Black feminism and queer families: a conversation with Thomas Allen Harris.

In Vintage: Families of Value (1995) Anita Jones proclaims, "I have chose to do like my mother and be a warrior... 'cause I'm a lesbian. My life has evolved around women being sensual, and I rather enjoy it." Speaking forthrightly to the camera, Jones identifies some of the larger challenges raised by black women's lived experiences and by black feminist paradigms working to disrupt the silences surrounding black female sexualities. In Thomas Allen Harris's innovative documentary, which chronicles the lives of three sets of black queer siblings over a five-year period, the women portrayed--Adrian Jones, Anita Jones, Anni Cammett, and Vanessa Eaddy--articulate the impact of their respective familial experiences on their mappings of sexuality and identity. Vintage, as a forum, opens a dialogue in which these women add their voices to black feminist work that redresses socio-political misconceptions of familial gender roles, matrilineal histories, and, more recently, black lesbian sexualities. Through this dialo gue the women in the film implode (a)historical renderings of black familial dysfunction as they imbue black women's experiences and sexualities with agency. By situating black women's experiences as an integral narrative of his experimental documentary, Harris's film enacts the necessity of "exploring the experience of supposedly 'ordinary' Black women whose 'unexceptional' actions" (Smith and Hull xxi) become the peculiar project of a developing black queer narrative.

Harris's film succeeds at appropriating the black family from its demoralized public media representation through a radical framing of the black family within a queer context. His queer depiction of the black family functions to dispel myths of its pathology by refusing to entertain its departure from a nuclear model. In its subject matter, Harris's documentary dispenses with overtly addressing structures of familial normativity imposed by hegemonic racial models. Instead, the film allows the historic racial and sexual prohibitions of the black family in the United States to be explored through the familial and sexual reclamations of the documentary's black siblings as doubly queer self -expression. Harris claims that, "because few African American families conform to the patriarchal, nuclear-family model, they are depicted in popular media and government studies as amoral and in decay. Vintage cuts through these fictions of the 'vanishing' black family."

Harris's film reconfigures the terms black and family in an attempt to depict the difference and diversity of meaning which these terms suggest. As a bold critical move in African American and queer cultural production, Harris's project subverts the notion of queerness as a discrete sexual identity or relation to others by taking as its focal point not the lover relationships of the queer siblings but the intra-familial, intra-racial, and class negotiations of identity and agency that each queer sibling grapples with in order to define him- or herself and his or her queer sexual desires. This broadened approach to exploring queerness is a much needed perspective if queer, as a critical model, is to prove useful beyond a select group or an essentialized sexual identity of lives and work. Harris's film, through the use of documentary, fantasy, and archival footage, theorizes as queer the contradictions and connections that the combinations of black and family and sexuality create in the United States.

With many barriers set in place by the profit-motivated institution of slavery that defined for generations the destiny of a black woman's sexual being, as well as her children's, rupturing the silences and oppressions imposed on black female sexualities has been an endeavor fraught with violent revisitings and violating erasures. Over the course of the past two decades, at least since the appearance of Barbara Smith's essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," the process of breaking such silences through a critical black feminist perspective has been in progress. In her essay, Smith posits as urgent the critical use of black women's studies paradigms in order to arrive at an analysis of black female sexuality as it has been denied, ignored, and stereotyped, in part due to the fear and shame located in racist and sexist manipulations abounding in history, as well as in academic scholarship. Smith writes that a black feminist practice should be committed to "exploring how both sexual and racial politics and Black and female identity are inextricable elements" (163). Further, Smith is one of the first feminists to suggest that "lesbian"--read "queer," in Harris's film-analyses do not reside solely in the portrayal of women as lovers but indeed can and should also be culled from the complexity of black women's relationships to each other. Sexual identity, for Smith, is understood along a continuum of intra-racial dynamics.

Important historical continuities exist between Smith's black feminist literary analysis of lesbian as a more inclusive category than sexual activity alone and Harris's black queer method. Both speak to African American traditions of subversion and appropriation. For example, in Vintage in the relationship of queer siblings Vanessa and Paul Eaddy, queer, as an identification as well as a critical approach, is in part located in gender roles and class stratification within black familial structures. Reading queer in Harris's film in this manner moves toward a multivalent correspondence of queer with cultural histories, rituals, and family dynamics which shape desire.

