:Draft:The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye (1990-1994)

Janine, Dunye's video debut (not counting her Bachelor's thesis project, Wild Thing, at Temple University), was performed, produced, and edited by Dunye with camerawork by Gail Lloyd.{{Cite web |date=2021-03-12 |title=Director Cheryl Dunye Shares Her Film School Syllabus |url=https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/freeze-frame-cheryl-dunye-interview |access-date=2025-04-21 |website=W Magazine |language=en}} It is described in the DVD cover as, "Experimental documentary, 1990) The story of a black lesbian’s relationship with a white, upper-middle-class high school girl." It runs for 9 minutes and 11 seconds. It is the first of four short videos made by Dunye during her MFA study at Rutgers University.

The video is primarily a talking head interview of Dunye describing her high school crush on Janine Sorelli and its effect on Dunye's self-perception. At several points, the video is intercut with clips of two candles in front of a purple cloth, which Dunye lights and blows out. Dunye describes how Janine seemed perfect and epitomized whiteness, and Dunye, by contrast, felt less-than and out of place. Their friendship ended not long after senior week, when Dunye came out to Janine as gay and Janine's mother offered to pay for a therapist to "talk about [her] problems." Dunye goes on to say that she called Janine "this past holiday" and was disgusted when Janine judged their former classmates who had children out of wedlock.{{Cite web |title=Kanopy - Stream Classic Cinema, Indie Film and Top Documentaries |url=https://www.kanopy.com/en/reed/watch/video/14077256 |access-date=2025-04-16 |website=www.kanopy.com}}

Dunye describes Janine as an expression of her struggles with race and class related to her experience as a lesbian:

I was going to do a documentary and ask the question, “Why are there so few African Americans women artists?” I had recently talked to this chip on my shoulder, Janine, from high school, who I had a big crush on and came out around. A big light bulb came above my head, and I de­cided to sit down and rip the pictures off the wall and sit in front of the camera and tell this story that was burning inside of me. I wanted to get out all these issues that were burning in me, not just the crush, but that she was a white woman and came from a different class background.

She Don't Fade stars Zoie Strauss, Cheryl Dunye, Paula Cronan, Wanda Freeman, Gail Lloyd, Pin Martin, Jennifer Ozarow, Heather Hassinger, Brent Hill, Barbara Kigozi, and Laura Rau. Dunye is credited as the writer, producer, editor, and director, with first and second assistant directors in Brent Hill and Shae Marconi and an assistant editor in Gail Lloyd. The camera was operated by Paula Cronan with help from Shae Marconi, Gail Lloyd, and Rainy Orteca. Sixteen millimeter film footage from Erica Fueudenstein and Christopher Leo Daniels was used. Additional crew included Jennifer Brody, Liz Bonaventura, and Vikki Braxton. Lisa Marie Russo, Jim Caiola, Antoine Bell, John Knapp, A.J. Banks, Frank Carfi, and Carol Goertel of Independent Images contributed on project direction, coordination, and cinema editing.

In the DVD cover, She Don't Fade is described as, "(Experimental narrative, 1991) A smart, hilarious, and self-reflexive look at the sexuality of a young black lesbian." It runs for 23 minutes and 50 seconds. The video is punctuated by title cards describing each scene, similar to the style of a silent film. It is the second video made at Rutgers.

The video opens with Zoie Strauss describing the plot to come, and afterwards follows Shae Clarke, played by Dunye. Shae has a street vending business, an occupation she began after a break-up a year prior, in part to meet women. She describes this venture in a scene following a title card that reads "shae clarke." Shae wears two rings, one on each ring finger.

After an unfulfilling period of serial monogamy, Shae has a "new approach." She asks out a woman by asking her to be in a video (presumably She Don't Fade itself) but is rejected.

Shae's best friend is Paula, played by Cronan. Dunye says she met Paula 10 years ago and they have been friends ever since, but it is unclear if she is speaking about her own life or if she is playing the character of Shae. In "shae meets margo," Shae confides in Paula that she met someone while vending named Margo. Shae and Margo go on a date ("shae and margo have a date") and then sleep together after looking at a photo album ("shae and margo have sex"). Their sex scene includes dialogue between the actors Dunye and Freeman and the camera operators and crew.

