“Support Your Local Pornographer!”: Radical Sexual Politics and the Making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song!

Abstract: In the shooting diary for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song! (1971) Melvin Van Peebles claimed that the film’s controversial sexual aspects were necessary because of production constraints. He wrote: “The unions don’t trouble themselves over smut films, that is pornographic films, which I suppose they consider beneath their dignity, and there is even an entire parallel distribution circuit for these films. . . . I told everyone I was making a beaver film.” This account of the film’s production minimizes the impact of 1970s radical sexual culture on the film. Rejection of marriage and monogamy and acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and birth control became standard on the radical Left largely because of the commingling of groups like the Sexual Freedom League, the Weather Underground, COYOTE, and the Black Panthers. Experimenting with new models of affiliation and relation redefined understandings of sexuality within all of these movements at the same time that new and often contestatory understandings of what freedom would mean emerged. The Black Panthers, who promoted and celebrated Sweetback and may have been an inspiration for the radical activists in the film, dubbed it “the first truly revolutionary Black film made.” While Panther leader Huey P. Newton, former roommate of Sexual Freedom League leader Richard Thorne, urged viewers not to see the film as “a sex film,” it is difficult to understand the significance of the film without understanding the radical sexual politics that shaped it.