Less a portrait than a meditation on Langston Hughes, this film "looks for Langston" in the worlds evoked by his poetry. Like the poems, the images are infused with the Blues. But their bluesy text, along with compositions by poet Essex Hemphill, is what might be called a Ballad of Black Gay Desire. Julien conjures up the Harlem renaissance of the twenties-of which Hughes was perhaps the key figure-in moodily re-shot newsreels and clips from race movies. It is Harlem viewed from a gay vantage. Imagined sequences bring the subject of black homosexuality into the present and infuse it with a libidinal lyricism. For U.S. copyright release, negotiations with the Hughes estate turned into a contentious attempt to silence the history of a culture and its icons.