The movie Brother- to- Brother was made to show the similarities of the current struggles of black gay men to the in Harlem, using Bruce Nugent as the connection. Even though there are some apparent differences in the oppression that each age group had to deal with because racism and homosexuality are more accepted now, but there are still problems in the past that are shown reoccurring in the present. With the similarity in struggles, there are similarities in Harlem Renaissance themes. The themes this movie brought up fir me was, identification with race, anger at racism and pride.
When it comes to oppression squables, the theme pride tend to come up a lot. Brother- to- Brother, is written with the essence of pride. In the first seen where Perry is in class, he gets in an argument with another black guy about whether its different to fight for equality as a black person or as a black homosexual. The fact that Perry was not shy or afraid to stand up for him self and his ideas, even though he is put down and had hateful words thrown at him for it. This may just seem like a normal classroom debate but the separation between black pride and black gay pride in Harlem had been an issue for a long time, which is depicted in the movie.
Many of the themes in the Harlem Renaissance themes are proactive towards the reconstruction of black culture and equality between blacks and whites. However anger at racism is still a large theme of the Harlem Renaissance and this theme was showed in the movie. Perry has a very open mind when it comes to race, but his long time friend, Marcus, show so much hostility to white people everyday. After he performed a white man complemented his poem and Marcus couldn’t even hear the good thing he was saying, because it was a white man saying it he took it offensively. Perry didn’t understand why Marcus was so rude accepting a complement from another man who appreciates good poetry and he was extremely confused. His anger is driven by the fact that he always feel that white people are trying to be better than him or they think that they are. Anger seems to be Marcus’s way of fighting racism, instead of engaging himself in his culture; he hates the group that held his race down for so long, even when they compliment him.
Anger at racism is something that showed up in the Harlem Renaissance, in the movie, and in my everyday life. On multiple occasions I have been attacked by groups of black girls purely because I’m white, or I have been told that white people shouldn’t have dreadlocks. They assumed that just because a hundred years ago white people enslaved their ancestors, makes me a racist. When in all reality, my family came on a boat from Russia and were in the holocaust, and none of my ancestors were a part of the slave trade.
In my opinion, identification with race is one of the most common occurring themes in the Harlem Renaissance because that’s one of the most important things it was about. Through out the Harlem Renaissance artists were learning how to use their new acquired freedom to show the power they had with their race identity, and their rights that they should have. In the movie Perry shows his interest to identify with race by taking the collage class you see him in where they talk about influential black icons. Though the rest of his class didn’t share his interest in exploring black homosexual struggles, he still got the opportunity to explore and identify with it which made him really happy. Just as Bruce, Langston, and Wallace used the magazine Fire to express their opinions on being black homosexuals at the time, which in turn helped Bruce explore what it meant to be a gay black man and inevitably allowed him to identify with his race and sexuality clearly. I think this is the most important theme because this is what really made this time so revolutionary for black culture, because the base of culture is identification. So during the time they were trying to change the meaning of negro, they made a entire culture that was more than they ever thought.
