2020 Revolutionary Love: The Movie

black queer men on love

Take part in a new kind of collaborative film-making; using your smartphone

What does love mean for you in 2020?

Create a vibrant, honest, positive record of our lives, in your own words, for us and by us for future generations

How do we make space to nurture the love in our lives?

What have you done for us lately? What can you do now?

Be part of it - #makingspaceforus

2020 Revolutionary Love is a collaborative video project and social media campaign for BlackOut UK. It creates a platform for the experiences/views of ten to twelve, Black queer men on love (– with partners, best friends (Black and queer/and not), siblings, parents/carers, squad, children, God, or even pets!) The tone should be celebratory, show the value of our loving relationships, encourage viewers to think about their own relationships, offer peer-advice on maintaining them, and highlight opportunities to deepen/extend/start new relationships with other Black queer men.

How revolutionary would it be for Black men to love and support other Black men?

How do we encourage each other to do the emotional labour that loving ourselves and each other requires?

Why revolutionary love?

I dare myself to dream of us moving from survival to potential, from merely getting by to a positive getting over. I dream of Black men loving and supporting other Black men, and relieving Black women from the role of primary nurturers in our community.

I dream, too, that as we receive more of what we want from each other that our special anger reserved for Black women will disappear. I dare myself to dream….

I dare myself to dream of a time when I will pass a group of brothers on the corner, and the words ‘f**king faggot’ will not move the air around my ears, and when my gay brother approaches me on the street that we can embrace if we choose.

I dare us to dream that we are worth wanting each other. Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act. -

In The Life; A Black Gay Anthology (1986), Introduction Joseph Beam

sos: challenge Patriarchal manhood

Until we begin collectively to protect the emotional life of Black boys and men, we sign their death warrants. Saving the lives of black boys and black men requires of us all the courage to challenge patriarchal manhood, the courage to put in its place alternative visions of healing black masculinity -

We Real Cool (2004) bell hooks

How You Can star in '2020 Revolutionary Love: The Movie'

Step 1

If you identify as a Black man, who is bi, gay, trans, and/or queer, click here to send an email to blkoutuk@gmail.com with your NAME, Mobile Number, Postcode

Email us

Step 2

Download the app to your phone - IOS or Android.

Create an account and join project BLACKOUT

Crew Studio on Apple App Store

Crew Studio - Google Play Store

Step 3

Watch the intro video, take 10 minutes to get to know how the app works and try it out by completing the introduction exercise

Introduction exercise - We Real Cool

The making of . . . 2020 Revolutionary Love

The Edit

We will work with the super-talented editors and producers at Crew Studio to create a film together that shares our voices and encourages more Black queer men to join the BlackOut journey,

We're are using the Crew Studio technology for new purposes: and it's our first time too, so let us know what you like and what you find more difficult.

While we have high hopes for the impact of the film we co-create, it is also important that we enjoy the process together.

the Hub

We are creating an online/mobile app space over which we can have greater control, and in which members may be at less risk of harassment by extended family or ‘friends of friends’, and insulated from the toxic racism, and subsequent alienation created by the online and on-land LGBTQ spaces.

Creating our own digital spaces, we will make content for and direct it to those who will benefit most. We create routes to establish reciprocal relationships, and for acknowledgement of our interdependence to knit together a community from a category

the difference

We will be publishing the results of the 'In The Picture' research on Black queer men in London in February 2020. Until now there has been no baseline research. We now have a means to measure progress and to involve more of us in making decisions/taking action to improve outcomes for ourselves and each other.

2020 Revolutionary Love will present our truths in support of our wellbeing, attract others to our networks, and help us to set an agenda for future community-building. It will also share our #BlackBoyJoy and encourage new ways of thinking about our futures.

Crew Studio

We're excited to be working with Crew Studio from WTV. Crew Studio is a simple and smart mobile app designed to harness the power of individuals to create collaborative, authentic video content. It turns global communities into professional film crews with defined tasks, smart in-camera features and filming tips.

blackout uk: On a mission

We create spaces that articulate the voices of Black queer men.

We collaborate to build solidarity and to enable community ownership of our legacy and assets.

We connect and grow our networks and skills, so that Black queer men can be a resource for each other, for life.

We are building our new now; making spaces for us

For the past two years we have been in dialogue with Black queer men across the country, and have dug deep roots where our people are; from musical theatre to dance, at Carnival and at the movies, from drug den to museum gallery, 'freak Twitter' to church choir, workplace to prison cell. Rather than our initial efforts being focused on justifying our relationship to a supposed mainstream, (in which by definition we are objects and by habit; objectified), we have chosen instead to do what it takes to make Black queer men the subject - unapologetically BlackOut.

50 years since Marsha P started a riot, we have learned from our resilience in the face of poverty, racisms, xenophobia and homophobia. We now revel in our freedom to love, including our remarkable ability to reconstruct family when let down by blood. Those close, informal, sexual and social networks that worked against us in accelerating the spread of HIV, can finally be turned to our advantage rather than to that of professionalised service-deliverers to whom we are a problem to solve, and a mainstream media who justify their existence by creating fear of difference, voyeurs who feel entitled to leer into our business as if their gaze liberates us, rather than confines us within their blunt narratives.

We create together and flex our networks to leverage resources, express compassion, distribute power, and deliver change for those around us.

However this politically uncertain period plays out, BlackOut UK will pursue the prospect of Black queer men having each other as a resource; a means of seeing each other authentically; a way of re-investing all those efforts put in over generations to be 'twice as good for half the result', and a focus beyond working for pay to fix our serial oppressors' faults, with little energy or resources left to fix our own. We know that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house', so we're laying the foundations for our own home. The whole neighbourhood will be better off for it.

BlackOut & Our New Now - Who, Where, Why, What and When

Rob Berkeley

Please share this page with the Black queer men you know and encourage them to take part.

Please contact BlackOut if you'd like to support the post-production activity and/or distribution of the film outputs - this work is experimental, breaking new ground both in terms of content and method, with a demographic that is too rarely centred in media content. We are keen to continue to innovate and to create new insights to inform public discourse and, with Black queer men, to address patterns of inequality and injustice. We remain keen to work with others who share this aspiration.

Stay In Touch

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