While walking up the stairs by the Walnut Street Bridge, Shae smiles at a woman (Gail Lloyd) who passes by. She then tells Paula in "shae and paula have a 'chat' about 'things'" that it was, "heartstrings," and that she feels confused because she was "so moved" by this woman despite her "thing" with Margo. She says she is "torn between two lovers" to Paula, and then in a talking head interview, she proceeds to sing Torn Between Two Lovers by Mary MacGregor.

Shae describes how she broke up with Margo outside of the museum following a Black women photography show, and then says she and Paula found out that the name of the woman on the stairs is Nicki. In "the intense fantasy," several clips of Shae sorting through a large bag of jewelry divide short scenes of Shae with her lovers. First, she is looking at a photo album with Margo, then she is looking at it with Nicki. Next, she is kissing Nicki while clothed, then while unclothed, then they are insinuated to have oral sex.

Nicki arrives at a party, hosted by Strauss, that Shae and Paula are attending. Paula persuades Shae to talk to Nicki, and Shae and Nicki leave together soon after. Strauss picks up a microphone and says, "So, seriously, sisters, the rest is history... or herstory, sorry."

She Don't Fade leans heavily into comedy, in part through its conversational documentary style. Frequently, actors address the camera directly, or talk to each other out of character. Dunye recorded this project with her "girl gang from Philadelphia," and the friendships portrayed are based in real friendships. Dunye connects the humorous nature of her work to her identity and her politics, saying that comedy is a "powerful political tool." She Don't Fade is the first of Dunye's shorts to lean heavily into comedy, but it is essential aspect of the collection as a whole in retrospect.B. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 66.

Dunye made She Don't Fade because of the marginalization of Black lesbians in visual media, such as the film she studied in her filmmaking program at Temple.{{Cite news |title=Some advice from filmmaker Cheryl Dunye: 'Keep putting yourself out where you belong' |url=https://www.npr.org/2023/07/08/1186387526/cheryl-dunye-the-watermelon-woman |access-date=2025-04-20 |work=NPR |language=en}}

Never in my life have I seen images of black lesbians loving each other, in love or making love.* It's something that I had hoped to see in works by other lesbian film and video artists. Rather than waiting, I made She Don't Fade ... Rather than wait for inclusion, I choose to use my marginality as what bell hooks calls a site of resistance. In Black lesbianism, I become the subject in a world where I am never "different" or "other" but an authority on who I am and who I am becoming. It is this affirming voice that I articulate in my videos and offer to all marginalized people working to transform present reality.

Vanilla Sex is described in the DVD cover as "(Experimental documentary, 1992) Cheryl Dunye muses on the slang term of the title: is it who you do, or what you do?" It stars Dunye; however, no credits run at the end of the video, and there is another voice that appears intermittently throughout, responding to Dunye's questions. It runs for four minutes. Vanilla Sex was made during Dunye's time at Rutgers for Shu Lea Cheang's Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1992), in which Dunye and 19 other woman artists of color made work discussing interracial desire.

Vanilla Sex features a video of a scroll of black and white photographs of Dunye and other figures with various amounts of clothing, sometimes applying black duct tape to each other and the wall. It is intercut with black and white film footage featuring nude women, including Dunye. The audio that plays over these images is either Dunye, speaking about the term "vanilla sex" with another unidentified person, or music. At first, the music is soft piano in a jazz-like style, an then several other instruments can be heard, including a dissonant electronically manipulated sound.

Dunye describes being on a conference panel with white lesbians who practice BDSM and refer to "vanilla sex," or non-BDSM sex, as "sex without toys." She realizes later that she has heard the same term used by a Black woman to describe the sex Dunye was having as "vanilla sex" because she was sleeping with white women, and she was offended to be described in such a way.