Vanessa and Paul Eaddy, two queer siblings out of the eight, explore a brother and sister relationship and queer identities that reside in part within their familial gender roles and, then, on being queer along a specific class axis. In the film, through conversations with both siblings, Paul's attempt to hide his effeminacy-his "flaming," as Vanessa identifies it-is linked to his expected masculine role as family caretaker and their mother's co-parent" after their parents' separation, as well as a result of his college education that marks an intra-familial class distinction between the siblings. The conversations painfully reveal Paul's embarrassment, and Vanessa's awareness of his discomfort, at his sister's masculine-gendered--"butch"--lesbian identity, which Paul, who moves in an educated and artistic black milieu, perceives as an aspect of Vanessa's lack of education or self-knowledge and her lower, working-class status.

Indeed, what Vanessa's and Paul's sibling relationship around their queer sexualities exhibits is a classed and gendered conflict located within their familial relations that impacts how their queer identities are understood or read. The gender roles assumed by Paul and Vanessa within the family and in oppostion to one another occur as a process of dialectical conflict, as they facilitate their respective capacities to self-identify and ultimately to negotiate their relationship. Underlying their class and gender positions, and therefore the interpretation of a "flaming" or "butch" queer sexuality, are larger historical tensions imposed on black families and black masculinities through the history of black and white power relations around masculinity, in which both black men and black women are entangled.

During at least three showings of the film, the question arose regarding the lack of "strong black men" in the film as a potential marker of the so-called pathology in the maturing of the black queer men. Of course, there are three "strong" black men portrayed in the film, all of whom are gay. Moreover, Harris's juxtaposition of the gender identifications of these two queer siblings offers a continuum that can re-envision notions of "strong" masculinity through Vanessa, who unravels a butch identity constituted at least in part by her admiration of her black working-class father. Vanessa, therefore, contributes to the diversity of black masculinities portrayed in the film and their diverse modes of familial grounding, even as Harris subverts nuclear models of normative desire.

The connected and empowering black matrilineal histories and black lesbian sexualities which weave through Harris's documentary also often function as specifically gendered black threats to the normativity of the nation's family values. This sexual/familial dyad surfaces in many moments in the film, as when, for example, Vintage visually captures the uneasy yet passionate mother-daughter relation of sisters Adrian, Anita, and Anni to the sweet but searching poetry voice-over of Anni Cammett: "It's Mother's Day and while I think of white roses and polaroids, I dream of wisdom born of struggle." Harris's documentary participates in the critical dialogue that black feminists such as Audre Lorde have raised in their own work regarding the erotic potential of black women's mother-daughter space of conflicting difference and identification of desire. Anni's "wisdom born of struggle" signifies the coupling of the black mother's hard-earned independence in a doubled patriarchy, as it is understood and lived out by t he black lesbian daughters. The contradictory bonds between the black mother's desires and the black lesbian daughters' desires--those of sexual autonomy--are most vividly present to the viewer in the relationships among the sisters Anni Cammet, Adrian Jones, and Anita Jones, not only through the diverse sexual identities they choose as lesbians and bisexual women but in their negotiations with each other and their own matrilineal histories.

In their group discussion scene, an entangled reality surfaces as the trio's conflicted relations to one another and especially to their different fathers are relived through the strength of their commitment to preserving and understanding their mother's desires and experiences as well as the similar types of desires and experiences manifest in their own lives. While their own mother is represented through their recollections from youth, it is Adrian's mothering role with both her sisters, the result of familial circumstance, that illumines the terrain of sexual tensions circulated among the sisters. Alternately they grapple with the familial roles each adopts in relation to "mothering" as an erotic potential in their familial connections to one another, in addition to their respective sexual self-identifications. Throughout the documentary Anita rejects Adrian's mothering as invasive and traumatic to her own relation with her father, instead seeking the succor of Adrian's acceptance of her as an equal in li ght of the allegations of paternal abuse that negate Anita's claims for an erotic connection with "mother." On the other hand, and despite her frustrations with the mediator role, Anni soothes Adrian, the outraged daughter-sister-turned-mother to siblings at a young age. Anita, to some extent by offering what can be read as the prescient insights of a young child for a mother in distress to "heal herself," also attempts to resolve the broken connection of Adrian's narrative of mothering and abusive sexual experience within the sister triad. As mothering, sexuality, and paternal difference circulate among the queer sisters, it is not solely the memory of the biological mother's experience that informs their sexual reclamations but the very present sisterly dyads of mother-daughter conflicts over familial sexual histories that impact their own sexual identities as black women in relationship to one another. Hence, that which separates them, different fathers and familial dynamics, finds relief in that which is not only their common bond but also their most precious pursuit to reappropriate the legacy of their own mother's and mothering struggles for sexual autonomy and pleasure in their queer lives.

