High-Dyke Density: Urban Fragmentations and the Black Lesbian Condition in ‘Pariah’
For American director Dianrea “Dee” Rees, the street-bound borders of 2010s Brooklyn set the scene for sapphic self-discovery in her 2011 feature film “Pariah.” Directed originally as a short film and an MFA thesis for the Tisch School of the Arts, the character sequence of its titular character, a closeted teenage lesbian, Alike, and other narrative structures somewhat rely on the borough as a backdrop large enough for both the coexistence and aversion that comes with the circumstances, events and perceptions that morph what we now call the “Black lesbian condition.” The long-form demographic changes within the borough due to increased social opportunity for Black Americans in the early 20th century provide Rees with a baseline for a covert and somewhat invasive commentary on the long-standing intersection between population and liberation.
“Pariah” centers on 17-year-old Alike, a closeted lesbian between the world of her traditionalist parents and her best friend, a butch lesbian named Laura. The expository indicator of the film’s acknowledgment of the role played by the urban setting is seen not through individual scenes of interactions, but rather through the dichotomy of scenes in various points. The opening scene shows Alike awkwardly moving through a line at a club with Laura, who seems much more comfortable than the former, with Alike frantically stuffing a drawstring bag with her baggy shirt and pants, while Sparlha Swa’s “Doing My Thing” plays in the background. Alike rides her last stop on the bus to “Doing my Thing” while it is clear that she does not know what her “thing” truly is. However, she does have direct exposure to the thing (a butch lesbian) she alleges to be, an alien to two different aspects of her personhood at the same time.
Projects like the National Black Lesbian Archive in New York City and the 1996 federally-funded mockumentary “The Watermelon Woman,” directed by Cheryl Lee Dunye, speak to the expansion and development of the “Black lesbian condition” in the late 20th century. This stems from evidence that many prominent Black female artists, writers and thinkers from the Harlem Renaissance and the Second Wave Feminist movement of the ’60s identified with the homoeroticism within the feminine category long after their prime. Figures like singer Billie Holiday, playwright Lorraine Hansberry and dancer Mabel Hampton did not publicly state their sexuality during the duration of their respective careers, but their identities as sapphic women were discovered by LGBTQ-oriented think tanks, research centers and historical preservation efforts much later. These research institutions were located in predominantly urban environments to search the journals, photographs and even homes of closeted Black lesbians.
The research efforts of such institutions have largely been focused towards the accumulation and preservation of Black lesbian memorabilia centralized to diverse, densely-populated urban environments. Many lesbian-focused archives are based in major U.S. cities such as San Francisco, Kansas City, New York City, Portland and Boston. Factors such as labor force availability, purchasing power and planning changes could be factors for the centralization of lesbian-oriented research centers, but each city possesses a notable documented increase of LGBTQ+ inhabitants within the late 20th century. This is due to large waves of urbanization and migration — a result of increased association of cities with opportunity, possibility and individual liberation.
Uses and limits of urbanization in “Pariah” articulate a neo-commentary on the longstanding association of urbanization with Blackness, centered around conceptions and caveats of perceived prosperity. The National Archive Center refers to a period between 1910 and 1970 in which over six million Black Americans moved from Southern to Northern regions of the United States. This period is referred to as The Great Migration. The first phase catalyzed by the end of Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow in major Southern states, with increased urban economic growth in the 1920s, due to restrictions on people of color formally supporting the WWI effort.
Black-led efforts of racial equity and justice such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissance, introduced figures like writer Zora Neale Hurston and philosopher Alain Locke, who brought light to the significance of queer subtext and spaces in the African-American art of the 1930s. The 1940s and ’50s saw an increase in Black queer thinkers in the major city of Paris, with thinkers like the African-American novelist Richard Wright and Haitian Poet Ida Faubert. The second phase of The Great Migration is attributed to the growing defense industry of World War II, and the subsequent Civil Rights Act, second wave of feminism, and the Gay and Lesbian Revolution of the ’60s. During this time, the art and theory of racial justice expanded towards Black Americans who were met between the thresholds of multifaceted gender and sexual identities.
Increased prominence of intertextual identities within a diverse, population-dense, prominent site of liberation for Black Americans highlights a broader connection and increased interpersonal communication on a broad scale. Individualistic aspects of urbana life broadened the scope of gender and sexual expression within urban environments. “Pariah”’s appeals as an “urban” approach to a familiar topic, with the effects of urbanization being identified in various moments throughout the film.
The 2021 Gallup Daily Tracking Survey revealed that the New York metropolitan area, which is between New York and New Jersey, has the highest population of LGBTQ adults, 47% of those adults are women, 13% of those adults are Black, 23% of them between 18 and 24. New York is also the most population-dense city in the United States, with an estimated density of 29,302.66 people per square mile. Queer-dominated areas such as Chelsea or the West Village yield densities of 82–97K people per square mile.
