Happy Birthday, Marsha! Directed by Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel. San Francisco: Frameline, 2017. 14 minutes.

Mama Gloria. Directed by Luchina Fisher. New York: Third World Newsreel, 2020. 76 minutes.

In a moment when teaching about both contemporary Black struggle and trans history is under direct attack by the United States government, reviewing these films as teaching tools feels like both an act of subversion and care. Alongside other feminist films, Happy Birthday, Marsha! and Mama Gloria offer a window into Black trans subjectivity—but even more so they provide an opportunity to discuss Black trans feminism as a toolkit and way of viewing and encountering the world. Simultaneously, they demonstrate the tension between visibility and opacity: how making Black trans lives visible also creates opportunities for state surveillance and systematic harm (Spade 2015).

The first of the two films, Happy Birthday, Marsha!, is a fictional window into the lives of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera just before the Stonewall Riots. As a short, this film produced by Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel fits easily into a classroom discussion. However, its strength as a teaching tool is its ability to draw viewers into an ethereal, almost dream-like recounting that conveys the feelings—both mundane and extraordinary—that characterized both of these icons and the milieu in which they lived.

Alongside these feelings, there has been some controversy about the historical accuracy of the film’s depiction of the events leading up to Stonewall. I encourage educators interested in this film to teach it not as a source of biographical or historical information, but as a lens on the confluence of class, race, and gender that produced the Stonewall Riots. Rather than focus on historical veracity, the film instead pushes us to think about what affective and material forces shaped the participants in this event. In doing so, you invite students into a conversation about archival transparency and opacity, about how we construct memory, and about who it is constructed for (Gossett, Stanley, and Burton 2017).

In contrast to the snapshot offered by Happy Birthday, Marsha!, the film Mama Gloria provides viewers with biographical depth, narrating the life and impact of a Black trans elder. Mama Gloria, the film’s protagonist, embodies a key distinction drawn out by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, namely that Black trans identity is relational first and foremost (2018). This relationality challenges both the historical erasure of Black experiences of gender and the popular idea that queer and trans life (often understood through a lens of whiteness) is a “new” phenomenon. Further, it explores how elders relate to and are understood by younger generations of Black trans people. This is particularly useful in our current moment, when queer and trans youth are being systematically targeted by the state.

This film humanizes the figure of Mama Gloria, recognizing the care work and organizing she’s done over her life. It also wrestles with how that care work can reinscribe respectability politics. One weakness of the film is the perhaps uncritical application of respectability politics and how it shapes Mama Gloria’s efforts to teach trans femmes using her “charm school.” This should be unpacked for students to demonstrate how care work can be a disciplining force in which resources and support are traded for adherence to certain performances of self. Feminists looking to include Mama Gloria in their teaching repertoire should be sure to scaffold the film to emphasize its contributions and address its shortcomings.

Providing classroom structures of care is important in each of these two films because they address the difficult reality of what it has meant, historically and in the present moment, to be Black and trans in its fullness. In particular, students who are survivors of sexual harm or who have experienced other kinds of acute violence may find Mama Gloria especially triggering. This should not discount the use of either film, but appropriate care and forewarning should be given to students and community members when facilitating viewings. Providing this context can allow students the opportunity to engage with these texts in trauma-informed ways.

These two films, put in conversation with one another, offer a unique chance for feminist educators to introduce students and community members to both the affective and historical realities of Black trans subjectivity. It also provides an important toolkit to shift discussions away from the public narratives in which Black trans people are discussed only when we are abused or killed. Each film, in its own way, emphasizes what Black trans life looks like through the connections built and the practices of joy that are carefully cultivated in the face of systematic violence.

Blu Buchanan is a university fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UNC Asheville. Their academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals like GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and PUBLIC: A Journal of Imagining America, as well as edited volume chapters in Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis and Unsafe Words: Queer Perspectives on Consent in the #MeToo Era. They have also written extensively in the public sphere, particularly about movements to disarm campus police and confront trans antagonism in the university.