On Wednesday, April 20, 2022, Black Women Radicals hosted a film screening & post-film discussion on STORMÈ: The Lady of the Jewel Box with Michelle Parkerson and Briona Simone Jones!
About the event: “During the 1950’s and 60’s, Stormé DeLarvarie toured the black theater circuit as a mistress of ceremonies and the sole male impersonator of the legendary Jewel Box Revue, America’s first integrated female impersonation show and forerunner of La Cage aux Folles. The multiracial revue was a favorite act of the Black theater circuit and attracted mixed mainstream audiences from the 1940s through the 1960s, a time marked by the violence of segregation. Through archival clips from the past, STORME looks back on the grandeur of the Jewel Box Revue and its celebration of pure entertainment in the face of homophobia and segregation.
Writer/filmmaker/educator Michelle Parkerson is from Washington, DC. Her career burgeoned in the late 1970s and early 80s, when she became a major contributor to a Black gay and lesbian renaissance of DC artists, musicians, activists, writers and performers.
Michelle’s award-winning films include Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock, A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde and Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box. Her documentaries have screened at prestigious festivals, including The Sundance Film Festival, The Berlin International Film Festival and AFI Fest.
She has received numerous grants and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the Mayor’s Art Award, grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Rainbow History Project’s Community Pioneer Award and a HumanitiesDC DC Docs Grant. Her new documentary, Fierceness Served! The ENIKAlley Coffeehouse, revives the storied history of a DC Black LGBTQ cultural hub in the 1980s.
Briona Simone Jones is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Jones is also editor of Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought.
This event was powered by Black Women Radicals, Radical Books Collective, and the University of Connecticut.
