And just like that, I felt seen

Santana was hot, she was quick with her slick tongue (and ponytail), and I absolutely loved her voice.

Before her, there was the DVD of Set it Off starring Queen Latifah (my all time crush). And throughout my entire journey of realizing I was relating a little too hard and loving way too much of the gay character for this to just be some awesome allyship…there was a looooot of white gay characters that somewhat fit me, but not quite. Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hey y’all. I’m Jay, your pretty unserious-of-a-writer twenty-five-year old neighborhood queer, and I’m here to share a very cool tale about seeing more of myself on the big screen because growing up there weren’t that many opportunities for me to casually see myself in a romcom or regular school drama streaming for four days before it gets cancelled. I had to hide under my covers and search on Netflix, scroll through channels, or anywhere else in the dead of night and just take what the platform would give me which were: Blue is the Warmest Color, or

Now don’t get me wrong, I completely appreciate all of the representation…well, I’m lying. There is very harmful rep out there (cough Blue is the…cough), but I mean I needed those movies in my own way and can recognize that though I wish they didn’t exist, younger me needed some validation that they gave me.

Anywho, I saw many of those stories, and I enjoyed parts of them that made me feel normal and like there was hope for my romance craving self. But, I didn’t quite feel like they had “me” on the screen yet. See, I’m not ignoring Queen Latifah’s character in Set it Off or Celie (played by Whoopi Goldberg) in The Color Purple, but those characters weren’tt necessarily talked about in my community as being “gay,” (I also never realized Queen Latifah was gay as a kid) and as far as I’m concerned, one of them had too rough off a life for me to want to watch without crying too much. I wanted more gentleness and I wanted open and accepted queerness in my rep. So, I kept searching.

And to my surprise, I found what I had been searching and dreaming for in the back of my sophomore film class. This was a surprise majorly because I was one of the only two Black faces in the sea of white people and majority of these people were men, also we had watched a movie about a certain racist group and I woke up to beint incredibly triggered once…but that’s neither here nor there. What we’re focusing on is me getting to sit in that large presentation room where I felt unseen and when I felt unseen in general due to y’know just feeling misplaced in the world, and getting to watch a movie called The Watermelon Woman.

If you don’t know, and it‘s okay if you don’t because I’ll also share my essay about it in my next upload here, The Watermelon Woman is about a Black lesbian filmmaker named Cheryl who goes on a quest to find answers on the life of “The Watermelon Woman.” The lady was an unaccredited actress who played a “mammy,” and Cheryl just went around having interviews with people and talking those unaccredited in films, The Watermelon Woman’s life, and she finds out so much information that she felt connected to.

It was something about not only the story, but Cheryl, that I resonated with. Cheryl was Black, a lesbian, a filmmaker, and was deeply into respecting people who people probably didn’t spend much time thinking about. She wanted to know and share the information with the world and I loved her dedication and attention to such an obscure topic because I felt like filmmaking and writing only mattered to me because I wanted to highlight people and things that others overlooked.

And I also wanted to look as cool as she did.

Cheryl had the gentleness in her life. She had good friends, she had a partner, and she had passion for her craft and her people. I was trying to keep my love for my craft and have more motovation to go out there and tell the stories I wished to see as well. So, seeing a non-man, Black, lesbian onscreen in that classroom did something to me. And it didn’t hurt that she presented herself how I typically did as well clothhing wise.

Man, I’d love to go back to rewatch that for the first time, but I’m glad I saw it in general so that I, as a twenty-five year old, can answer this prompt here. This is when I saw myself in media. This is when I felt that not only did I matter, but what I wanted to share with the world mattered as well.