“Pariah” portrays this concentration as something that both expands and contracts Alike’s particular lesbian experience. When she is at the club with Laura, Alike is comfortable in her gender expression with no external inhibition, while, at the same time, her lack of security within her gender and sexual identity prohibits her from actively identifying with the lesbian category. Alike’s mother Audrey, a hyper-religious and homophobic maternal figure, drives the majority of the conflict within the film surrounding Alike’s sexuality. Her religious convictions leave way to a broader dichromatic structure that evaluates the impacts of urbanization and density on romantic and sexual communication on humans.
In long-standing metropolitan areas, environmental conditions have impacted the evolution of homoerotic sexual signals and mating behaviors Although many of the concrete research articles analyzing sexual interaction in urban environments refer mainly to animal behavior, the same positive and negative aspects stand in human behavior. Various observational studies released in the 2000s and 2010s concluded that anthropogenic sensory pollutants such as artificial light and low-frequency acoustic noise reduced communication efficacy within various taxa including birds, insects, amphibians and fish, with certain verbal indicators becoming masked by anthropogenic noise pollution. Humans, like animals, utilize multiple signals during sexual communication, whether through verbal communication, body language or symbolism (e.g. Sappho’s use of the lavender to signify lesbianism). Their opacity depends on the social implications and perceptions of the behavior.
In the case of lesbianism, the dominant articulation of relationship satisfaction or contempt in private settings is verbal communication. Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women, was an observational study performed by Psychologist Alan P. Bell and sociologist Martin P. Weinberg, intended to describe and discredit certain notions regarding homosexual behavior in both men and women. Their findings concluded that lesbians fare better in terms of verbal communication than heterosexual women, straight men and gay men. A 2012 study published in the PSI CHI Journal of Psychological Research revealed that greater physical touch indicated greater relationship satisfaction for lesbian women compared to heterosexual women, while greater words of affirmation indicated greater relationship satisfaction for heterosexual women compared to lesbian women. The pair envisioned that this could have been a learned behavior, as varying social acceptances between the romantic experiences of straight vs. gay women lead to many lesbians having to utilize implicit methods of sexual communication at a significantly higher rate.
While “Pariah” does not necessarily touch on how urbanization impacts lesbian communication from a purely physical, sociocultural or psychoanalytic perspective, the present factors of a typical metropolitan circumstance could be used metaphorically to refer to different points of Alike’s story as the film progresses, particularly when referring to the physical, sociological and structural circumstances of a predominantly Black portion of the Brooklyn borough. Alike’s neighborhood appears to be highly fragmented and population-dense, with every character being of African-American descent. The fragmented nature of her community results in a high expectation on stringent physical and behavioral indicators of masculine and feminine gender categories, which reinforces Alike’s challenge of coexisting in an area with a high density of a demographic, traditional masculine and feminine sexual categories, she does not align with.
The urban setting of “Pariah” only emphasizes this. The physical structure of an urbanized area is often fragmented, and areas of high population concentration often opt to split into smaller, stratified groups according to cultural similarities. This isolates individuals outside of said groups due to cultural differences, which can result in intense intraracial and intrasexual groupthink. The highly-fragmented state of Alike’s contrasting communities causes a reliance on the sexual specifics of her two respective microhabitats within Brooklyn. Both of these environments negatively impact Alike’s gender and sexual expression in the beginning and middle stages of the movie, as they negatively impact her ability to switch between her preferred and expected manner of facilitating sexual activity. This can be seen in her relationship with Bina, the daughter of one of Audrey’s coworkers, with whom she shares a brief attraction, or in the platonic communication between Alike and Laura.
In the climax of the movie, Audrey reveals that she knows about Alike’s gender and sexual identity. Alike then returns to Laura’s place of work to explain what happened, but Laura calls Alike out for wanting to distance herself from the butch and lesbian category, accusing her of treating her sexuality like a costume “that you can take on and off.” Ultimately, Laura claims that Alike is making a fool of herself by failing to perfectly align with drastically different modes of being.
The resolution of the film emphasizes urban fragmentation’s effect on Alike’s sexuality symbolically, as it concludes with Alike telling her father she is leaving home to go to college in California. This is the only scene in the movie that does not feature high-rise infrastructure or other urbanized physical structures (i.e. highways, mass transit, landmarks, etc.), signifying that Alike’s removal from the fragmented micro-traditional environment of Brooklyn, alongside a supportive parent, ultimately liberates her from the Appollonian tendencies of a traditionalist micro-habitat. She is able to soundly express an adherence to the Black lesbian condition, and ultimately a new factor within the broader sexual context.