Angela Harvey, Rodney Chester, and Nathan Hale Williams: Three Black Queer Artists Expressing Themselves in Movies

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I spent five days, October 8-12, in Riverside, California for the annual Convocation of the Unity Fellowship Movement. One of the most fascinating events we went to during the convocation was a combination film screening and question-and-answer session held at the Riverside LGBTQ+ Center featuring filmmakers Angela Harvey and Nathan Hale Williams and actor Rodney Chester. Harvey and Chester were both present from the opening of the session, though Williams arrived later and Harvey left early due to another commitment. Harvey and Chester both projected enormous charisma; Harvey was dressed in skin-tight blue jeans and a simple top, while Chester looked electrifying in a powder-blue suit. Harvey’s film was called Black Rainbow Love, and was 45 minutes of interviews with African-American Lesbians and Gay men in coupled relationships with other Black partners. She said that she was having problems finding a distributor for it because at 45 minutes it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. She also said that it wasn’t taken seriously by a number of the film festivals to which she submitted it because it only had two people credited with being on the crew: herself as producer, director, and writer, and Ken Branson as cinematographer and editor (though Harvey said she’d done a lot of the editing herself). Completed in 2022, it’s sort of a modern updating of the classic Queer documentary Word Is Out (1977) specifically focused on Black Queer people and the dual struggles they face with both racism and homophobia. (Blessed be, Harvey did not use the horrible jargon word “intersectionality.”) Harvey identified herself as a single Lesbian, though she’d been routinely coupled until 2019, when she finally realized she’d had a history of being trapped in co-dependent relationships and needed to break free of emotional commitments to other people.

To me the most interesting of Harvey’s interviewees were Deidre Gray, a Transwoman from the Midwest, and Rayceen Pendarvis, an older woman who said she’d been a mentor and substitute mother to a lot of Queer people who’d been cast adrift by their families of origin. Almost inevitably given that the director was a Lesbian, Black Rainbow Love featured more women than men, but Harvey proved to be a sensitive interviewer with a knack for getting her subjects to reveal themselves. After the movie I suggested that she should do a follow-up about African-American Lesbians and Gay men involved in interracial relationships – and Harvey, much to my surprise, took the suggestion well and didn’t challenge me to make such a film myself. In her opening presentation she stressed that she’s nearly 60 years old and had never even thought of becoming a filmmaker until she did this one, though she’d worked as a writer on the cable TV series Teen Wolf. Mostly she’s a motivational speaker, counselor, self-described “GROWTHologist,” and also a writer and poet who was selling two books at the event, an adult coloring book called Colorful Growth and a poetic memoir called Poetic Alchemy: Seven Intentions for Healing, Personal Growth, and Transformation. Rodney Chester turned out to have been an actor mainly known for his role as part of the cast of Noah’s Arc, a cable TV series that had a two-year run (2004-2006) on the Queer-themed network Logo. He said that despite the fact that Noah’s Arc was the most popular show on Logo for the short time it ran, it was canceled because the network couldn’t find a sponsor – which an audience member said reminded him of the fate of Nat “King” Cole’s 1957 variety show on NBC, which also didn’t draw a sponsor because no one wanted to have their product identified with a show featuring a Black host. Chester recalled that there was a lot of pressure from Logo to introduce white characters into Noah’s Arc, which the producers resisted because they wanted to keep the show all-Black and focused on the issues specifically faced by Black Gay men. He said that the actor who played his partner on the show was straight in real life, and it was a professional challenge for Chester not to cross the line that would make his co-star uncomfortable with physical displays of affection between them.

The rights to Noah’s Arc ended up with Paramount, which produced a feature-film version released this year. The feature includes the same actors as they’ve naturally aged, and one twist in the movie is that the baby he and his partner were raising in the original series has grown up and come out as Transgender. Chester also had a supporting role in the next film shown as part of the afternoon, Nathan Hale Williams’s and Jennia Frederique’s 90 Days (2016), a 20-minute short produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in association with Williams’s own production company, iN-Hale Entertainment, and Full Frequency Media. 90 Days seemed to me the weakest film on the program, not only because I’m still committed to the idea that we’ve been sold a bill of goods in being told that the whole cadre of diseases lumped together under the name AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) can be blamed on a single virus, the so-called HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), but because even if you accept the HIV/AIDS model as true, it’s awfully didactic. It centers around the straight relationship between Taylor (Nic Few) and Jessica (Teyonah Parris), who met at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles (which, by coincidence, Charles and I had recently visited on a day trip to L.A. and we recognized quite a few of the locations inside that incredible establishment) and had been dating for the titular 90 days. The issue between them was that Jessica had dodged any physical intimacy between them without telling Taylor why, and on the night in question Taylor brings over a red jewel case containing an engagement ring and plans to propose to Jessica – until she tells him that (shock!) she’s HIV positive. The most celebrity-adjacent actor in the movie is Pauletta Washington, Denzel Washington’s wife, who gave up her own acting career to raise their children. She plays Taylor’s mother Gayle, and her main function in the film is to question whether it’s wise for Taylor to marry a woman he’s known such a short time. Williams, who wrote 90 Days solo as well as co-directing it with Jennia Frederique (who also is in the film in a supporting role), dared to leave the ending open rather than tell us definitively whether Taylor does or does not let the fact that Jessica is HIV positive break up their relationship. One member of the audience, apparently having missed the import of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s logo being on the credits, thought that the big reveal was going to be that Jessica was a Transwoman.

The third and last film on the program was All Boys Aren’t Blue, a 2021 adaptation of a young-adult novel by George M. Johnson, also directed by Nathan Hale Williams and produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation along with Williams’s own iN-Hale Productions and All Tea No Shade Productions. Johnson’s novel was published in 2020 and has become one of the most frequently banned books in the U.S. due to its open addressing of the issues facing a young Black Queer growing up in this country. (It was the number three most banned book in the U.S. in 2021, the second most in 2022 and 2023, and the most banned in 2024.) The film adapts three vignettes from Johnson’s book: a story of how they were (since Johnson has come out as non-binary the plural pronoun is appropriate) beaten up by bullies at age five (they were out with two older cousins and they were attacked by six larger boys, one of whom literally kicked most of Johnson’s teeth out, leading to them getting adult teeth way ahead of schedule and being literally unwilling to smile); a portrait of their grandmother Nanny (Jenifer Lewis), the only supportive member of their family; and their account of pledging the most prestigious Black college fraternity and having to deal with the other members’ homophobia. George Johnson is played by three different people: Thomas Hobson as a child, Dyllon Burnside as the one who relates the story of Nanny, and Bernard David Jones as a college student. The result was an incredibly powerful film that, at 40 minutes, has the same problem as Black Rainbow Love: it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. Williams and Rodney Chester joined forces for an hour-long Q&A that addressed the difficulties of getting Black- and Queer-themed films out to a mass audience. They were originally supposed to show a fourth film, Come Together: Art’s Power for Change, a making-of documentary about the groundbreaking 2006 film Dirty Laundry, the story of a young urban Gay Black man who’s summoned to the Southern home where he grew up to deal with a family crisis. The film was intended as a tribute to Dirty Laundry’s director, the late Maurice Jamal, but the event ran too long for them to be able to show it. Nonetheless, Williams and Chester paid homage to Jamal’s ability not only to get the feature made but to recruit name actors like Rockmond Dunbar and Loretta Devine to be in it. All in all, the event was a tribute to the power and persistence of these Black Queer artists not only to get their films made but to present them to the public as best they can and do their level best to build an audience for Black Queer cinema.