On the evening of October 19, 2026, the meeting room at Severn Library, at 2624 Annapolis Road in Severn, will go dark for the last time this season on a month of programming devoted to Black LGBTQIA+ experiences on screen. The closing selection is The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye's 1996 debut feature, a film that has spent three decades being rediscovered, restored, and argued over. The screening runs from 6:00 to 7:45 p.m., is free, and is rated NR.
The film is easy to summarize and hard to describe, because Dunye built it out of a deliberate impossibility. Her protagonist, also named Cheryl and played by Dunye herself, is a young Black lesbian working the counter of a Philadelphia video store while scraping together a documentary about a forgotten 1930s actress billed only as "the Watermelon Woman" -- a performer consigned to mammy and housemaid roles in the race films of the era. As Cheryl digs, she finds a stack of obstacles that are anything but neutral: a white gay librarian who assumes she cannot read, a white lesbian archive where the rare Black lesbian materials have been mistreated by the very people preserving them, police who profile her in the street. And the object of her research, Fae Richards, does not exist. Dunye invented her.
That invention is the film's central provocation. Dunye has said she created Fae Richards because the archive had nothing to offer -- because the Black lesbian actress of 1930s cinema was a figure the historical record had simply erased, and if no one would write her into history, Dunye would. To make the erasure feel real, she commissioned the artist Zoe Leonard to fabricate an entire photographic archive: 78 gelatin silver prints, four color prints, typeset notebook pages and 57 typewritten captions on onionskin paper, all documenting a life that never happened. The Fae Richards Photo Archive now sits in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, catalogued as an artwork made for the film -- a fake archive that has outlived most of the real ones it was built to indict.
The result is a hybrid the director labeled a "dunyementary," switching between grainy 1990s videotape and 16mm film, between black-and-white faux-archival footage and the loose, funny texture of everyday life. It is, among other things, a romantic comedy: Cheryl's relationship with Diana, a bourgeois white lesbian played by Guinevere Turner, runs alongside her friendship with her coworker Tamara (Valarie Walker), and the film treats the racial fault lines in both with a light, exacting touch. The critic and academic Camille Paglia appears as herself in a cameo, one of several real Philadelphia figures who drift through the movie, along with the writer Sarah Schulman and the musician Toshi Reagon. The film is dedicated to the memory of actual Black actresses of the studio era -- Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel and others -- who really were confined to the roles Fae Richards was invented to embody.
Made for roughly $300,000, the film was financed in part by a grant of about $31,500 from the National Endowment for the Arts, along with a fundraiser and donations from friends. That grant turned the movie into a political football. In 1997, Michigan Republican congressman Peter Hoekstra cited the film on the House floor as an example of inappropriate use of government funds, calling it "patently offensive and possibly pornographic," and pressed his colleagues to deduct Dunye's grant from the NEA's budget. The campaign failed, but not before the film had been dragged into a broader assault on public arts funding led by Senator Jesse Helms. Much of the ammunition came from a single line in a Philadelphia City Paper review -- "the hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid" -- quoted out of context in papers from the Tampa Tribune to the Washington Post. The reviewer later noted, dryly, that the scene in question would not have raised an eyebrow between a man and a woman in any R-rated Hollywood release; it was the scarcity of Black lesbian and interracial intimacy on screen that made it scandalous.
What the controversy obscured is how much the film belongs to a specific moment and place. The Watermelon Woman is a landmark of New Queer Cinema, the early-1990s wave of low-budget, formally restless queer independent film -- Todd Haynes's Poison, Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston -- characterized by irreverence and a certain revolutionary cynicism born of the AIDS years. Dunye, born in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1966 and raised in Philadelphia, trained at Temple University and Rutgers, and her film is steeped in the Philadelphia of the mid-1990s: TLA Video, the Free Library, the vegetable truck on Germantown's Chelten Avenue. It was the first feature film directed by an out Black lesbian, and it remains one of very few films to take Black lesbians not just as its subject but as its vantage point.
For years, though, it was hard to see. The film drew limited attention on its original U.S. release, and only in 2016 did a restored version arrive for its 20th anniversary, a project involving Outfest's Legacy Project, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Toronto International Film Festival, First Run Features and 13th Gen. The restoration put the movie back in circulation and into the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and a new generation of viewers -- many of them encountering Dunye's video-store Cheryl as a period piece -- began quoting its lines back.
That is roughly the position the Severn Library audience will be in on October 19: watching a 1996 film about the impossibility of finding a Black lesbian past, from a vantage point nearly thirty years on, in a public library in Anne Arundel County. The setting is not incidental. The film's most memorable sequences take place in libraries and archives, where Cheryl is alternately condescended to and stonewalled. Screening it in a lending library, as the closing night of a series built around Black queer experience, is a small reversal of the film's most famous frustration -- the archive opened up, the materials available, the door held instead of shut. The branch is at 2624 Annapolis Road; the event runs 6:00 to 7:45 p.m. and is open to the public.