Filmmaker Terry Blade describes his short, My Gender Is Black, as “a film about the Black male body as a battleground, the voice as an archive, and blackness as a universe of gendered truth.” The film challenges how we define masculinity as it relates to Black men.
We open on young Cristian Julian Chigbolu as he vlogs about being a Black male and a trans boy. He hates being labeled. He never felt “trans.” He just felt like a boy. From there, a video collage of Black queer men takes over, cutting between color and black-and-white images of them to capture their individual personalities. Each man stares straight into the lens, and the segments are tied together by shots of the men sitting in the same chair, in the same corner of bare cement walls.
Ujah Ogbole grew up in a world where boys weren’t allowed to cry because crying would call their manhood into question. Today, as a grown man, he’s stopped hiding his true self, and that vulnerability makes him powerful.
A shirtless skateboarder stares down at the camera in My Gender Is Black.
“…Big Sexy and Jay Hill set the record straight: Black gay men are not all the same.”
In a podcast-like interview, Big Sexy and Jay Hill set the record straight: Black gay men are not all the same. Some are out, some keep quiet, and, even in 2026, plenty still face families and communities that won’t accept their sexual orientation. This bigotry is even found inside the gay community, where labels are in full force: “No fat. No femme.” Syd Tillman points out that the progressive world has decided being a gay man is cute, like a Beverly Hills handbag. But cute or not, they’re still men, and they’re tired of anyone telling them what they should look like or how they should act.
I can’t state this any better than the film’s press kit does. “My Gender Is Black explores how Black masculinity, sexuality and gender are produced, policed, punished, beautified, feminized, sanctified, athleticized, watched and performed through objects, institutions, speech, silence, music, posture and the body. Rather than resolve Black masculinity into a single definition, the film holds contradictory expressions in the same frame and allows each body to remain particular.”
What Blade delivers is not just a thoughtful video essay on gender and identity but a celebration of its subjects. The piece is most effective in confronting the social norms surrounding being Black and masculine, and it allows its subjects to step into the public light. I would never judge a person for living their life as they see it. I understand all too well the unhappiness and despair that come with being judged. Sure, there is still much for me to learn, understand, and even accept. My Gender Is Black absolutely opens up my world a little more.
For screening information, visit the My Gender Is Black official website.
"…being a gay man is cute, like a Beverly Hills handbag."
