In a new teaser for a ground-breaking HBO unscripted series starring Jerrod Carmichael, the Black comedian is on a “tumultuous quest for love, sex and truth” and can be seen navigating through complicated dynamics with his family, mostly surrounding his decision to come out as gay.
The reason the show, set to premiere at SXSW before its on-air debut at the end of March, is ground-breaking is because it is chronicling what comes after the coming out stage through a Black man’s eyes. The two-minute teaser shows Jerrod working through a lot of incredibly tough moments, which feature the nuances of coming out in a religious family, seeking approval from his dad, and on-screen intimacy.
One thing the trailer makes very clear is his mother’s discontentment with his sexuality. There’s one moment where another woman, likely a family member, challenges Jerrod’s mom and calls on her to “do better”. In another scene, Jerrod and his mother are praying together. His long, silent stare after his mom asks God to “remove the desire” for Jerrod to be with men during prayer in another scene is very loud. There is no prompt necessary for viewers, at least ones with empathy and understanding, to ask why she can’t just accept him if she loves him.
Acceptance seems to be a big theme in this show, and also for Jerrod, who at one point says that he’s always wanted to make his dad proud. From the looks of it, his dad certainly seems more accepting of his son’s sexuality than his mom, which I’m basing off of the hilarious – and likely very awkward - conversation about twinks vs. twunks, something I can’t even imagine his mom sitting through. But his dad’s willingness to listen doesn’t mean their relationship isn’t still fraught.
At one point in the trailer, Jerrod tells his dad that he’s “afraid” to have certain conversations without cameras being present, which begs the question of why it can be easier to talk about sexuality in a filming setting. Perhaps because of the combination of protection and documentation? But perhaps it’s also about the buffer that cameras often provide between someone who’s got something to say and the person they need to hear it.
I’ve written a few articles about why coming out in the Black community, and marginalized communities in general, can be especially difficult. There was the piece I wrote on Tevin Campbell coming out after years of speculation. And then there was the piece I wrote about reality star Mikel Simmons coming out, though not quite using the words, to his dad.
Watching the trailer, I see a lot of similarities between Mikel and Jerrod’s stories. Both men are from either of the Carolinas, with Jerrod coming from the north and Mikel coming from the south. Both come from families where religion played a pretty big role in their development. And lastly, for both men, the cameras seemed to offer a sort of buffer to have tough conversations with their families. And even outside of Black families, cameras being a buffer was also something I explored in the piece about Mikel when Amrit, a Family Karma star finally telling his grandmother that he was gay and was going to be marrying his partner in the biggest, gayest wedding Bravo had ever aired.
And the other similarity between all these men is how long they waited to come out. As someone who is heterosexual, I can’t speak to how soon one comes out after knowing and accepting that they like the same sex, but I do think it’s interesting that these men, in one way or another, waited until they had amassed a certain amount of money, success and visibility before finally coming out to their families.
Based on the trailer, it looks like there is going to be a lot of on-screen intimacy, and that is very likely to impact the audience for this show, judging by comments made on Hollywood Unlocked, anyway. Hollywood Unlocked is an online media company run by a blogger (and recently turned politician?) named Jason Lee, who is gay. When he shared the trailer for Jerrod’s new show, the comment section was filled with homophobic and bigoted comments, with remarks about the importance of loving your children no matter what sprinkled through.
A few days ago, though, the blog also shared footage of Saucy Santana, a gay rapper, twerking, hundreds of commenters threatened to unfollow the page, claimed they were being “harassed” by the outlet’s posting choices and one commenter implored the outlet to stop posting explicit or provocative content that included men, alluding to that being the reason the hit show Empire, with a mostly-Black cast, that ramped up its airing of same-sex intimacy onscreen got cancelled. Though the show’s cancellation reportedly had to do with the Jussie Smollett scandal, the commenter does allude to the fact that as the show’s seasons progressed, Black viewership started to fall off.
Jerrod sits at the intersection of two groups still very marginalized in the screenwriting business. And despite the anticipated discomfort many may have watching, it’s one of the few real Black stories being told during this time where we’ve seen so many stories by diverse storytellers and people of colour get cut. The loss of that art and storytelling is immense, so it means a lot that this new project is actually making it to air. And I hope for the sake of Jerrod, Black storytellers everywhere and more importantly, all of the Black members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, that we tune in.
