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“It Never Really Was the Same”: Brother to Brother’s Black and White and Queer Nostalgia

The 2004 film Brother to Brother, written and directed by Rodney Evans, presents a fictionalized account of the final months of the life of Harlem Renaissance artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. Interspersed among scenes of the elderly Nugent (Roger Robinson) mentoring a young artist, Perry Williams (Anthony Mackie), are black-and-white flashbacks to 1926, the year the young Nugent (Duane Boutte), along with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston, conceived of, created, and published what became the only issue of Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. In a scene from the film’s present day, sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, Perry and the older Nugent sit on the floor in the hallway of the now dilapidated and abandoned Niggeratti Manor, where several of the Fire!! contributors lived during the 1920s. Nugent narrates Thurman’s death from alcoholism, and then Perry asks him what happened to the others. Nugent nostalgically replies: “I still saw them, but after that, it wasn’t the same. Times changed. The Depression set in and people really thought our excesses was [sic] what brought it on. It never really was the same. That sense of risk and magic was gone.” The “sense” to which Nugent refers here is marked as queer—risky, magical, and excessive— and no longer exists in the present. As he longs for the queer past, he provides a thoroughly nostalgic historical narrative; indeed, nostalgic feeling characterizes the film as a whole. At first glance, the two storylines in the film neatly parallel each other: Perry, coming of age at the end of the twentieth century, and the young Nugent, coming of age at the beginning of the twentieth century, negotiate their intersecting identities with difficulty. However, nostalgia prevails in the contrast between these two historical moments. It is Perry’s contemporary moment—one in which he is thrown out of his family’s home because he is gay, racially fetishized by an insensitive white lover, and beaten by a group of homophobic classmates—rather than Nugent’s historical moment that is positioned as more untenable for the gay black artist. Starting from this historical contrast, what follows is an exploration of black queer nostalgia in the film Brother to