Unreliable Narrators
“I am all of them, they are all of me…”
— Etheridge Knight, The Idea of Ancestry
Through Unreliable Narrators, I depict family recollections from the life of an uncle whose personal biography reflects the larger Gay Liberation Movement of twentieth-century America. In this project, I act as a medium, embodying kindred memory through portraiture and performance. I work both behind and in front of the lens to reflect the self as a microcosm of an ancestral collective. Each photographic, sonic, text-based, or video portrait is born from extensive research, mining the archives of family lore, and aligning these oral accounts against available historical documentation.
This project examines and reconstructs a Black, Queer, working-class (personal/political) history—a history whose visibility is often overshadowed by the dominant public narratives and collective concerns of mostly White, gay, middle-class men or silenced through notions of decency, respectability, and a desire for power and/or assimilation in Black America. This project serves to combat this invisibility, silencing, and erasure with dignity and a dash of camp.
Unreliable Narrators speaks to the resplendent elaborations of African-American, vernacular, storytelling traditions in reimagining our pasts, presents, and futures. My narrators are contested sources. Their stories sometimes bump against the boundaries of realism or shift depending on the teller’s mood, shrink or expand according to whichever ear is listening. There are secrets and lies and truths all rolled into various accounts. This is the oral tradition. The way we whisper our lineage. The way our tongues move to document place and presence. The way we remember who we are.
“Memory in this regard becomes responsibility; as responsibility and memory both become us.”
— Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent
“Collective memory requires that we piece together the fragments of individual memory and behold something, not necessarily larger, but with greater depth and color.”
— Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh