shared struggle but as a black gay man, there is a double shared struggle.

This shared struggle contorts and takes new form as a rhythm- a beat of inside jokes, a secret language where hurtful slurs are repurposed as bandages of hurt

But, Isaac Julien does not dwell on hurt; instead he shoots his film in 16mm lens of fantasy.

It ebbs and flows in cheerful, gay blends of recollections and desire; and to justify this, he quotes Henry Scott Holland’s ‘’Death is nothing at all”.

On three separate occasions, the camera transitions from stock-still characters at a wake to a paused speakeasy party scene; whether with fog rising in the background, he is trying to tell us

‘’put no difference in tone when you speak of his name, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow, let (his) name be spoken without effect, without ghost of shadow on it.’’