An Interview With Jamal T. Lewis, Director Of “No Fats, No Femmes”
This article was published on Medium as a teaser for HARLOT Magazine prior to their formal launch in February 2016. You can view it on the Harlot site here.
What does it mean to desire, and what does It mean to be desired? That the politics of such transcend our very bedrooms is the notion filmmaker and activist Jamal T. Lewis, alum of Morehouse, intends to interrogate, probe, and examine without apology and with much confrontation.
Racism, misogyny, femmephobia, fatphobia, ableism. These are words, subjects even, that the LGBTQIA+ community is inclined to dismiss, issues that either people don’t want to acknowledge or only approach with superficiality. With the documentary No Fats, No Femmes (whose Indiegogo campaign ends on January 5th), Lewis intends on embracing the complexity those questions have to offer, without the hubris of answers necessarily, but with the humbleness of curiosity and desire for insight.
I spoke with Jamal recently about how to navigate one’s identity in a homonormative (read: white cis middle class urban gay male) queer world, projections of desire, and what desire means.
I guess we should start at the beginning. How did you conceive of this being something you wanted to explore both on its own and as a documentary?
It came to me in undergrad. I vividly remember one day being on one of the apps. I never really gave Grindr a try, because it it targeted a certain kind of audience–a very white cis middle class audience. I used Jack’d, and another app called Growlr–an app for bears. I tried it for a moment and I was like, no, that’s not a space for me either, because it was centered around a masculinized fatness.
I had reached a point where I was both bitter about and frustrated with gay male hookup/dating culture; like, wow, there is really no end to this shit.
I totally understand.
“No fats, no femmes” was everywhere! I couldn’t understand why someone would be so proud to boast such prejudice and this “masc for masc” bravado. Like, why is this a thing? I was also frustrated with myself as well because I had also internalized that kind of rhetoric, and I would often try to conform and kill parts of myself just to get a nut and a fuck. When I said “no more” to it, I dedicated myself to getting to the root of my own desire formation. I remember putting a really long message on my Jack’d profile, offering a sharp critique of people using “no fats, no femmes” on profiles.
People weren’t really responding to or receiving it; so, I started looking inward. I thought “is it not resonating?” I eventually erased the profile and took it down. Then I made a new account, and on that profile, I put “Looking for documentary subjects for a film called No Fats, No Femmes if you’re interested, hit me up.”
I would say that’s when it was conceived, in 2011. It’s since grown into a beautiful life and research project of me really interrogating the root of desire formation and making sense of how we have learned and still learn today; of desire and how that has shaped the politics of desire and who gets to be loved, whose body is desirable and whose is not; who’s worthy of being saved and whose body is not worthy of being saved.
Desirability politics isn’t just limited to our bedrooms.
Have you always been introspective and wanting to interrogate those ideas about desire, about the self, about construction of identity?
I would say yes. I have always been a very curious person, always asking a lot of fucking questions. Even growing up, asking questions was my earliest understanding of resistance. I’d always offer pushback, even when things really did not deserve pushback. It was somewhat childish and selfish, but I feel like if things aren’t going in the way I think is right for myself, I will always question it. Even with my own identity and coming out in high school– I left home, because it wasn’t a safe space for me.
With this project, I’m saying “I deserve a desire that’s not violent and asks of me to kill parts of myself just to be desired or desirable in somebody’s eyes”.
And this idea of desire as politics, when did you start exploring that?
Very recently. I’m pointing a lot towards bell hooks’ work, because bell hooks questions everything as a cultural critic and media theorist. She writes extensively around race, desire, and love. I remember reading her one day and thinking, “wow, I’m really interested in the intersection of desire and politics.” I feel like I recently came into that as a thing, and I’m focusing my academic research around that, and I’m hoping this film will be a sound board for later work in teasing out what I really mean by desirability politics and the politics of desire.
I totally understand with regard to compromising in terms of killing parts of yourself off. I actually very recently deleted all the apps off of my phone, because you get on them and then no one really responds, or they say really racist things. This one guy asked me if I worked at the Chinese restaurant on Sisson Avenue. And I was so offended–
Oh my god.
I worked at the one on George Street, and I’d never talk to those bastards! That’s a joke; I’ve never worked in a Chinese restaurant. When you create your profile, you’re constructing a version of yourself, and projecting, and I’m wondering, why do you think people would want to project a version of themselves that seems racist or misogynistic or femmephobic or fatphobic?
That’s a great question, and I feel like the answer to it is that it comes at various points, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to it. I think one way that I have tried to make sense of it is that I think people are performing in a way that they must perform just to be desired themselves. Often times, these profiles will state or list what they don’t rather than what they do want, so it’s almost a way of performing femmephobia and fatphobia, which all points back to misogyny. Performing misogyny just to get laid. I honestly can’t find any other reasoning; people do that because they feel that’s what they have to do.
People wear it as a badge of honor. And it’s a very complicated thing. What I don’t want to accomplish or achieve with this project is to shame people for how they name and experience their desire(s); I’m just asking that they look deeper, and interrogate that. Some people just might not be into me or femme folks, but the goal of this project is not for us fat femme folks to get laid–I could care less about that. I don’t need to be fucked, I have an okay sex life. I’m just saying we all need to understand that the root of our desire is informed by many fucking things and it’s informed by things that we take in. So I think people put them on their profiles as a way to perform/embody this violent hyper-masculinity, which goes back to: a) wanting to being normal; and, b) wanting to be desired and fucked as normal. The only way to do that, it seems, is to perform those kinds of things.
