It follows Barry Walker (Lennie James), a Caribbean-born man residing in Hackney with his wife of 50 years, Carmel, and the downfall of their marriage due to the revelation of Barry’s decades-long affair with his male best friend, Morris.
As I watched a scene in which both Barry and Morris imagined a world where they could’ve been together, I felt intoxicated because it mirrored my own past experiences. But I was also angry because I realised what it actually represented: false promises.
This promise of forever – to love in the open without shame, guilt, or fear – is often broken and weaponised as an instrument of pain for Black queer masculine-presenting bodies.
We’re no stranger to dealing with beings who are unable or unwilling to either fully accept their sexuality, which can possibly lead to relationships rooted in secrecy or discretion.
But beyond this gut reaction, Mr Loverman showcases something important: the intersection of race, sexuality, and hidden histories. It does this by showcasing how heritage and cultural upbringings can anchor Black bodies in ways that other races and ethnic groups may not experience.
February is LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK – but LGBTQ+ history is also Black history. And too often, that fact is overlooked.
While living in both New Orleans and New York City, different regional factors influenced my Black queer upbringing tremendously. Black LGBTQ+ rappers like Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia, as well as the Vogue Ballroom scene – which I encountered through outreach work – were foundational.
I felt affirmed in both my Blackness and queerness. However, my understanding of this intersection got much more critical after reading the work of Kevin J Mumford’s ‘Not Straight, Not White’ and E Patrick Johnson’s ‘Black Queer Studies anthology’.
They introduced me to the existence of the word ‘Quare’, which was made as an intervention to ‘Queer’ to capture the experience of non-white queer folks. (I’ll be using this term throughout the rest of the piece).
But when I moved to the UK in my late 20s for academia – first to Southampton in 2017 and then to London in 2018 – I saw that Black Quare spaces were few and far between.
Safety, for me, is something that I felt marginalised people had to create for themselves. So when I discovered both the Queer Picnic (which used to happen the same day as the London Pride Parade) and Black Pride UK, it was some of the few times I truly felt I could trust others and share that responsibility.
Ever since, the latter in particular has been a beacon of resistance and light for me and have volunteered for them year after year.
It was events like these that made me want to learn more about this intersectionality internationally.
American films like Moonlight (2016), Kiki (2016) and historical Black Quare American figures, like James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin – who would one day take up a large portion of my academic endeavours – all showed me my lived experiences throughout history.
But where were the Black British Quare figures?
Mr Loverman offers snapshots of this reality for those who know nothing of it. The show can also act as a launching point for questions around who came before and who is here today.
However, this glaring gap of knowledge is systemic.
Student-run organisation, Impact of Omission, found that only 7.9% of students learned about the colonisation of Africa and only 9.9% learned about Britain’s role in the slave trade. The majority of their historical education (86%) revolved around the Tudors.
On top of that, the Historical Association’s annual report on secondary schools in 2021 found that 23% of schools dedicated a series of lessons to Black or Asian British history, while 57% allocated just one or two lessons to these topics.
It’s not surprising then that Black Quare British experiences are so often overlooked because Black British history in general has been overlooked.
Some of my earlier work with Black History Month South – an organisation based in Southampton where I conducted my doctoral research – sparked internal ventures on where Black Quare folks’ stories were buried in the past. Artists like Sir Isaac Julien and Ajamu X were my creative introduction into the Black Quare British experience.
However, it wasn’t until much later that my readings about Ivor Cummings were a great spark for me. Dubbed the ‘gay father of the Windrush generation’, he was a British civil servant and advocate for Black migrants coming to the UK.
In the 30s, he worked as a warden of London’s Aggrey House (a hostel for African students and people of African descent) and he later became the first Black official in the British Colonial Office, where he continued to advocate for Black Britons.
Then there’s Theodore ‘Ted’ Brown, who is a British gay rights activist who is still alive today. He helped organise the UK’s first Gay Pride march in 1972 – which defied the law by featuring a mass ‘kiss in’ – and was a co-founder of Black Lesbians and Gays Against Media Homophobia.
Learning about his work in both organising and calling out homophobia in politics and media – even at the cost of his own safety – made me feel ashamed because I had no idea about it.
It meant a lot to me to read up on these Quare Black pioneers – but where is this history for UK folks today and how is it accessed?
In some cases, it’s easy and ongoing to reach. The digital archive called, Black & Gay, Back in the Day, is dedicated to honouring and remembering Black queer life in Britain, created by Jason Okundaye and Marc Thompson.
Okundaye’s book, Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain also highlights this history for a modern audience; while Busy Being Black with Josh Rivers is a podcast ‘exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives’.
There’s physical history out there, too.
The Glasgow Women’s Library, for instance, houses original material from the Camden Lesbian Centre and Black Lesbian Group. The National Archives in Richmond holds some of Cummings’ notes and official material, and the London Metropolitan Archives holds the Rukus!, a collection which tells Black LGBTQ+ history through newspaper clippings, prints, and photographs.
It’s so important that people understand that LGBTQ+ history is also Black history. History is complex, but never we should never let it be distorted to write Black and Brown folks out of it.
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