Cheryl Dunye | The Watermelon Woman / 1996 (Germany), 1997 (US)

the necessity of fiction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cheryl Dunye (screenwriter and director) The Watermelon Woman / 1996 (Germany), 1997 (US)

 

Dunye portrays herself in this landmark film as a 25-year-old black lesbian woman working at a Philadelphia video store in the late 1990s with her best friend Tamara (Valarie Walker). The store seems to be the perfect hang-out of the lesbian woman with an openly gay owner, all of which reminds me a great deal of my own experiences in that city just a decade earlier, including my Giovanni Bookstore visits, an important gay bookstore mentioned in the film. I feel in this film that I almost fell into a world in which I once lived, days in which the owner of the bookstore might approach you to suggest what you were particularly looking for based on months of careful observation. They knew their customers and Philly might have been said to know their local neighborhood citizens.

 

   Although, of course, I was not part of the gay lesbian world upon which this film centers. I was not, as Cheryl is, involved in the African-American society in which suddenly she discovers, through film, a world in which she, as a developing young filmmaker identifies with in watching the film titled Plantation Memories, featuring the black actress Fae, known on screen as “The Watermelon Woman,” featuring her in a “mammy role” in which she pleads for the health and well-being of her white plantation “mistress.” For Cheryl, the role is so memorable in the manner of other great black “mammy characters” such as Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, Louise Beavers, and others, to say nothing of figures such as Ethel Waters, Dorothy Dandridge, and the roles played early on by Eartha Kitt. 

     But it’s the fact that Cheryl accidently discovers through acquaintances and her own mother that Fae Richards was also a noted singer performing in the Philadelphia black clubs of the 1930s and 40s, and that she may have had a relationship with her white director, Martha Page that Cheryl begins to develop a near obsessive fascination with the unknown and culturally ignored black actress.

     Her continued research begins to create tensions between her far more immediately sexually focused lesbian friend, who is also disturbed when Cheryl becomes involved with a new white employee, Diana (Guinevere Turner), who appears to Tamara as a white wannabe black woman simply taking advantage of her friend’s passion for old films and the exploration of white/black relationships.

     Dunye takes this all into much more comic territory, if personally serious, as we see the relationship between Diana—who obviously quite wealthy, nonetheless wears chic dog collars and other slightly S&M paraphernalia—begins to develop a relationship with Dunye’s character, and as Dunye begins to explore a rather verboten lesbian film world where the relationship between “the Watermelon Woman” and her white director lover is not permitted to be fully explored, even in a New York City lesbian archive in which whose director is perfectly happy to throw open—quite literally—the boxes of a special film archive, but refuses to allow any permission to actually explore its contents.

     There, nonetheless, Dunye discovers a treasure trove of photographs which clearly document the relationship of her now unknown black acting idol with her white director. But a later visit with the director’s sister, deep into denial about her sister’s lesbianism, gets Cheryl thrown out of her house.

      From there it gets worse as her relationship with the everyday sexually focused Tamara begins to fray, and even Cheryl’s sexual involvement with the hot young Diana begins to fall apart as she grows increasingly obsessed with the obscure figure from the past.

      We begin to understand that any such outsider—in this case, a black, woman, lesbian, and intelligent pursuer of truth—has nearly impossible restrictions put upon her to discover the truth of racial and cultural history. Dunye treats this quite humorously and almost matter-of-factly, but we want to scream when she is ousted from CLIT, the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology or when Martha Page’s sister sends for her black maid to remove Cheryl from her house simply for restating the facts that have already been published in some publications.

     But it only gets worse when Cheryl discovers Fae’s later lover of 20-years long, a black woman after her failed film career and her notorious life in the Philadelphia clubs where she sang. June Walker (Cheryl Clarke) might suddenly have been the deep source of Fae’s life that she has been seeking. But when Dunye arrives at her Philadelphia door, a specially made supper treat in hand, she is met by her neighbor who tells her that June has just been admitted to the hospital with heart problems and hands over a folder filled with June’s own diatribe against the young researcher for daring to assert that Fae was a lover of the white woman Martha Page, a woman, after all, who had kept June's friend and lover of 20-years in the symbolic chains of “mammy roles” and a failed career as an aspiring black performer.

    At the very same moment, Cheryl’s relationships with Tamara and Diana have come apart, the ties with which she’s bound herself in every aspect of her life having become unwound, as if any possibility of even imagining love between the black and white worlds which she inhabits as being utterly impossible. The young researcher is forced to admit that all the ties she sought to bind have come undone, the forgottenness of the talented young actress who she so admired is seemingly destined to be just that, utterly forgotten because of layers of racial and cultural hate. It is enough to make any socially ware viewer of this film burst into tears.

     Such worlds and difficulties, in fact, do exist. But as the credits role and Cheryl recounts the actual history of the remarkably unknown black movie star, Fae Richards, we also get a new punch in the belly with the passing crawler: “Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction.”

 

     What we might have suspected all along is true, and the tears, if you are all the sensitive kind as I am, flow down your face once again, as you realize that for such an outsider figure as Cheryl Dunye whitewashed history does not permit you anything more than an incredible fiction such as this film has just presented us.

      There was no “Watermelon Woman,” no Fae Richards, and the lovely Hollywood-like photographs we have seen were created on the small budget of the film as a solution to actually purchasing the rights to such actual black actor’s photos. But still, we comprehend the film’s remarkable truths. If this woman didn’t exist, dozens of others like her did. To talk about their existence as do writers such as Dunye, Adrienne Kennedy, Susan Lori-Parks, and so many other brilliant black woman, you have given no choice but to create fictions. When reality won’t permit the truth you have nothing to turn to by your own imagination.

      Even more terrifying is what might have been a footnote were it not for its brutal representation of the reality: among the budget items of support for this now culturally recognized film, was a small grant given to Dunye by the NEA in 1996 of $31,500. In June 14, Julia Duin wrote an article for the rightest-based The Washington Times quoting a Philadelphia City Paper review describing the sex scene between Cheryl and Diana as “the hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid. Evidently that original reviewer, Jeannine DeLombard had never experienced Chantal Ackerman’s Je Tu Il Elle of 1974, which is perhaps why film history and  LGBTQ+ film history is particularly important.

      The result, as anyone with knowledge of the history of NEA funding might have expected, was immediate, with Chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee’s United States House Education on Oversight and Investigations, Peter Hoekstra’s reactionary response, a letter written to then NEA chairwoman Jane Alexander, castigating Dunye’s films as evidence of “'the serious possibility that taxpayer money is being used to fund the production and distribution of patently offensive and possibly pornographic movies.” Because of this controversy, the NEA restructured its awards grants to provide monies only for specific, censororily approved projects, as opposed to granting outright to individuals and groups for open explorations. Yet again, tears of recognition rolled down my own my cheeks, having experienced previously, in a very personal manner, the Reagan years controversies of the NEA four, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, all gay artists refused grants by Regan-appointed John Frohnmayer in June 1990, along with the rejection of support for the Robert Mapplethorpe show soon after. I was there, and involved, refusing to apply for a much-needed grant for my Sun & Moon press that next year in protest.

     Little by little, any expression of truth in the LGBTQ+ world required more and more fictional deception. The real research of truth was upended.

     We come away from Dunye’s film, however, with a sense of relief and belief, of possibility rather than embitterment. If Fae Richards didn’t actually exist, she most certainly should have and probably did if history had not erased so many individuals like her.

     This film is a profound extension of a hand from communities outside of Hollywood and even the more normative LGBTQ+ archives to embrace what probably really existed, demanding us to rethink our own notions of black, lesbian, female perspectives and of outsider art in general.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).