I assume you know what RuPaul’s Drag Race is?
Mhm, of course.
How do you feel — I watch that show partially because it is a guilty pleasure, but I think there’s an interesting of body, race, beauty, and gender politics, and I’m wondering what you thought about that?
Drag Race is an interesting show–I really love how some of the queens are really brilliant in their wit and humor. The last season I watched, I remember Ginger Minj competing. Ginger Minj almost had that win, and she said one thing that was really poignant. She said a “big girl would never win this show.” That was a neccesary critique on so many of the ways that consumerism informs what is marketable and what is not. I was like, “damn, she’s right. I’ve seen big girls ascend to the top on the show, but never win.”
These are people that send ratings through the roof: Ginger Minj, Latrice Royale, Mystique Summers (“Bitch, I’m from Chicago!”) Also, it’s so crazy how drag has shifted from this really radical genderfuck performance. It’s moving away from this really entertaining drag performance to who can be most beautiful, and who can look most like a cisgender woman; who can look most like a model, because those things will sell.
And you mentioned in your Indiegogo video about these connections about being desired with capitalism. Could you elaborate on that?
For the film, I’m pulling different snippets from movies, films, television shows, magazines, and cartoons in a way to show how the media economy benefits from fatphobia. I’m thinking about beauty as a system of domination under capitalism. Magazines, TV–any kind of media mostly market white, cis normative thin bodies. Everybody wants to subscribe to that and be that because that’s what they are fed as “beautiful”. It’s what circulates most in our economy and makes the most money.
I remember my friend was critiquing me on how I was setting up and writing my dating profile and whatnot–he specifically used the metaphor that you’re selling yourself essentially. It’s interesting, and certainly problematic that the best way to sell yourself is to buy into the ideal beauty standard or the homonormative ideal or anything like that. With regards to gender fucking and race and body, Paris is Burning and Portrait of Jason are two very important films for ostensibly shedding light on an aspect of queer culture that was, at that point, not well known or under-seen. I’m wondering to what degree has that changed since the release of those films. Portrait of Jason was released in the late ’60s and Paris is Burning just had its 25th anniversary, I think. How has our ability to navigate our identities changed since then, specifically within intersectional purposes: race, gender, class?
I think things have radically changed since then. I think some of this longing to be seen and fucked by patriarchy is still there. And I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere until people are ready to really fuck shit up and imagine new worlds for themselves and their desires. Our language for self and the world has evolved since then because folks did not have access to complex and critical understandings of gender; all people had was “gay” and “transvestite”. So you know those things have radically changed.
Paris Is Burning still informs many queer people’s notions of self-identity. A lot of people are like Venus; they just want to be loved and live a very normative kind of life, in a nice house, with white picket fence and family. And a lot of people are also like Octavia; they want to be a model, and be respected for their whole selves.
So as you were growing up — I think self-actualization is a very important part of life, and we certainly have mixed messages in our society with regards to that, but was there any particular figure in the media, a fictional character or anything, in a book, film, television show, anything, that you saw yourself in, or has that yet come to be?
Growing up, I was very thrilled to see pieces of me in characters. I feel like it’s hard to try and capture everything because we are constantly evolving, over the years. And if there is ever a moment where our whole selves are not being reflected back to us, we create our own representations and stories. There was one particular figure in Baby Boy that I saw parts of myself in. Have you seen it?
I have not, but I’ve heard of it.
There’s like this one gay hairdresser in the movie. I remember at one point — Tyrese was a booster in the movie (someone that steals clothes for a living). He was getting this lingerie piece for this hairdresser–and back at the salon the hairdresser holds this pink little lingerie set up, he’s just like “Mmm, how much?” And Tyrese says “$40”. And the hairdresser is like, “forty dollarssss?!” That moment really tickled me and warmed my heart.
I also really adored Andre Leon Talley in high school. I couldn’t tell you who I look to now, because there are so many people! But growing up, I would say Noah’s Ark was a really big thing for me. It was an image of queerness created by a queer person. I also looked to RuPaul for inspiration a lot back in high school. I won’t discredit them now because of their messy politics; but he was a representation of strength and courage, as somebody who clearly genderfucked on TV.
Reading books and playing video games were really formative, too. I saw a lot of myself in women and female characters.
What was your formative queer experience? Not when you knew you were queer, but a moment in your life that helped you solidify your identity as such.
Full disclosure: I’m a Libra, so I have a really hard time making decisions sometimes; I’m really indecisive. So something came to me, but I’m like, that’s not it, that’s not it.
You can have more than one! I mean, part of navigating our identity is going through different experiences. But anything is fine. Whatever means the most to you.
I would name coming into my body and my gender as a really formative queer experience for me, and understanding both of those things as resistance. I’m just really comfortable with the ways that I have grown to see it, know it, and love it.
Kyle Turner (queer cis male monster, he/him) is a freelance writer, editor, and transcriber, and, if John Waters is to be believed, a good dancer. He began writing on the internet in 2007 with his blog The Movie Scene. Since then, he has contributed to Esquire, MUBI, Playboy.com , Flavorwire, TheBlackMaria.org, The Film Stage, Film School Rejects, Under the Radar, and IndieWire’s /Bent. He is studying cinema at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.
This article was produced and published on behalf of HARLOT Magazine, an intersectional e-rag set to launch in January 2016. For media inquiries or article pitches, contact us at dirtiestwellknownsecret@gmail.com.