Perhaps the most radical gesture found in Harris's documentary is its apposite representation of black queer single mothers against the grain of a dominant queer theoretical thrust, which purports to embrace the heterosexually marginalized but lacks much analysis or representation of queer mothers and mothering dynamics, especially among black women. Harris's documentary opens this dialogue and in so doing illumines that much pertaining to this topic remains to be explored. In making familiar "dysfunctional" black family narratives unfamiliar, Harris's documentary collects disparate threads of sexuality located within the film's black families as a knowledge that constructs black queer subjectivity yet refuses any facile resolutions. Instead, a fragmented genealogical model of familial sexual dynamics is the subversive anti-resolve of the documentary.

A Conversation with Thomas Allen Harris

LH: I am wondering, Thomas, if you could speak to the both the rewards and the risks of a public recognition of you as a black queer filmmaker and activist that Vintage, as your first feature-length and award-winning film, has created? What have been some of the responses from different communities of your pairing of queer and black as troubled yet powerful terms/identities/critical theories/activist stances? In other words, what does being a black queer media artist and intellectual involve?

TH: It's interesting to think about this question in the context of living in Salvador da Bahia, the "Mama Africa" heart and soul of Brazil, because Vintage first brought me to this country. Now, from Brazil, the film is taking me back to Africa. [Vintage had just been selected for official competition in the 15th Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.] So I would say the biggest reward of having completed Vintage is its success within the international African diasporic film festival circuit which began with its world premiere in the 1995 Toronto International film festival inaugural Planet Africa program launched by Cameron Bailey. So this film is being seen and discussed as a critical work within the African diasporic film community. The discussions with Afro-Brazilian, Afro-European, and African cultural producers around issues of family, narrative, history, nationalism, and filmmaking have been extremely rewarding. Most people outside of the U.S. don't see this as a gay f ilm, and in fact I've had several people take issue with my use of the word queer. They tell me it's more universal than queer and that I shouldn't ghettoize the work by using this label. it is important for me to use the word queer when speaking about this work not only because of the current attacks on African gays and lesbians in Angola and Zimbabwe, but also because black and queer is no less universal than white and straight.

Vintage has universal appeal because it honestly deals with the subject of our families. The story is conveyed by three groups of siblings whose sexual orientation and gender performativity fall under the categories of lesbian, gay, and bisexual. For me the word queer--though far from being unproblematic-encompasses a certain defiance around sexual orientation and gender performativity. I would say therefore Vintage is a product of an African American queer imaginary space--a space that simultaneously destabilizes all of these "identities," including those of gender and family--making them all a bit queer in a sense.

I love watching Vintage in a predominately black queer audience--people who feel free to laugh and cry at just the very right moment. It's like a great ride that actually reflects the voyage of making the film with my collaborators Anni Cammett, Paul Eaddy, Adrian Jones, Lyle Ashton Harris, Vanessa Eaddy, Anita Jones, and my mother Rudean Leinaeng. I think it's this destabilization of identity that makes the film so threatening to black nationalism and queer nationalism. In the former instance, the film has been rejected by almost every U.S. black film festival, and in the latter instance, white gays constantly suggest that the film is not gay enough because it doesn't represent same-sex couples--as if queer identity is exclusively contingent upon the representation of same-sex sexual relations. I think what is particularly disturbing to the black nationalist gate keepers  is the film's unapologetic assertion and investigation of the black family as a matriarchal social structure. The intellectual, theoretica l celebratory activity around this issue is clearly articulated in the individual and collective journeys of the eight principal documentary subjects/characters, who are also participants in the making of the film. But it's also related to and comes out of a contemporary movement of radical African disaporic queer media production within the realm of popular culture, as well as all areas of the arts and culture. For example, over the past decade or so we have seen the late Marion Riggs's nationally televised films [Tongues Untied and Black Is... Black Ain't], Linda Villarosa's publishing in and visibility as editor at Essence magazine, The Black Nations/Queer Nations conference, The Black Popular Culture conference, The International MIX New York-Brazil-Mexico Film Festival, Isaac Julien's theatrical and television films, including Looking For Langston, the proliferation of black queer [produced] anthologies and literature such as the E. Lynn Harris series, and Jacqueline Woodson's children books, as well as the Black Male show, which prominently featured queer visual art, including that of my brother, Lyle Ashton Harris.

