Quil Lemons knows how to start conversations. Whether photographing Black men with guns, exploring the practice of tucking, or turning the camera on himself, the Philadelphia-born image-maker has spent a decade pushing the boundaries of “acceptable” representation. “I’m not a rage-baiter, truly,” he insists, “but I do know that I don’t have control over other people’s opinions or their biases.”
Lemons’s first monograph, Quiladelphia, published by Idea Books this month, collects more than 100 images that examine Black masculinity, queer intimacy, and the texture of Philadelphia, the city that shaped him. In conversation with writer Brontez Purnell, Lemons addresses the scrutiny that comes with refusing respectability and how the prejudices of fashion have shaped his ambition.
Brontez Purnell: You grew up in Philly, and I grew up in Alabama. Both places teach you very specific rules about how a man is supposed to move, speak, and hold his body. What was the first rule you remember breaking, and did you know you were breaking it?
Quil Lemons: We have such a similar experience. Philly is a northern city, but we are so Southern in the way that people understand each other, and in the way that people go to church. We’re the northernmost Southern city on the Eastern Seaboard, culturally. I feel like the first rule I broke unconsciously was the way I spoke.
I kept getting called “white boy” growing up. And I spent the next four years of my life, from age 7 to 11, understanding that my diction and the way I was able to hold verbs and vowels and nouns came off differently. What people meant was that I sounded educated, and having access to education didn’t mean I could sound like a Black man. That was the first thing I wanted to challenge and subvert.
Purnell: This book arrives after a decade of work. What made you hold off in the interim, and what do you now know that you didn’t at the start?
Lemons: I wanted this book to come out immediately, because I knew that it was needed. But I really appreciate now how much time I took to put this together and to get voices like yours, Santigold’s, and Lyle Ashton Harris’s in it, because we’re all aiming to do the same thing. We all occupy Black punk space. [The book] allowed me to really think about what I have to add to that conversation. I want to know what your process was, too. 100 Boyfriends [Purnell’s 2021 book of short stories], for me, feels like the Black queer Memoirs of a Geisha. In that book, what did you learn about yourself?
Purnell: Well, most of my books come from an autofictional space. I’m glad that I wrote them when I did, because they all reflect different points of view in my life, and places I was at. The miracle is that they ever got written in the first place.
Lemons: How do you deal with the scrutiny? Right now I’m dealing with a bit with my essay, “African American Trade” [which appeared in PDF magazine]. I shot a biracial Black man [to accompany the text], and they’re claiming that he isn’t Black enough to wear the title of African American, phenotypically. Has someone ever misinterpreted you without actually sitting with the work long enough to read it? I feel like there’s a lot of projection that comes with being Black and queer.
Purnell: Oh, definitely. It’s so part of the territory that it almost rolls off my back these days. It’s only natural to be misunderstood, and a lot of people are never deeply confronted with questions of self. We live what I’ve been calling “the death of discourse” in online discussions. If you go to the comments, everyone has lost the plot. If you have the notion to see a thought through, especially in these times, good for you.
Lemons: Have you ever dealt with it from within the community? A lot of the work that we do is aimed to heal the younger Black inner child that had no real reference for what a queer life could be. When I put out this book, I do it to try to create more space of safety for people that look like me. But then it will be put through double scrutiny from them. Have you ever confronted that? Blackness, even within our own community, is seen as a monolith. How do you deal with that conversation of not aligning with the “respectable Black male identity”?
Purnell: I just do what the fuck I want. I don’t deal with any conversations. Also, I have committed to not healing, and that has been very freeing.
Lemons: The conversation just adds more fodder. It’s not my first time dealing with online backlash or trolls. I try to approach it through humor, and I dubbed the term a “niggle.” It’s almost a painful humor. That’s how I’ve been forcing myself through it, just thinking about what they’re actually mad about. It’s colorism, and that’s something that is a creation of white supremacy. These are all division tactics, and we’re not focusing on the actual message.
Purnell: I want to ask about your self-portraits in the book. Was it hard to photograph both yourself and your hometown? I don’t really do memoir. I’m closer, actually, to autofictional spaces, but the photographs tell such an immediate truth. They describe physical space, in a way.
