“Dreams do come true!”: Black Queer Comedy in Rudy Ray Moore’s The Human Tornado

Abstract: Through casting, regionalized coding, genre parody, and characterization , The Human Tornado implicates a number of sensational genres and films, effectively and excessively bursting the heteronormative, racially charged bounds of the Blaxploitation nomination without ever sacrificing the triumphant Blackness beloved of the genre’s historical fans. Casting Sir Lady Java, a celebrated drag queen and queer activist in Los Angeles, in addition to nicknaming a Southern sissy “Sweet Tea,” a Black gay Southern euphemism, the humor generated by both Rudy Ray Moore’s Black queer authorship and regionalized address in Tornado enlivens Daniel Fuentes Morgan’s reasoning that satire produces “kaleidoscopic Blackness” hitherto hidden by “consumable and commodifiable” assumptions about Blackness. Defying the heteronormativity governing “consumable” constructions of race and sexuality in Blaxploitation films and revealing the exploitational features of “white” Hollywood genre pictures, The Human Tornado surely reveals “kaleidoscopic Blackness” in its comedy, and produces a space alluded to by E. Patrick Johnson in Black gay Southern culture: fostering coexistence and “paradoxical” affirmation, where pouring Sweet Tea, indulging Java, and laughing together forge community.