black queer and no fear, first trans director up for oscar

By Emil Wilbekin, AFROPUNK contributor 

Yance Ford is the first Trans director to be nominated for an Academy Award for his documentary ‘Strong Island’ which focuses on Blackness, criminalization and social injustice through a Queer lens.

“Strong Island” is a powerful documentary about America and identity. The story focuses on William Ford losing his life and how a family and friends have to cope with social injustice, criminalization and “reasonable fear.” Director Yance Ford courageously explores the death of his brother, his families’ trauma, and the issues of race, Blackness and the justice system fifteen years later. Yance talked to AFROPUNK about his own sexual identity journey, his historic Oscar nomination, and why we should not live in fear.

You’ve made history as the first Trans person ever to be nominated for an Oscar for directing. How does it feel?

It feels incredible. I remember being young and not knowing what the hell I could do, how I could feel better about the schism. If this nomination helps one kid somewhere, feel less disconnected, then I embrace leading with that foot. If this nomination especially helps one family of color somewhere not put their child out, then I’m happy to lead with that. At the same time, I think that there are going to be people who forefront the historic nomination of a transgender director so as to create a reason to back burner the issues in the film. I’m not so interested in the adults, I’m more interested in the Trans kids and their families to know that if you continue to love your child as your child, they will be okay.

How did you create this film and deal with all of the emotional baggage of grief, sadness and anger? How did you get to the place of, I am going to tell this story?

It got to the point of knowing that I had to make the film when it became harder to maintain my silence, then I was afraid. So, the fear of the unknown repercussions: The fact that I don’t know what the man who killed my brother looked like. The fact that the family associated with that garage is very powerful in Suffolk County [Long Island]. The fact that my family still lived in Suffolk County. All of those things kept me silent, but the fear at a certain point was not as great as the, as the cost of the silence, right? I was paying a price and I decided that it was too high and that’s when I talked to a friend and mentor about my brother, that he had lived and died, because at that point I hadn’t shared with that many people in the documentary community or at my day job that I even had a brother. Talking to her really helped me just to start the process of developing the film. I decided that, you know what, fuck being afraid. I can’t be silent anymore.

Did your Queerness, being Trans, affect your storytelling?

I’m surprised that people don’t read the queerness in the film because I became my parent’s oldest son when my brother was killed, and so I took on all of those responsibilities. When my father died, he asked me to help my mother. ‘I want you to, to watch out for your sister.’ And so those responsibilities really helped me background the emotional difficulty of making the film. I feel things very deeply and very clearly, but I don’t always necessarily share them. I usually turn it into something else. With my brother’s death and the difficulty around making the film, I put all of that difficulty into the process.

Talk about being a Trans Black man, your Blackness, and how you were able to fight for your freedom through your brother’s story.

You know, what’s interesting about identifying as a Trans man is the different stages of my transition. I did surgery years ago and I started the hormone therapy about a year and a half ago, and it’s a process, right? I imagine my brother going through puberty and seeing his body change. My body has changed a lot. I mean, I’ve always been, my mother would say ‘big boned’, but I’d always been short and stocky, but I’ve become more muscular. I have become more outwardly male. And when I think about William’s story and how old he was when that happened to him being a teenager as opposed to being in your forties, right? There’s so much that’s happening that I actually am cognizant, like I can tell the difference between how I am perceived on the streets and in my own personal circles this year as opposed to last year. And the awareness of becoming more male while being Black has been mind-blowing. The more male I become, it seems the Blacker I get. And despite the fact that I have always been Black, and I have always presented as male, there is a definite connection that I think has to do with precisely why my brother’s killer was able to get away with his crime.

There’s a direct connection between physicality and people’s reaction to me. I think of my brother’s story, telling my brother’s story, and my own transition and how they connect. Becoming male at this age and gives me incredible insight into what must’ve been going on for William, where he was in his teens and twenties. I don’t have to figure out who I am there. He had to have his body change, you know, he became overweight while struggling with arriving at an identity in the outside world that was reflective of who he actually was.

Angela Davis said after a screening [of ‘Strong Island’] in San Francisco that for her, the film really reminded her that at the beginning of the 21st Century, what we’re grappling with are issues that should have been resolved in the aftermath of slavery. And I think that the Black body as property versus the autonomous Black body is what American cannot accept. That’s the problem. My autonomous brother, with his anger because someone had followed my mother home, winds up dead and criminalized for doing what any white boy would have done. And I use white boy specifically. Right. So you are living with the unaccepted truth that Africans in America are no longer chattel.

What do you want people to come away with after viewing ‘Strong Island’?

For all audiences, I want them to walk away with a clear sense of what was lost. Without this film, William would have been reduced to 3,000 words in a local paper. He would have lived on and eventually died in the memories of those who knew and loved him. I want the world to know who and what was lost. I also want people to understand that there are no rhetorical questions in this movie. Not one rhetorical question. So, when I say, how do you measure the distance of reasonable fear? That’s an actual question. That’s an actual question that people need to begin to grapple with, because if they stop accepting that it’s just fear, and not reasonable fear, then I think we inch a little closer to a more just criminal justice system. I think the interesting and sad thing about America is that people don’t care about issues until it happens. As a fabric to our society issue is the key to our Democracy issue, as opposed to ‘isn’t this just a tragedy for this family. You have to stop. Attention must be paid — a life was lost here. Lives have been lost. And unless we all decide that Black people, brown people should not be disposable, and should not continue to be disposable, we are going to be in a very deep and prolonged struggle because I refused not to be free. And I refuse to accept that Black people are not entitled to their full range of emotions, without those full range of emotions presenting a mortal risk to someone else.

*Emil Wilbekin is the former Editor-in-Chief of Vibe, Editor-At-Large at Essence and founder of Native Son.
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