Lollypop

Performance artists Kalup Linzy and Shaun Leonardo perform a lip sync of the 1933 blues song “Lollypop,” which was originally written and sung by Coots Grant and Socks Wilson, an opposite-sex married couple who performed as Hunter and Jenkins from the 1910s through the 1930s. Over that heterosexual narrative, Linzy and Leonardo superimpose a fictional queer relationship between two Black men, inhabiting affects that are both masculine and feminine.

Linzy’s video work consciously plays with the low-fidelity aesthetic of the medium. In this video, Linzy transforms a vintage blues song into a queer flirtation, harkening back to histories of popular entertainment, including vaudeville and drag.