LH: Thomas, how has your film contributed its own version of "gender trouble" with the different masculinities and feminities depicted--Paul and Vanessa--and the diversely gendered black lesbians in the film? One of the aspects that drew me to write about your film in relation to feminist-informed discussions of black female sexuality is not only the presence, struggles, and power of the women, but also the underlying commentary on gender roles and biological sex which your film makes. It makes connections between masculinist fears of "effeminacy" and a misogynist society in which some of the black lesbians in your film find it empowering to construct their lesbian identities along matrilineal lines and those of masculinity--be they patriarchal or matriarchal. Anxiety around the gender portraits in your film is evidenced in the oft-repeated question from audiences: "Where are the men? Where are the strong men in this film?" What is your perspective on this type of connection between homophobia and misogyny, s pecifically within the black family?

TH: Vintage's position on gender within the film comes out of the collaborative nature in which the film was produced as well as my own search for a non-misogynist vision of masculinity--one not contingent on the degradation of the feminine. At the outset of the film I was interested in returning to childhood to explore the fantasy space that I shared with my brother Lyle. I was interested in this space because of the freedom it allowed us in terms of transgressing the socially imposed boundaries of gender that we confronted growing up as two sensitive young black men in the United States. We had the good fortune to spend two years living in Tanzania, Dar-Es-Salaam, where the dynamics of gender were far more expansive than the restrictiveness of those in the U.S. When we moved to Tanzania the childhood fantasy world of dressing up in mother's clothes, having imaginary boyfriends, and fighting off gangs ceased to exist. In its place were real explorations of sensuality and being--with other boys. Coming back t o the United States was a real shocker in terms of the dos and don'ts of gender performance.

During the five-year process of producing Vintage I was dialoguing continuously with each of the participants--including the music composer Vernon Reid--around ideas of gender performativity in the context of contemporary black family dynamics. Anni Cammett and I had intense conversations around the role gender played in maintaining the status quo by inhibiting personal development, evolution, and communication between and among women and men. As I stated earlier, each of the siblings collaborated with me in the filmmaking process. I gave video cameras to each of the siblings to interview one another. I also asked each to collaborate with me in constructing their fantasy scenarios. These scenarios in a way are about recouping queer moments of pleasure as gender identities were being articulated, and perhaps a certain innocence regarding the possibility of gender roles. I think that all of the people featured in Vintage employ and manipulate gender to achieve a certain type of balance or equilibrium between f orces or inclinations commonly referred to as the feminine and masculine. For me this comes out most clearly in the juxtaposition of the fantasy footage with the more documentary conversations.

The problems one encounters in such an assertion are typical of misogynist society: The women are seen as strong because they have taken on certain "masculine" aspects of fierce, rugged independence, while the men are seen as weak precisely because they publicly exhibit the typically feminine aspects of sensitivity and vulnerablity. Of course feminine strength, feminine power across gender isn't accorded value in the way that masculine strength and power are valorized. One sees this precisely in the responses that you are alluding to, which I might add come almost exclusively from straight-identified African Americans: "Well, where are the strong men? There are no strong men in the film. The way you [Thomas] represent yourself in the film is not about strength."

The men in the film exhibit a certain type of inner strength which allows them to remove the mask of impenetrability that we as black men are taught to wear. Hence this film provides a counter-narrative to the notion of black masculinity as commercialized within Black popular culture--including rap, Malcolm X iconography and hood films. It shows what masculine strength looks like when it is exhibited by men less concerned with proving their "manliness" than with negotiating the roles of father, older brother, younger brother, friend, and son in a nurturing and self-reflexive way.

