In the 1972 horror flick Blacula, a gay interior designer named Bobby McCoy only gets about seven minutes of screen time before he and his partner Billy become a meal for the titular vampire.
It might seem like a bit part in hindsight, but Bobby is one of the earliest Black queer characters seen onscreen. Actor Ted Harris isn’t given much to work with in the script — at one point he refers to Dracula as the “crème de la crème of camp” — but charming nuances in his performance still shine through, and when Bobby ultimately gets bitten, it’s hard not to feel the same concern for him expressed by many other characters in the movie.
Watching Blacula today, it’s hard not to imagine an alternate past: Maybe if characters like Bobby had been given their proper due and written with their own autonomous narratives from the start, we’d have even stronger examples of Black LGBTQ+ characters across the big and small screens today.
As it stands, Black queer characters have been scant throughout much of film and TV history, and when they do show up, their identities are often outright ignored or obscured by coded direction. Of course, there have been highlights in films like Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, and Sean Baker’s Tangerine, which starred Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor in lead roles. There are standout characters on TV, too, like Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette Reynolds in True Blood, Brian Michael Smith as Antoine “Toine” Wilkins in Queen Sugar, and Wanda Sykes as Shuli Kucerac in The Other Two.
But it’s telling that, to this day, the mid-2000s dramedy Noah’s Arc is the only scripted series to have ever focused exclusively on Black gay men. Indeed, even with the extended runtime that television allows, Black queer characters rarely get the space to experience a range of adventures and push beyond one-dimensional categorization, apart from notable exceptions on shows like Greek, Black Lightning, and Pose. Even today, many Black LGBTQ+ characters are cast as caricatures or relegated to the outskirts of a narrative.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the need for more fully representative Black queer characters becomes increasingly apparent with each new release. Too many Black LGBTQ+ people are growing up not seeing space for ourselves onscreen. Characters like Laverne Cox’s defense attorney Cameron Wirth on the short-lived CBS series Doubt and Phastos in Marvel’s forthcoming Eternals hint at a promising new chapter for Black queer characters — ones who are influential not just within their own communities, but in the world at large. But that future isn’t coming fast enough.
Marlon Riggs once said that “Silence kills the soul; it diminishes its possibilities to rise and fly and explore,” and the converse is true, too: By breaking the silence and putting Black queer characters onscreen, more wholly and loudly, Black LGBTQ+ viewers can continue to grow and experience fuller personhood in real life. We need to see ourselves not just coming out, but in more prodigious capers as well, trailblazing through space, falling in love throughout all eras of history, and saving the day/world/multiverse. Stronger narratives will bring about stronger futures.
To broaden our perspective, them. asked seven film and TV stars to tell us which single Black LGBTQ+ character made the biggest impact on them — and about where they’d like to see the industry evolve from here.
