The Brooklyn Rail

The first scene in Stephen Winter’s 1996 film Chocolate Babies sets the pace. A gang of friends, connected by being Black, queer, and HIV-positive, confront a Black and closeted New York City council member at the bottom of his stoop. They demand action and representation regarding the fight against AIDS. The councilman, Melvin Freeman, is haughty. His superior attitude drips with disdain for the group and their cause. Faced with such condescension, the protesters cut themselves with knives and smear their infected blood over the council member’s face. It’s a pioneering display that is hard to watch. Although numbed by the current proliferation of extremity and shock in film, general audiences still have not really experienced another such scene to this day. The sequence elicits a deep reaction but is somehow grounded in humor, camp, and levity.

Chocolate Babies is the brainchild of Winter, a biracial director, half-Black, half-Jewish. “It started in Chicago, where I grew up. When I was in my late teens, I joined ACT UP,” Winter told me over Zoom on a recent afternoon. “I had a good time there until I got completely disillusioned by the racism of ACT UP Chicago. That was pervasive at the time, and then I started going to a place called the Clubhouse on the west side of Chicago, which is a Black gay house music club that Frankie Knuckles used to spin at.”

The transgressive nature of the film is undergirded by a simple two-story structure: the first being a love triangle between the straightlaced and “bad boys”; the second a narrative of aggressive, almost terroristic, political action against the backdrop of an authentic capture of the urban, gay, New York experience in the early to mid-nineties. “It was a fantasy based on lived experience,” Winter said. “[The] plot is from Humphrey Bogart movies. And the relationships are from the experiences I had, in the house music scene with the trans girls I was hanging with and being a young person in the world.”

In 1992, at the age of twenty-three, Winter, having graduated from art school in Chicago, made the move to New York City to make films. This experience solidified the story for the director:

I was fated to be born late enough that I could learn about HIV when I was a teenager and did not have the experience of all my friends dying. But still in the right spot where HIV was always [an] around issue; you know, you have to wear condoms, you have to be mindful about everything, and you’re also a kid, so you want to have as much sex and fun as possible, which I definitely did. But you also [had this] thing that’s hanging over all of us. It’s a constant worry, a constant refrain…. There was a gallows humor, and we were also very much the orphaned generation.

Orphaned? He means the lack of older mentors that one could look up to for a kind of pathway a young gay man could cut in a world that very much marginalized gay people. The first wave of AIDS deaths had already happened in the eighties. By 1992, very few older gay men were left, and the ones that had survived didn’t want to rehash a horror they had all been through. “If they’re around, they’re very PTSD and very busy trying to fulfill some kind of a life, you know,” explained Winter.

Out of this milieu—his time in Chicago and experiencing both the agony and ecstasy of New York—was birthed the completed idea for the film.

The movie has a mixed cast; there is no real “main” character, but the three that are most consequential are Larva (played by Dudley Findlay Jr.), Sam (played by Jon Kit Lee), Max Mo-Freak (played by Claude E. Sloan), and Councilman Melvin Freeman (played by Bryan Webster).

Larva, “the Vicomtesse,” leaps off the screen because of his discourse, a symbol of emotionally layered Black male intellect—a round man, verbose about all matters of life. The character is inspired by Lawrence Warren, a mentor of Winter, who published an underground zine in Chicago called Thing Magazine. “A lot of the things that Larva says are things that Larva said. Larry Warren coined himself ‘Larva the Vicomtesse’ and I loved him. I would memorize all the things he was saying, because he had all these wonderfully conflicting opinions,” Winter said.

It’s Larva’s deep well of knowledge, but also his inner contradictions, that give the character his depth. In one scene, he berates Jamela, one of the group, in front of everyone for her pro-abortion stance, a scene that stems from Winter’s own experience discovering the dualities of the human condition: “Well, I remember being really surprised across the board at how even the most intensely active, political people could have these big blind spots. White gay guys in ACT UP were totally racist sometimes, and Black queens, who love women, could be totally conservative.”

