The late New York City-based lesbian poet, activist, and professor Audre Lorde will be the subject of a forthcoming biopic, according to an exclusive report published by Deadline.
Lorde, who was born in Harlem and called Staten Island home for more than a decade, was previously featured in documentaries such as “The Berlin Years,” which highlighted her time in living in Germany, as well as “The Life and Work of Audre Lorde.”
The bopic will be called “The Erotic,” which is inspired by Lorde’s own essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic of Power,” which confronted western perspectives of eroticism and reframed the term in a way that related to women’s power, consciousness, spirituality, and other themes.
Numa Perrier, the director of “Jezebel,” will produce and star in the film. The biopic does not yet have a timeline for production.
“Audre Lorde lived fully, loved fiercely and used her words as both weapon and salve. We seek to honor her in an intimate yet bold way,” Perrier said, according to Deadline. “The stories of our poets are necessary as their work continues to give shape and make sense of the world. Audre Lorde said ‘your silence will not protect you’ — and I believe creating a film is one of the most impactful ways to use our voices.”
Perrier’s House of Numa Productions and Livia Perrier’s Brazile Productions will work together on the film.
“House of Numa is dedicated to the centering of Black women who have so often had to work on the fringe yet still impinge society in a powerful way such as Audre Lorde,” Perrier added.
Lorde rose to become a key voice in civil rights activism and participated in the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. She fell in love with libraries at an early age, leading her to work as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library in the 1960s.
Lorde, who received her bachelor’s degree at Hunter College and her Master’s Degree at Columbia University, went on to become a tenured English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Her Staten Island home, which was located at 207 St. Paul’s Avenue, was landmarked by New York City two years ago. She lived there with her partner and two children for a decade starting in the early 1970s.
Lorde died of breast cancer in 1992 when she was just 58 years of age.