Vanilla Sex is referenced but goes largely undiscussed in interviews with Dunye, and it is excluded from the Guggenhiem Fellowship's list of Dunye's filmography.{{Cite web |title=Guggenheim Fellowships: Supporting Artists, Scholars, & Scientists |url=https://www.gf.org/fellows/cheryl-dunye/ |access-date=2025-04-20 |website=www.gf.org}}

An Untitled Portrait is described in the DVD cover as "(Video montage, 1993) Cheryl Dunye’s relationship with her brother is examined in this collage of appropriated film footage, Super 8 home movies, and Dunye’s special brand of humor." It is made entirely by Dunye, with the exception of footage shot by Nikki Harmon. It runs for 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

The visual montage element of the video is made up of clips depicting the legs and feet of people playing basketball at a neighborhood court, shoes implied to be those of Dunye's brother, young Black children sitting or playing in the water, a Black person walking around a skate park, a Black man diving into a lake, and a figure jumping to try to reach shoes hanging on a power line.

The audio that plays is Dunye discussing her family. She begins by talking about how large feet run in her family and mentions the death of her father as well as the mixed nature of their family; Dunye is African on her father's side and African-American on her mother's.{{Cite AV media |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW-sQbnCj6k |title=Cheryl Dunye Interview Clip - Criterion Channel |date=2020-09-21 |last=CRITERION |access-date=2025-04-21 |via=YouTube}} She talks about basketball--she played in junior high and high school, and thought of herself as a jock, but her brother never played basketball, despite the size of his feet. Instead, he was "a Star Trek computer head nerd." Dunye brought his shoe in for show and tell in elementary school.

Dunye idolized her father as a child, but realized later that he "wasn't this great guy." In the aftermath of his death, she is uncertain on her feelings regarding him. Dunye's brother keeps a picture of her on his mantle, and on her "altar," Dunye keeps a picture of her father. Dunye's brother lives in Laguna Niguel, Orange County, California, and they "aren't very close," in their relationship, distance, and age. Dunye ends the narration by saying, "Blood is thicker than water." Music plays for about 30 seconds over the final clips and credits.

Dunye "never really thought [she]'d make work about [her brother]," due to his absence in her life, so An Untitled Portrait's visual and descriptive story comes from family archives, stories, memories, and old footage, combined with some new footage on Super 8 film, to compile stories about him. Though her father is mentioned, Dunye expressed in 2001 that she would like to make work expressly about him, perhaps searching for information about him.

Despite appearing before The Potluck & The Passion in the collection, neither Dunye nor her scholars list An Untitled Portrait as one of the shorts made during Dunye's MFA program at Rutgers, indicating it may have been made following her graduation.Carroll, Noel, Christine Holmlund, Paul Arthur, Melissa Ragona, and Robin Blaetz. Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.65097.

The Potluck & The Passion is the first video to have both and opening and ending credits sequence. Dunye is credited as co-writer, director, producer, offline editor, and actor (as Linda), and Pat Burch is co-writer and actor. It stars Nora Breen (Meghan), Shelita Birchett (Tracy), Jen Baker, Nikki Harmon, Gail Lloyd, Carolyn Shapiro, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Myra Paci. Jimmy Caiola was assistant director. The 'Potluck' crew was Brian Bazemore, Liz Blengino, Jimmy Caiola, Chris Daniels, Cheryl Dunye, Brent Hill, Barbara Kigozi, Vikki Plummer, and Robert Sciasi. The 'NY' crew was Chris Daniels, Angelou Deign, Erica Freudenstein, Lauralynn Farwell, Brent Hill, Aishah Simmons, and Nadine Stanley. Off-line facilities were by New Liberty Productions. The crew from Independent Images was project director Lisa Marie Russo, project coordinator Linda Milburn, production coordinator Frank Carfi, editor Antoine Bell, assistant editor John Knapp, and titles by Al Banks. It is dedicated to the memory of "G.M.L."

The Potluck & The Passion is described in the DVD cover as "(Experimental narrative, 1993) Sparks fly as racial, sexual, and social politics intermingle at a lesbian potluck." It runs for 21 minutes and 45 seconds.

