Equal’s Best Episode Lets Queer Black People Take Center Stage In Their Own History
The show’s third episode, “Black Is Beautiful, Gay is Good!” is probably its strongest, if for nothing more than the fact that it lets queer Black people take some of the credit for their own liberation. Too often, queer Black people are written out of our own histories — from the books we’re fed in history class, you’d assume the Civil Rights Movement was only led by straight Black men and women, while the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement was spearheaded by a sea of white gay men. That’s why it’s nice to see a section dedicated to someone like Bayard Rustin, the unapologetically gay activist behind crucial Civil Rights events like the March on Washington, the Freedom Rides, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. While his name doesn’t immediately command the same response as Malcolm X or Rosa Parks, his work was just as important. (It was his time in India studying the pacifist philosophy of Gandhi that would eventually inspire Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “nonviolent” approach to protesting, after all.) It’s heartbreaking to hear how an unfair arrest on counts of sexual perversion (Rustin pleaded guilty to propositioning two men to engage in sodomy) forced Rustin out of a movement he helped establish, but Equal knows how important it is to acknowledge these intersections.
Equal Is a Great Showcase of Underused Queer Hollywood Talent
As the number of LGBTQ+ productions rise in Hollywood, the conversation about who should get the opportunity to play queer on camera gets tougher and tougher to navigate. To imply that straight actors should never play LGBTQ+ people seems unnecessarily restrictive. But as has been noted time and again, when queer people are rarely ever cast in straight roles, it’s almost necessary that they be given fair shots to get the roles for characters that look, sound, and act like them. Despite its flaws, Equal does a remarkable job of actually filling their vignettes with out queer actors — whether it’s former them. cover star Keiynan Lonsdale as Bayard Rustin, Sense8’s Jamie Clayton as Christine Jorgensen, or Orange Is the New Black’s Samira Wiley as the Tony-nominated A Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
More importantly, they each turn in bravura performances, even if the bite-sized clips naturally leave viewers wanting more. Since watching, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Theo Germaine’s performance as Jack Starr, a transmasculine Montana resident who chose being an outcast in his community over conforming to the expectations of a society that insists he wear clothes that match the gender he was assigned at birth. Ditto Cole Doman as journalist and Gay Liberation Front founder Mark Segal, Pose’s Hailie Sahar as Sylvia River, and former America’s Next Top Model contestant Isis King as a composite of all the trans women that banned together for the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966. The next time a big, hot-shot Hollywood producer needs to cast an actor in a queer role, I hope they flip through Equal for a few actual queer candidates before immediately jumping to the Rami Maleks and Taron Egertons of the world.
