I've always been a huge fan of those queer-coded cartoon nerds, Sherman and Mr. Peabody, and last June when I attended a 10th anniversary screening of Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied at the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, I felt as if the bespectacled dog with the hirsute accent and hypertext logic had tossed me into his "way back" machine and set the dial for 1989.

Is it possible that 10 years have past? Where were you in 1989? I was a 30-something "colored queer" living in the San Francisco/Bay Area, part of Black Gay Men United, a long since disbanded bi-weekly discussion group that met in individual member's homes for four years. Where "brothahs" talked about whatever we felt like talking about, with each other. Where Marlon found a space to begin to articulate the ideas near, dear, and queer, from which he would pull the tapestry of his groundbreaking video. If you were a "same gender loving African American male New Yorker" you might have brought "homo" home by daring to march up Malcolm X Boulevard, behind an out gay banner, in the Harlem Day Parade, or spent your summer nights "vogueing" away at the end of Christopher Street, proud and defiant. Tongues Untied, now a decade later, captures the vitality of that "We're here, we're Black queers - get used to it! (Snap!)" moment of Black gay community emergence. Yet the film's deeply personal testimony to racism within the gay community and the Black community's silence on AIDS, are, unfortunately, all too present.

If Mr. Peabody - a dog so smart he can do something I can't: tie a bow tie- were to spin the dial on his time machine to "here and now", one would expect a vast library of Black (Queer) Like Me representation to whiz by. Sadly, film and video production by, for, and about Black lesbians & gays remains, at best, a sometime thing. Perhaps it is precisely because I live four blocks from San Francisco's Castro Theater that I long ago wearied of the transference exercise: trying to find something I could relate to in the eternal stream of GWM seeks GWM films, that even my GWM friends find numbing. So when some black/les/gay/bi/ or "trans" film maker, somewhere, somehow, despite all the obstacles, does "hook it up," I try to catch it. The results, almost inevitably, leave the boundaries of identity politics in the dust. Like the way Charles Lofton's O Happy Day combines 1970's pop gospel with Black Panther imagery to ask really erotic questions about our brothers in berets and black leather jackets. Or how Cheryl Dunye humourously subverts the personal and the political, in the conference room of the lesbian nation, in The Potluck and the Passion. Or the soaring majesty of Isaac Julien's meditation on art history and sado-masochistic relations, The Attendant.

And the future? Mr. Peabody's machine won't go there, but a number of young filmmakers already have. Fresh out of the Graduate Filmmaking Program at New York University, Steven Winter's first feature Chocolate Babies swaps pathology for agency in this urban tale of HIV-positive, queer, activists of color who put the "scream" in drag queen. Etang Inyang takes a quieter approach, shifting from pop cultural icons to body image and representation in Badass Supermama. Black, queer, and playful? It could be "the bomb."

Brian Freeman is a playwright, theater director, actor and the recipient of the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award in Theater.