How Billy Porter Will RUIN the James Baldwin Biopic

In 2023, Billy Porter announced he’s co-writing, co-producing, and lead acting in a forthcoming biopic about the famed writer, James Baldwin. Through the years many have discussed the validity of forthcoming biopic about James Baldwin; notably Queer Of The Ratchet, a content creator on Tiktok.

The lack of previous Baldwin biopics could be attributed to many things; the protectiveness of the Baldwin, family, and estate, whether or not the public, is ready for a nuance to the portrayal of James Baldwin, and how Baldwin’s sexual politics would be represented when past projects on his life, and work have skirted over his queerness. With these histories in mind and the recent rise of bad biopics, what would a James Baldwin biopic mean today? And what mistakes could be made?

During his time, Baldwin was notably in opposition to Zionism and the subjugation of Palestinians, notably stating once that he chose not to move to Israel. In Billy Porter’s recent interview with The Guardian, when asked about how he plans to portray the critiques of Israel and Zionism by famed writer, James Baldwin, in his forthcoming biopic on the writer born in the 1920s, Porter responded,

There’s nothing to navigate — I’m not James Baldwin, he’s a character, so I have to be true to the character. I don’t know what he was talking about in the 40s, 50s, 60s — it’s 2024 now. I don’t have the history to even know what the version of the Israel-Palestine conflict was when he was around. It’s not a part of the script — his civil rights work in America is what we’re focused on, more than what he thought about the crisis in the Middle East. What’s going on over there is horrific — the choices that we, in America, have made, are wrong. Please don’t make me a poster child for that. I don’t want to be in the conversation, because I don’t know enough about it!

To date, almost 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing genocide since October 7, 2023, amounting to countless human rights violations and international calls for a ceasefire. In the past, I have written and spoken extensively about the Black connection to Palestinian liberation, highlighting the importance of our collective histories and struggles against colonialism. Much like Baldwin, I understand how media and entertainment are battlegrounds for historical representation, truth, and a chance to challenge the status quo or dissuade the masses.

James Baldwin, Billy Porter, Zionism, and the artist’s struggle for integrity?

Queer capitalism examines how LGBTQ+ identity and culture are co-opted for profit, often while erasing the historical struggles and marginalized experiences. The erasure of history and the co-optation of identity are intertwined within the framework of queer capitalism. Baldwin’s work often explored themes of identity, race, sexuality, and capitalism, and he frequently critiqued how dominant cultural narratives marginalize and silence marginalized voices.

In his acclaimed essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin is critical of the racial wrongs committed by the American project and later on in his collection, No Name In The Street, Baldwin unravels the impacts of media and Hollywood in framing the American and colonial imagination. All of these considerations are built into Baldwin’s logic that the artist must have integrity in an unjust society:

I really don’t like words like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day. (The Artist’s Struggle Integrity)

This struggle or demand for integrity lays bare the contradiction of Billy Porter attempting to create a biopic today while having no deeper sense of allegiance to Baldwin’s desire for a more conscious and humanizing form of media. Porter, instead, wishes to make this biopic and follow where the green is, seemingly at all moral costs. Of his responsibility to tell Baldwin’s story, Billy Porter says to The Guardian:

If not me, who? I’ve been sitting around waiting for people to tell the Langston Hughes story, the James Baldwin story — anyone Black and queer, as far as I’m concerned. I’m done waiting — I’ll do it myself. The audacity, right? Who’s going to tell it better than the Black gay man who embodies that in today’s age? It’s such an important story to tell, and I feel so blessed to be in this time where it will get told.

Why should a person so dedicated to capitalism and personal benefit be tasked with writing and helming a James Baldwin biopic? According to Porter, being Black and gay and keen on pleasing gatekeepers is key. To Baldwin, however, this is the death of artistic integrity, and bending to the whims of the powerful of his time, like vehement anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, was a sign of a burgeoning era of censorship and propaganda that has led to many of our present realities today. For this reason and more, the question of the artist’s integrity is more important than ever.

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To learn more about Billy Porter’s forthcoming biopic on James Baldwin and how Hollywood Zionism may ruin it…

More Resources on Black History and Palestinian Liberation

• Black for Palestine | RESOURCE PAGE
• ‘We Know Occupation’: The Long History of Black Americans’ Solidarity with Palestinians [READING]
• The long, complicated history of Black solidarity with Palestinians and Jews [READING]
• From Ferguson to Gaza: How African Americans Bonded With Palestinian Activists [READING]
• How Palestinian And Black Liberation Is Connected [READING]
• Zines on Palestinian Liberation: Resource #1 | Resource #2 |
• The Ethnic Cleanings of Palestine [BOOK]