The video opens with Linda (Dunye) and her partner, Nikki, played by Lloyd, discussing the potluck they are having for their anniversary (a term which Lloyd's character does not like) where their friends Lisa (Harmon), Kendra (Paci), Nikki's boss Evelyn, Kara and Erin (Baker and Shapiro, though unclear who is Kara and who is Erin), Megan (played by Nora Breen, who "changed her name to Eishah or something").{{Cite web |date=2018-07-11 |title=The Potluck and the Passion (1993, Cheryl Dunye) |url=https://thestopbutton.com/2018/07/11/potluck-passion-1993/ |access-date=2025-04-21 |website=The Stop Button |language=en}} Linda is worried that they will not get along, but Lloyd's character is excited.

Linda is on the phone with Kendra, who lives in New York and has lost the directions. Robert Reid-Pharr's character, who Kathlen Mchugh refers to as "Robert," enters and comments on the state of their apartment, and Nikki refers to him as a "queen." A short clip of Robert in a talking head interview saying "queen" cuts in. Robert gives Nikki a photo of the three of them together as a gift and they talk about her clothes.

The video changes to sepia tone from color when it cuts to Kendra on the phone with Linda. Neither Lisa nor Kendra are ready for the party, and Kendra proposes they have sex before they leave.

The video returns to color. Robert is in Nikki's room as she changes. The video cuts to Reid-Pharr's talking head, where he discusses the term "queen," and how the label, "queen," like the label, "Black," is not reducing them but is an introduction to who they are. He says, "Black is the world and Black is everything, and I think that to be gay is completely expansive, and to be a queen is completely expansive. To be femme is completely expansive." The video returns to Nikki's room as Linda enters to tell them that their guests have arrived.

The camera spins in the center of the table, showing all of the guests. They discuss their food; Megan brought ambrosia, and Evelyn brought Southern-style chicken, less spicy than she usually makes it.

The video, in sepia, cuts to Lisa and Kendra in a grocery store, arguing about Lisa's use of the word "bitch." Lisa goes next door to buy a gift for the couple and offers Kendra money to buy the food for the potluck, but then says she doesn't have any money and says she'll pay Kendra back.

Then, the video is in color again, and it shows a talking head interview with Shelita Birchett, who speaks in the first person as her character Tracy, Megan's date to the potluck. It cuts to the table again, and Linda is asking Tracy about her studies. A talking head interview with Nora Breen, who plays Megan, is next. She also talks in the first person, saying she (Megan) felt she had control over Tracy. At the table, Megan, Tracy, and Evelyn discuss growing up in Washington, D.C., and they discover that Tracy and Evelyn went to the same high school, Paint Branch, after Evelyn's family moved to Silver Spring because Capitol Hill "was getting too white." Evelyn says she was president of the Sisters for Africa, and Tracy has never heard of it--they discover that Evelyn, 35, is nine years older than Tracy, 26.

The video returns to Birchett's talking head, where Tracy is talking about how Megan's investment in African-American culture was exciting before it began to grate on her, since it seemed like a show. Megan and Tracy stand at the sink arguing about Evelyn, who Megan dislikes for her age and "selfish[ness]" and not being a lesbian. Both of their talking heads show them agitated about the situation with Evelyn, and Tracy doesn't like that Megan assumed they would go out with Erin and Kara after the party.

The video (sepia) cuts to Lisa and Kendra in the car. They are lost again, and the camera faces up at the roof from between them. There is a loud sound of squeaking leather as they discuss the route. They eat some of the pasta salad that they bought for the potluck, but it spills when Kendra reaches for the phonebook. They make a plan to get replacement food from KFC.

When the video (color) returns to the party, Evelyn is talking about a time she visited Liberia. one of the white guests asks, "Isn't it dangerous there without a government?" Evelyn chokes a little on her food, and then she discusses the ensemble she was visiting with. She mentions the Peace Corps, and Meghan comes over to say that she applied to the Corps in Ethiopia to "better understand the problems in the third world."

Tracy is in the bathroom, and Evelyn walks in on her, coughing and drinking her beer. Evelyn asks how long Tracy has been going out with Meghan, and Tracy says they aren't going out. Tracy compliments Evelyn on her chicken, and they laugh about the other food. They flirt awkwardly, and Tracy asks to exchange numbers before the end of the night.

In the living room, Meghan approaches Tracy and asks her to lave with her, but Tracy rejects her. As Meghan slams the door behind her, the color of the video changes to sepia. In the hall, she bumps into Kendra and Lisa, making Kendra drop her bags, and calls Kendra a bitch. In her talking head, Tracy says Meghan was mad becuase she could see something was happening with Evelyn.

