This movie seems to me, on some level, to be about the unfinished work of the civil-rights movement. You mentioned a moment when Dr. Anna speaks up and says, “Hey, you know there’s no women here, right?” And, of course, there’s also the homophobia that suffuses the whole movie and is directed toward Bayard.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you whether you yourself felt that growing up, in Kentucky. You went to a Black college, you went to a Rosenwald School—you’re a beneficiary and a product of so many of these movements. And you’re also an out gay man.
I got the benefit of being a part of this incredible community, and then I had to run to become me. It was a very nurturing community, but it also had . . . There was this man, I mention him all the time, a man named Jackson Robb. There was a march on Frankfort, with Martin Luther King, and King stayed at Jackson Robb’s house. Jackson Robb was an undertaker, and he was gay. Wasn’t nobody going to complain about Jackson Robb if they wanted their relatives buried.
But, in terms of my career ambitions and who I was, I had to leave. I went to California, to Pomona, and then, after California, I moved to New York, so that I could claim all of me. But I had to get out of there. I go back and they’re proud of me, and I’m happy that they’re proud of me. But you have to go on journeys, and you have to obey your curiosity, and your need to discover, and need to know.
At one point, I was on Martha’s Vineyard, and I was talking to this younger girl, she was maybe in her twenties, and she was saying, “My father’s a preacher and I’m a lesbian.” And I said, “Look at that world, claim and own that which you can use, and then wave goodbye to the rest of it in the rearview mirror. If you can’t use it, don’t claim it, but don’t let it stop you from becoming the most astonishing version of yourself that you need to become.”
I am, very much so, who I am—I’m very much from Frankfort, Kentucky. But if that shit don’t work, I don’t wear it. Bayard left West Chester, Pennsylvania, was part of this Black community, he protested the segregation of his local movie theatre, and then he came to New York and went on a journey and became who he was. We all go on journeys to complete and explore that which we have not explored.