Coquie Hughes: Urban Lesbian Filmmaker Introduction to Yvonne Welbon’s Interview with Coquie Hughes

Toni Morrison purportedly began her career as a novelist because she noticed a dearth of books about black women. As a result of this limitation, Morrison desired to write books “for people like [her], which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people—people who can’t be faked, people who don’t need to be patronized.”¹ Similarly the writer, director, and filmmaker Coquie Hughes (born Latasha Iva Hughes in Chicago in 1970) has produced narratives that feature an array of queer black women—“Girls Like Us” as she calls them in her web series—who are curious, demanding, flawed, and