Conversely, declaring the women strong somehow lets people off the hook in terms of a discussion of the intricacies of power relations, gender roles, and diversity of the women within the film. For instance, up until now no one has written on the relations among the three sisters, who display a diversity not only of lesbian identities but also in terms of their respective experiences of childhood in the same family. In the fantasy scenes of the sisters and the ways they have chosen to represent themselves, one finds clues as to a counter-narrative to their identities as seen within the more documentary aspect of the film. Taken together these different portraits address the psychic dimensions of their sibling dynamic.

Each of the sisters mothers, and through the course of this each in her own way asserts her respective vision of matriarchy, which comes out of her lived experiences. Part of their theorizing around matriarchy comes from their mother, who insisted that despite their different fathers the fact that they all came out of her meant that they were sisters--nothing more, nothing less. Only later in the film is it revealed that they have different fathers and that their different experiences of childhood are in large part due to this fact and the abusive behavior of the "father" they grew up with.

Vanessa is a down-home Southern butch whose home life is further complicated by having a closeted, college-educated aesthete brother, Paul. People who've seen the film often speak a lot about Paul and Vanessa's relationship. I think that the issues their relationship raises are in many ways the most accessible to a lay audience. Paul's rejection of his sister's butch identity reflects his own internalized homophobia, yet this is complicated by their class differential as well. On one occasion Paul tells Vanessa that he was embarrassed by her butchness when they were younger, and Vanessa states that Paul didn't want her around him because he didn't want her to see him "flaming." On another occasion Paul tells Vanessa that he thinks she was the smartest of all the sisters, and he has always "been angry she didn't finish school." I think that people perceive the evolution of both of Vanessa and Paul as they communicate with one another through the filmmaking process. People, particularly straight men, empathize with Paul when he comes out to his mother at the age of forty-one.

I was very aware of the therapeutic value of this process, primarily through the process of interviewing and being interviewed by Lyle. After having extensive background as a television journalist I was aware of the power of the camera and of the intervention of the film as a constructive or conversely destructive force. I was determined from the start of the film to create a better familial space for the families to understand themselves and each other, one that as black families they had never really been given before. This is what I really think of as the "queer" space created by the film.

LH: Thomas, would you classify yourself as a black feminist filmmaker, and if so, how so? I have chosen to think about and read your film in these terms to expand the notions around who can do this type of work or what a black feminist perspective consists of. How do you see your work as important within feminist concerns, as well as those of race and family? How do you position your own film about black queer siblings, especially in terms of the women, in relation to some contemporary black lesbian films of your milieu?

TH: I think of Vintage as a feminist work in the way it recasts gender in a kind of fluid movement between masculinity-femininity as well as the way that it constructs family unabashedly as a matriarchal space. The film draws heavily from a black feminist criticism as well as literary work of the past thirty years. For instance, one of the central tenets of the film is this disruption between the division between the private and public space. The family traditionally falls under the jurisdiction of the former. However, the film also provides a bridge between private and public. All the participants understood from the beginning that their conversations and performances would ultimately be publicly exhibited. Hence, they were simultaneously existing in the privacy of a[n immediate] familial moment and the knowledge that they were performing for an unknown public [in the future].

The theoretical work of black feminists throughout our history in this country has consistently pointed to the imperative need to break the silences around sexuality, power relations, abuse, and pleasure maintained by the arbitrary and patriarchal private-public binary. Just as importantly, the therapeutic/workshop/collaborative nature of the production of Vintage has its roots in feminist practices of self-empowerment. In many ways the film draws from the rich legacy of the African American literary tradition of autobiography which Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on slave narratives argues should be considered a feminist canon.

The film is also in dialogue with contemporary films and videos on similar subjects by black lesbian film/videomakers such as Dawn Suggs's important work on gender play in I Never Danced the Way Girls Were Supposed to, or Jocelyn Taylor's pioneering interviews with family members in her videotapes such as Father Knows Best or Vejan Lee Smith's film-as-therapy work in Human Touch, Shari Friot's work on female sexuality in A Cosmic Demonstration of Sexuality Cheryl Dunye's fictional autobiographies, and Yvonne Welbon's work on childhood memories. This is the community I grew up with as a filmmaker, and many of these individuals were crucial to the process of getting Vintage made.