Sam, the lone Asian man in the all-Black group anchors the love triangle between Max and Councilman Freeman. His character is more conservative-looking. He has a “real” job in the office of Councilman Freeman; most aspects of his life can be read as “normal,” yet he hangs out and identifies with this gaggle of personalities that live on the societal fringes. The role of Sam took carefully considered casting. “All the movies that [had] gay themes from that era were all white,” said Winter. “I wanted the movie to exist in a world where whiteness wasn’t centered, and I also wanted to illustrate something of my own experience.” Winter found his inspiration for Sam in another real-life personality:

I [have] a really good friend who’s Korean from art school, we’re still friends, and he was a gymnast. So, when he came to Chicago, he joined a house, a voguing house, and he was the only Asian kid on their team. Which is very fun and exciting. But also, there were a lot of cultural differences that he would come home and talk about. And so, I smushed all that together.

Max Mo-Freak, the oldest character in the group, is arguably the film’s hardest to swallow, but most poignant character. Built upon the forgotten history of Black, gay men in New York, Max carries the bulk of Chocolate Babies’s conceptual weight. Winter explained that Max’s “self-loathing and internalized shame is so harsh that he says and does terrible things to try to get a, you know, any kind of rise out of you.”

Max, even in all his awfulness, becomes the most powerful figure of the movie by understanding the moment he came of an age in and what he has witnessed—a generation of dreams deferred. Winter looked back at the context of the nineties: “Martin Luther King [Jr.] is dead. Malcolm X is dead. Kennedy is dead. The civil rights movement is not dead, but certainly not what it was.” In this vacuum was the AIDS crisis; for many of the surviving gay Black men, all that was left was anger. The optimism provided by the sixties, and youth, had dried into a sour desert of thwarted “creative ambitions,” as Winter described it.

Rounding out the group of friends is Jamela (Suzanne Gregg Ferguson) and Lady Marmalade (Michael Lynch), another fantastically layered figure who is a trans woman, a lady of the night, and intravenous drug user. Plus, Michael Hyatt, an actor with a long and varied Hollywood acting career, makes an early appearance.

The technical aspects of the film are impressive. It was shot in September 1994 on 16 mm Fujifilm over three weeks, mostly in sequence, with cinematographer Chris Shaw. Winter explained his choice of film: “Fuji, unlike Kodak, was really good for non-white skin. That’s part of the reason why the film looks gorgeous from top to bottom. But also, the sex scene is so good. It was easy to light it in a way that really enhanced the skin tones of Black and Asian people.”

One of the film’s sets, a sunny rooftop, happened to be Winter’s apartment on 13th Street and Avenue B. “It was based on life. People did hang out on the roofs, and also, it’s a great set. You know there won’t be any traffic problems. You can control it, and it’s got all that light,” Winter said. A byproduct of both a narrative and technical decision results in the capture of one of the last bohemian moments of New York City, and in that way, Chocolate Babies becomes a special time capsule of a city that forever changes.

Looking back, the reception to Winter’s directorial debut was good: it premiered at SXSW, winning Honorable Mention for Narrative Feature in 1997, and it was an Official Selection at the Berlin International Film Festival. But the film’s success potential faced a ceiling in a pre-RuPaul’s Drag Race commercial film world. And even though the film is a forward-thinking product of its time, it’s also true that it’s a victim of the fear and closed-mindedness of its own era as well.

Winter is now fifty-five years old, and Chocolate Babies is twenty-nine this year. In retrospect, he’s still pleased with his film:

It was very much what I wanted, and every time I look at it, I’m like, yeah, that’s just really, really tight. The camera’s always in the right place. We always know exactly what we’re up to. The characters are strongly delineated, and their lived-in-ness is really great. And that’s because I knew who they were, and I knew what I wanted it to be.

There is one loose end all these years later regarding the project, and it lies with the actor who played Sam, Jon Kit Lee. After the movie, he was “around” living in New York, but he eventually left, and Winter never spoke to him again. “Never heard from him. I hope wherever he is he’s happy,” Winter said. A quick internet search reveals Lee has appeared in movies throughout the years, his latest role, according to IMDb, being in 2017. Winter continued, “I hope he knows that he’s wonderful in the film and that his performance has stood the test of time. He really does exactly what I wanted that character to do, to ground the project and to make the story relatable; and he totally does that, and he’s really subtle. He’s really sexy. It’s wonderful.”

Palpable grit and intensity composes Chocolate Babies, but it’s not without gentle, caressing moments. A principal scene of the film bookends the movie. An unsteady close-up shot of each character, their faces in full frame, bathed in dusky light from an end-of-day sun. It’s one of the most intimate and emotion-laden moments that connects the characters to the viewer; and it’s just a beautiful piece of filmmaking.