Lemons: In the action of taking the picture and putting it out, I dissociate and don’t really think about my body as being something that I’m possessing. I feel like it’s become more of a vessel for the message. I know, to your point, that I’m not going to be understood, and I love being provocative. I’m not a rage-baiter, truly, but I do know that I don’t have control over other people’s opinions or their biases.
No matter what I do to wrap this all in a bow, every image that I take is going to be reflective of Philadelphia. That city is so porous and that’s why I always say that it’s a decidedly Black city, more than most in our country. But I grew up in a place where my race never really limited me, because everybody around me respected Blackness and everyone around me was Black.
Purnell: Who in the book most surprised you, in how they carried themselves or what they let you see?
Lemons: My father was a little apprehensive of being photographed at first. It had to do with his level of vulnerability and ability to see himself. As he watched me define who I am, and he watched me come of age, he started to question his own rigid ideas of masculinity. Over time, he has really been able to respect my version of what manhood is.
Purnell: I love that. You’ve said the images involving tucking and bodily transformation were about beauty, not provocation. The images with guns will draw a very different kind of reading. What are you hoping people do with these images?
Lemons: People realize how much pain there can be in beauty. I think about it in relation to a ballerina. We watch a ballerina stand en pointe and we don’t get to see how beat up their feet are. Tucking is the performance of femininity, and there’s a lot of beauty in seeing how someone who was not born with the gender can perform femininity. Bondage inherently has that same language. It’s the same message of pain and pleasure: I get to choose how I want to be perceived, and I get to choose in which ways you get to engage with my body.
In terms of the guns, we live in a country where we need gun control. Let’s start there. Secondly, the Black men I know feel safer having a gun on them than not, because the country is always trying to violently attack them: laws are in place to disenfranchise them, or the guns are pointed at Black men, either by the country or by themselves. So the guns are a reflection of a reality. I’m always interested in truth, and that’s why the guns and tucking aren’t provocative—they’re a lived reality for most people that I engage with on a day-to-day basis.
Purnell: You’ve built a career in fashion and editorial photography. How does that world of imagery inform what’s in the book?
Lemons: Fashion photography is something I’m still learning, and we’re all trying to figure out its place in a world that’s constantly changing. Media has shifted. The importance of fashion to people outside of it has shifted. It feels like we’re doing this glamorous luxury exercise. It’s blood, sweat, and tears for an industry that the world is moving on from, in some ways.
Having access to fashion gave me mobility in a way I wouldn’t have had access to, coming from the space that I grew up in. There’s a lot of prejudice that comes from within the fashion industry, and my entire career is built on disrupting it, and letting more people who look like me into a space. I also know that me being in this arena scares people, and they want to push me out. By standing in it, I’m becoming my own institution. I’m becoming a gateway between the hood and the runway.
Purnell: You spoke with Lyle Ashton Harris and Santigold for the book. What did each of them pull out of you that you hadn’t said before?
Lemons: Santi and I have known each other for 10 years. We traveled through Africa together this spring. We went to Lagos and Dakar, and she walked me through the Door of No Return, one of the many ports in West Africa where people were forced into the transatlantic slave trade. And it was such a spiritual moment to be a free Black man walking through that door, where my ancestors lost every part of who they were in connection to Africa outside of their skin color and began to form this American identity. It allowed me to feel like I had access to African identity and showed me how I needed to make a work that spoke to my understanding of my own African American identity.
When I think about Lyle’s work, he gave me permission to access femininity. He told me to put that fucking wig on, and it’s a funny joke, but it means a lot to be a gay Black boy the first time you can put on a wig. His Billie images, where he portrayed Billie Holiday, were so transgressive for me. And to see him do a drag portrayal of what she meant to him, I realized that I could do my own kind of subversion with this act of femininity.
Purnell: In 10 years, when someone picks up this book at a library in Philadelphia, what do you want a young person to feel when they turn the pages?
Lemons: I love the optimism that libraries will still exist in 10 years, and I pray that we’re at that point. I hope that queer thought is still free. If someone were to pick this up in 10 years, I hope that they will see themselves within the pages. If they don’t have access to other people, then this book can be a guiding light to what their future could be, because I wish I had this book when I grew up.
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