The memories I have of Bruce Nugent are elusive at best. Throughout the past year of screening my feature film Brother to Brother on the festival circuit, I have been constantly asked what the inspiration for the film was. Most of all it seems like it was this strange intersection of my life with his and a profound love I developed for him even though we’d never met and he passed away in 1987 when I was 16 years old.
In 1987 when Nugent was probably at his weakest, I was browsing through an aisle at the St Mark’s bookstore. I pulled a book from the shelf entitled In The Life, opening to an essay that caught my attention — Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of the Harlem Renaissance. As I finished reading those pages and placed the book back on the shelf I remember thinking to myself, “This guy’s really interesting. I need to come back to him.”
Roger Robinson, the actor who plays Nugent in his elderly years, describes a deep sense of loss that seemed integral to who Nugent was towards the end of his life. As we both did our research to bring him to life on screen, it was this sense of loss that we both seemed to connect with. If we were both going to do justice to his story we were going to have to delve deeply into this feeling we got from him.
The more I learned about Nugent in my two years of writing and research, the more I knew the structure and form of the film would have to mirror the complex and poetic nature of his mind. There were many forms of knowledge that he seemed to synthesise, moving from the bars of New York’s lower east side where he seduced straight Italian gangsters, to the hotels of high society Washington where he passed for white, to the anthropology classes of Franz Boas that he attended during the 1920s at Columbia University, to the scandalous gay rent parties during the Harlem renaissance.
Nugent saw the ways that the street-corner philosopher and the academic scholar had so much to gain by listening to each other. He was open-minded enough to find the connections between these disparate realms.
Thus, the content and form of Brother to Brother needed to encompass the exploratory nature of Nugent’s life and world view. The various narrative strands would need to somehow coalesce into a meaningful and unified whole.
Nugent’s mind seemed to take him into fantastical worlds and the film would have to do the same for the audience. The standard cradle-to-grave biopic would not suffice. It had to be something that was as unique and idiosyncratic as Nugent and yet also integrate the burgeoning love that I felt for him as I delved deeper into his life, a love that moved outside of the normal logic of space and time.
Thus, the younger fictional character of Perry came into being and the emotional heart of the film would be the evolving love between these two characters. Some of my personal experiences would be used as the launching pad into imagining Perry’s contemporary world. The present-day narrative would then subtly parallel Nugent’s youthful experiences during his coming-of-age during the Harlem renaissance. These parallels needed to evoke the feelings I had as I learned more and more about Nugent’s life and began to think of him as my doppelgänger — someone who had similar thoughts as he walked the same New York city streets generations before me.
The more I learned about Nugent in making Brother to Brother, the more I knew there would always be aspects of his life that were unknowable. Yet my curiosity about him kept the momentum going for the six long years it took to complete the film. As the last frame flickers in projectors across the country this autumn, it is my hope that audiences will leave the theatre with that same feeling of wanting to know more.
Out in Africa: 10 of the best
Brother to Brother: Perry is a gay African-American artist who is finding it difficult to merge his political conscience with the isolation of his sexual orientation. He meets Bruce Nugent, the last surviving member of the Harlem renaissance, and is introduced to Nugent’s radical past.
Bulgarian Lovers: Looks at the lengths to which one man will go for a radioactive, unreciprocated love that transcends social, cultural and legal boundaries.
End Game: Tom is a rent boy who is used and abused by a vicious lover and pimp. Permanently on call, Tom feels lonely and trapped. He meets his neighbours, Max and Nicky, an equally disjointed and lonely American couple who have recently relocated to London.
The Event: When Aids victim Matty dies at a party held in his honour, the mysterious circumstances of his death pique the curiosity of the police who investigate Matty’s life through his friend’s memories.
The Long Firm: Depicted through the indomitable cult-figure of Harry Starks, this is an invigorating and riveting four-part revelation of London gangsterism.
Noah’s Arc: Presented through three exploratory vignettes and a pilot episode, Noah’s Arc is TV’s first black gay series (pictured). It offers an honest, sassy, sexy and intelligent insight into gay black Los Angeles through characters and situations that buzz with energy, gossip, intrigue and humour.
Round Trip: One day Nurit wakes up and realises that she does not love herself, let alone her husband, Yossi. She drags her daughter and son with her to Tel Aviv where, low on self-esteem and unable to cope, Nurit advertises for a live-in mother’s help. Mushidi applies and quickly caring and understanding turn to desire.
Saved by the Belles: In this psychedelic whirlwind of Toronto’s nightlife, gender illusionist/drag queen Sheena and his faghag Scarlet live a facile life, floating from one drug- induced party to another. One hedonistic night they happen upon a delightfully hot, lost and bewildered young amnesiac. Scarlet and Sheena name him Chris and vow to assist him in his quest to recover his lost memory.
Sugar: On Cliff’s 18th birthday, his younger sister gives him a wad of cash and instructs him to head downtown to “go get sex”. Cliff needs no second bidding, and enters Toronto’s rent-boy district where he meets crack-smoking Butch. Shocking but with an uncanny believability, Cliff’s infatuation with the sex-trade master and his drug and hustling lifestyle leads to the violation of what little innocence Cliff has left.
Womanly Love: Jeanne feels her life is slipping a little further away from her every day. Her attentive husband, David, offers little solace. One night, flamboyant Marie dances into her life. Beguiled and fascinated by her free spirit, Jeanne takes up dancing lessons and goes on an impromptu trip with Marie.