Dunye thinks of The Potluck & The Passion as a successor to She Don't Fade in its stylistic similarities: "A character drives you through it, as does title cards." However, while She Don't Fade is openly comedic, any comedy in The Potluck is in its tongue-in-cheek satirizing of certain 'types' of lesbians and the friction introduced by unresolved racism from white lesbians.

Kathleen Mchugh describes it as an "auto-ethnography" and a "parod[y]." She highlights Dunye's use of innuendo and double entendre ("meet and eat," and "A Pot Can't Call A Kettle Black").

Mchugh refers to Lloyd's character as Nikki, referencing She Don't Fade, but this character is never actually named withn the video. It is uncertain if Dunye intended the two videos to be related by their shared casts; she describes it as "another twenty-­minute girl gang video."

Greetings From Africa was created in collaboration between Dancing Girl and Good Machine Productions. It credits executive producers Ted Hope and James Schamus, and producers Cheryl Dunye, Mary Jane Skalski, and Karen Yeager. It stars Nora Breen as "L," Dunye as herself, Jocelyn Taylor as "Dee," and Jacqueline Woodson as "The Girlfriend." Dunye is also credited as writer and director. It features music from Glorified Magnified by Manfred Mann's Earth Band and Rebecca Coupe Franks. It runs for 11 minutes and 28 seconds, and features a significantly sized crew at 28 people. It is described in the DVD cover as "(Narrative, 1994) Cheryl, playing herself, humorously experiences the mysteries of lesbian dating in the 90s."

The film, as it is referred to in the second intertitle, opens with a title card and a color clip of Dunye looking through a box of photographs, some of which feature Gail Lloyd. Music plays, and Dunye narrates. In a talking head interview in black and white, Dunye says she was a victim of "lesbian serial monogamy," and is "checking out this lesbian new wave" in the wake of her breakup with her long-time girlfriend. She attempts to date "productive, professional, and cute women," but is unsuccessful, so she goes out.

Dunye meets a very attractive woman, L (Breen), at a party with "crunchy granola" lesbians Dunye doesn't particularly like. Neither of them want to take their shirt off like the rest of the group, so they flirt, and L puts a note in Dunye's jacket with her number. Dunye talks about L with her friend Dee, who says Dunye should make a move.

In Dunye's kitchen, L compliments Dunye's apartment. They talk, and there are close-up clups of their faces in which their mouths are not moving. L mentions Oscar Brown Jr., who Dunye hasn't heard of. There is a close-up of their feet, and then their eyes, and L talks about Brown and going on a date while ignoring Dunye's question about whether she's seeing anybody. Dunye doesn't push it, and they have tea.

In L's house, Dunye looks at L's pictures before a "Sister-to-Sister poetry reading." There's a photo of a woman, who L says is her former roommate and good friend. Back at Dunye's apartment, Dunye is taking a bath with the door open, and L comes in to use the bathroom. L compliments Dunye's body and makes a comment about her breasts, which Dunye responds to, somewhat embarrassed. Dunye doesn't notice L undressing until she asks to get in the bath with her. L makes a third comment about Dunye being embarrassed.

L has Dunye meet her at a party, where Dunye makes awkward conversation with another Black woman before L arrives. When she does, Dunye confesses to having a "hard-on" for L, and asks the woman if L has a girlfriend. The woman says she is L's girlfriend, and walks away from Dunye to L.

In the talking head interview, Dunye reads a postcard from L that says "Greetings From Africa" on the back. L writes that she joined the Peace Corps and is living in the Ivory Coast. After the credits, Dunye says, "C'est la vie." Notably, L is played by Breen, who played the Peace Corps enthused Megan in The Potluck & The Passion.

Dunye describes Greetings From Africa as a culmination of her previous work in video:

It was a kind of conglomeration of all the video work into a short, eight-minute film where I have a talking head: there’s lots of humor, and there’s a black lesbian subject. I talk about issues. I drive you through a condensed story. It’s about lesbian dating in the ’90s.

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