In 1994, married couple Paulette Green and Donna Dear purchased Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms, a 111-acre plot of land between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean said to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Still living there today, the conservation and cultivation of the land have been a crucial and transformative part of the women’s lives. They have won many awards for their work and have formed relationships with dozens of “nieces” and “nephews,” including married filmmakers Charlyn Griffith-Oro and Jeannine Kayembe-Oro, who they met in 2016 and to whom they immediately became role models.

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“There’s a love that melded immediately for us, but there’s a personhood that is a part of freedom,” Griffith-Oro told LGBTQ Nation. “What they reject is heteronormativity, and what they reject is systemic racism. But what they embrace is lifelong partnership and love and respect.”

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Green and Dear have since become the subject of the filmmakers’ new short, “The Aunties.”

“I think that having The Aunties is a really rare blueprint for us,” Kayembe-Oro said. “They have been the architects of an incredible life from before they got together. Having them close to us is very helpful to our marriage and relationship.”

Kayembe-Oro explained that telling the Aunties’ story hasn’t just been transformative for the filmmakers. “Other Black queer people that watch it, everyone loves it because they’re like, ‘oh my gosh, I really needed these Black queer elders in my life to see.’” She added that the short is “just six minutes of possibility versus the 10 years that we’ve been able to spend with them.”

Griffith-Oro said that during the early days of the pandemic, the relationship between the couple and the Aunties changed. The couple had recently married, and they say the connection to Green and Dear “deepened” with the commitment they made to each other. The idea for the short film came from that evolution.

Through the film, the Aunties become a living, breathing tie to the threads of the past. It gives viewers a taste of the richness that comes from intergenerational friendship.

“You deserve mentorship, you deserve the love of the older generation, and you have to be worthy of your deservings,” Griffith-Oro said. “Your elders, they don’t owe you to coddle you or be completely gentle or easy with you. They have survived plenty. They have done so much and they deserve for you to step your game up and know your own worth as you receive what you deserve, which is care and companionship in this life from an older person.”

The Aunties have ingrained Harriet Tubman’s legacy into their lives. They have a miniature poodle named Araminta, Tubman’s birth name, and their cat, Rit, is named after Tubman’s mother. And while the short focuses on the land and its connection to Tubman, the Aunties are also inspirational merely for their position as queer elders living their truths.

“We have a gay community around us that we have been engaged with for probably 70 years,” Greene told LGBTQ Nation. The couple, who met in 1974, refer to themselves as “partners in life,” even though they are legally married.

Greene, a native of The Bronx and Harlem, told a story about the time she took her grandmother to a party at the home of her friend Sherman’s grandmother on Long Island. Sherman was a gay man, and many of the party’s guests were also gay. “My grandmother told me that she had the most wonderful time of her life, and she said, ‘If I had known that this life could be like this, you may not have ever made it.’ I wouldn’t have been born.”

Dear grew up in the Midwest and didn’t know any out gay people growing up. She joined the Army on a whim shortly after graduating high school in 1965, but when she told her mother of her plan, the older woman balked.

“You know what they say about those women in the military,” her mother said. But Dear didn’t know. She dug her heels in on the idea, and eventually, her mother relented, thinking that maybe the military would force her daughter to follow through on a plan for a while. Dear was enlisted for 27 years.

“I’m not saying the military brought me out,” she said, though Greene disagreed, joking that it absolutely “turned you out.” 

There was a brief period when Dear considered leaving the Army to settle down and start a family. Greene was delighted to share what Dear’s mother told her: “I have enough grandchildren. You don’t need to make that kind of move.”

As Greene said, “Her mama knew what time it was ever since she had her.” Instead of settling down, Dear moved up to the highest military rank and spent time in Vietnam and Japan, among many other places.

The Aunties have devoted the past 30 years of their lives to their land. They show no signs of slowing down, and their zest has led the filmmakers to consider expanding the short into a feature. But for it to happen, it has to feel right for all involved.

“When we tell this story,” Griffith-Oro said, “it will be one of triumph and not heartbreak or the disenfranchisement that so many queer people have experienced through unethical filmmaking.”

“The Aunties” is now streaming on the Black Public Media (BPM) YouTube channel.

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