By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/14/23 – Premiering in 1996, Chocolate Babies is the funny, fearless tale of a crew of Black, queer, HIV-positive renegades fighting for their lives and community against a hostile system. It struck a jolt of righteous fury at a moment when HIV/AIDS was the plague dividing the country. For the film’s 25th anniversary, the Outfest Legacy Project, in conjunction with the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the National Film Preservation Foundation commissioned a 4K restoration of Chocolate Babies. Following its festival run in the mid-1990s, including SXSW, the Berlinale, Frameline21 and Outfest), Chocolate Babies struggled to secure major distribution due to its radically independent Black queer vision. This frenetic debut feature from writer/director Stephen Winter, Chocolate Babies unleashes a world of anarchic camp and unapologetic Black queer power in one of the hidden gems of New Queer Cinema, ripe for rediscovery. It is worth viewing at this Outfest on Saturday, July 15.
Director Stephen Winter explains: “Chocolate Babies has amazing performances, a well-crafted story that took appropriate twists and turns to keep audience satisfaction, and also took a piece of what was going on in the struggle with HIV and AIDS, and what’s going on with Black queers in the ’90s in New York.” We are introduced to the “Black faggots with an agenda” as they confront the good-looking Black city councilman Melvin Freeman (Bryan Webster) in front of his Greenwich Village apartment. The news media report the story saying the councilman was “attacked by faggots.”
We first meet the very vocal Larva (played by Dudley Findlay Jr.), the rambunctious sequin-headed Max No-Freak (Claude E. Sloan), and the usually inebriated drag queen Jamela (Gregg Ferguson) as they confront the Councilman on the street. All three live in an apartment in Harlem in New York City and spend much of their time up on the roof sharing their views and plotting how to reap havoc on local councilmen who are unwilling and uninterested in dealing with the AIDS crisis in the 1990s.
The plot is clever but simple. Max has a Filipino-American boyfriend named Sam (Jon Kit Lee) who apparently dropped out of medical school and now works in the office as an assistant to Melvin Freeman. Since Sam has access to the files in Freeman’s office, the renegade group plans to get ahold of documents that list the names, phone numbers, and contacts of all the gay people in New York who are HIV-positive. The plot thickens as Councilman Freeman has a crush on young Sam and we come to realize that he is a closeted gay man himself.
Meanwhile the antics of the Black queer renegades wanders from camp trash-talking too vague planning of their next Fassbinder-like urban terrorist acts. Clearly a reference to the ACT UP movement in New York City, Winters has great fun with his characters who speak truth to power in their own way. One of the great opening scenes is Lady Marmalade (Michael Lynch), a transsexual woman hooked on heroin, who performs at a local bar. Lady Marmalade: “Some folks got AIDS. And some folks got Magic Johnson disease. Those with Magic Johnson disease are innocent victims. I ain’t got Magic Johnson disease. And I ain’t got Ryan White disease. I got AIDS, damnit. And I got it by sucking dick and getting fucked and sticking needles in my arms.” She says it like it is.
The fast-paced story is well-written with great performances by the actors. The plot has enough twists and turns to keep the audience engaged. Chocolate Babies is a run ride with a very serious underbelly about the wages of AIDS in the Black community and the fact that not just gay white men were affected. The film arrived on the scene at film festivals just as anti-retroviral drugs were first being made available for HIV/AIDS sufferers. The film references that in its epilogue, when we find out what has happened to the many characters of this radical Black queer activist group: Some make it and some didn’t.
Campy as the film is with its highly contrived plot, you will sense the influence on Fassbinder’s earlier films on Chocolate Babies. Stephen Winter is an accomplished Black filmmaker and his work deserves more critical attention. His 2015 film Jason and Shirley, a sly reimagining of what might have gone on off-camera during the filming of Shirley Clarke’s 1967 queer classic Portrait of Jason. Winter’s film stars artist-performer Jack Waters and acclaimed writer Sarah Schulman – as he re-visits Clarke’s film about Jason Holliday (born Aaron Payne) – a Black queer raconteur, entertainer, and self-professed hustler. Winter was the producer on the award-winning film Tarnation (2003), which premiered at Outfest.
Director Stephen Winter plans to be there for a Q&A. Chocolate Babies will screen at Outfest on Sunday, July 16, at 4:45 PM, at the Directors Guild of America, Theatre 2. For tickets, go to: www.outfest.org.
