Queer Cinema World Tour is our regular feature taking you to destinations behind your favourite LGBTQ2S+ film moments. For our first stop, we’ll visit Fort Greene, New York, the setting for 2011’s “Pariah.”
We’ve all been there—a young person struggling with who they are and what they’re going to do about it. The magic of director Dee Rees’s debut feature, a 2011 reworking of an earlier short film that draws on autobiographical elements of Rees’s own coming-out story, is that it’s so specific with its characters and milieu that the authenticity makes it completely universal. Brooklyn’s historic Fort Greene neighbourhood plays a significant part in that magic.
Early on in getting to know the protagonist Alike (Adepero Oduye), we join the high school student on a visit to a sexually-charged women’s bar. She’s brought by an out-and-proud lesbian friend who had dropped out of school at least partly because she came out. The bar’s butch-femme dynamic doesn’t sit well with Alike, but it triggers something. (The bar, unfortunately for visitors to Fort Greene, is pure movieland fiction.)
While many of the scenes in Pariah take place in settings amongst family, friends and peers in Alike’s life—the dinner table, the bedroom, the corridors and classrooms of her school—it’s on the tree-lined streets and in welcoming public spaces of Fort Greene, just south of DUMBO and downtown Brooklyn, that she has room to think and grow. The transformations she makes in her appearance usually take place when she’s en route from place to place in the neighbourhood.
Named after a fort built in 1776 for the American revolution, the neighbourhood started taking its material form of handsome low-rise townhouses and apartments in the 1800s; Fort Greene Park, which is its heart, was designed by Central Park designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Though it has been a predominantly Black neighbourhood going back to the 1800s, it was in the 1980s that it started attracting Black artists and professionals who stirred a neighbourhood renaissance that’s been compared to Harlem’s. Spike Lee’s from here, as are actors Jeffrey Wright (Westworld), and Uzo Aduba (Orange Is the New Black). Gentrification has unfortunately been having an effect on the Black community here; Fort Greene and neighbouring Brooklyn Heights went from 41.8 percent Black in 2000 to 20.3 percent Black in 2019.
Cultural and community institutions that are focused on or welcoming to LGBTQ2S+ people of colour are aplenty. Alike, if she were a real person, would live within walking distance from The Audre Lorde Project, a community centre for LGBTQ2S+ people of colour which hosts events and provides space for community-building; the HQ of Gay Men of African Descent, which hosts community and arts events; and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. Though of little relevance to visitors, if Alike finds herself growing old in the neighbourhood, she could apply to live in Stonewall House, which provides LGBTQ2S+ friendly elder housing right across from Fort Greene Park.
For a break from touring, pop over to nearby Bed-Stuy for a drink at C’mon Everybody (325 Franklin Ave., Brooklyn, New York), a queer-run and -focused bar and performance space founded in 2015 to “promote inclusion, to uplift, and to offer our stage to those who have struggled to fit into the larger live arts community of New York City.” Every night is different so check out the website before picking your outfit. Singers (30 Kosciuszko St., Brooklyn, New York) just opened last summer and hosts an array of oddball queer parties and film screenings.
If you’re lucky, there might be a Queer Soup Night in Fort Greene Park during your visit. Founded here in 2017, the now multi-city event creates community through the soup-preparing skills of local chefs.
To support Black-owned businesses, try a light meal at Brooklyn Moon Café (745 Fulton St., Brooklyn, New York) or for something spicier, BK9 (62 5th Ave., Brooklyn, New York) for modern Caribbean cuisine.
For something completely different, there’s Black Forest Brooklyn (733 Fulton St., Brooklyn, New York) which has more sausage than most people can handle and a backyard beer garden that will transport you to the land of lederhosen.
You’re now a far cry from Alike’s journey, but Brooklyn’s like that—every block is a different world.
