"The New Black" film screening and conversation with Yoruba Richen

7:00 p.m. Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Hoff Theater, Stamp Student Union

Free and open to the public

The New Black is a documentary that tells the story of how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the recent gay marriage movement and the fight over civil rights. The film documents activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalize gay marriage and examines homophobia in the black community’s institutional pillar -- the black church -- and reveals the Christian right wing’s strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political agenda. The New Black takes viewers into the pews and onto the streets and provides a seat at the kitchen table as it tells the story of the historic fight to win marriage equality in Maryland and charts the evolution of this divisive issue within the black community and features several local activists and clergy including Sharon Lettman-Hicks, Rev. Delman Coates, and Karess Taylor-Hughes, who graduated from the University of Maryland in 2010 and worked as a field organizer for Equality Maryland and The Human Rights Campaign. 

Yoruba Richen is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker who has directed and produced films in the US and abroad. Her award-winning documentary, Promised Land, received a Diverse Voices Co-Production Fund Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and premiered on the PBS series POV in July 2010. Richen has received numerous grants, including a Fulbright Award and International Reporting Project (IRP) grant. In 2012, she won the Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award and became a Guggenheim Fellow. She is a graduate of Brown University and teaches documentary film at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

This is the kick-off event for this year's lecture series in LGBT Studies, Queer Intimacies.  For more information about the series, see http://lgbts.umd.edu/lectureseries.html