Although Vintage is a feminist work, I wouldn't classify myself as a black feminist filmmaker. I am a filmmaker--an artist whose media are film and video, one who works with various issues that touch and affect my life.

LH: Thomas, can you speak to some of the tensions between the use of the adjectives black and queer, and in the use of such adjectives to describe what you were attempting to address with your film?

TH: In Vintage, the adjective black is only used once--when my father is telling a story about a strange custom in the South of black parents teaching their sons how to hang themselves in such a way that, if they were to be the victim of a lynching, they would have a slim possibility of survival. There was no other reason to label anyone in the film as black because within the same family there is no need to distinguish ourselves along lines of an ethnicity that we share. In the film we are. Queer is a different story, because as an adjective it suggests a radically different set of desires, concerns, and performances that significantly departs from the omnipresent, constrictive heterosexual script. It's the radical subversiveness that led to the possibility of making this film. But as people have remarked, once stated, affirmed, then it too becomes part of the background--like black. I think the resistance to the word queer by some African diasporic folks may have to do with the filmic process of audience id entification within characters or processes within the film which in a kind of way makes the audience queer. But it's also the type of queerness that disturbs the white gay/lesbian managerial class, because this queerness is distinctly black. Within the white gay/lesbian managerial class, there is understandably the need to assert and privilege the families we construct outside of and apart from the structure of our biological families. As black queer people we cannot afford to leave our families to seek solace in the larger gay [white] worlds/ghettoes. I think Vintage shocks them because it offers a vision of the actual re-construction of the biological family. Perhaps it's something they do not feel is worthwhile or even possible within their own biological families.

LH: Finally, Thomas, it might, as we discussed, be instructive to end with a reflection on what was left out of your film in order to move toward an inclusion of understanding how histories, narratives, and knowledge are constructed, and the importance of having many voices involved in doing so. In your case, how do you understand your responsibilities to remake history in the editing stage, coming from a black queer intellectual, activist, and artististic position and attempting to intervene in media representation?

TH: I think the biggest risk in my making Vintage was opening up the editing process to the siblings. Each time I got a new cut of the film I would send out tapes to everyone and then call them up to discuss them. This was really intense because I was giving up authorial control--something filmmakers are taught not to relinquish. It was such heavy material that really expressed the individual characters' secret ambivalences. What if Paul or Adrian or my mother really hates something? What if they decide to pull out of the project because it's too close to home? This was the type of questions and fears that I had to confront, and it took a lot of faith to open up the editing process each time. But it was always a good thing because even though I stepped on toes and made mistakes the people in the film respected me and they had faith in the project. I had earned their trust and respect, and my reward was that they felt free to share their concerns, not just about their respective representations in the film but also about other characters--even ones they hadn't met yet.

The film deeply benefits from their input as well as my collaborative work with Vernon Reid, who composed the music for the film. We were talking right down to the final edits. And of course my partner at the time who co-edited the film with me, Christopher Kuhrt, was immensely important to the editing process. What was left out of the film was the intention to make every story, every relationship, every history clear and definitive. Initially I relied on the words and conversations of the siblings to guide the piece, a process which came out of my history as a public television journalist. It was the musician George Lewis and writer Minnie Bruce Pratt who suggested to me to instead focus on engaging the poetics and rhythm of the material. I stopped trying to explain everything and started letting the material lead me where it wanted to go. Every time I got stuck, I just returned to the character's fantasy scenes, and they put me back on track.

Works Cited

Hull, Gloria, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury: Feminist P, 1982.

Hull, Gloria, and Barbara Smith. "Introduction: The Politics of Black Women's Studies." Hull, Scott, and Smith xvii-xxxiv.

Lorde, Audre Lorde. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: Crossing P, 1982.

Smith, Barbara. "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." Hull, Scott, and Smith 157-75.

Laura A. Harris is Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. Thomas Allen Harris (no relation) is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and he hosts a webpage at www.chimpanzeeoroductions.org. His 1995 documentary film Vintage: Families of Value looks at three African American families over the course of five years through the eyes of siblings in the families who are lesbian, bisexual, and gay. Vintage won the Best Documentary Award at the 1996 Atlanta International Film Festival and was awarded a Golden Gate Prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

[c] 2002 Laura A. Harris