![]() ![]() ![]() And for queer Black people, he was a reflection of a truth rarely seen on screens big or small, especially after the Logo series “Noah’s Arc” went off the air in 2006. He was open and unapologetic about his love of sex and the male form while living in the tiny fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana-the type of place where it’s not necessarily safe to be gay, or Black, and certainly not both at the same time.Īs Lafayette, Ellis expanded the country’s collective imagination of what a queer black man could look, sound and act like, starting just months before California passed Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, and years before President Barack Obama announced an “evolution” in his thinking about gay rights. His short-order cook who moonlighted as a drug and vampire blood dealer was enticing and bawdy, femme and butch, learned and country AF. McDonald emphasizes how Ellis-a Julliard graduate raised in Alabama, two states away from “True Blood’s” rural Louisiana setting-gave life to a complex depiction of Black queerness that contrasted with the era’s cultural and political context: ![]() The Undefeated culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald pays respects to Ellis, who The Hollywood Reporter notes died of heart failure at age 39 on Saturday (July 8), and his contributions to the television landscape in a new retrospective essay. Outside of extended cable programs explicitly centering queer narratives, few narrative television shows highlighted out and unapologetic Black LGBTQ characters the way HBO’s “ True Blood” did with Nelsan Ellis’ Lafayette Reynolds. ![]()
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