“The Color Purple” Screenwriter Says He Wanted to Spotlight Celie and Shug’s Gay Storyline

The 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s bestselling lesbian novel The Color Purple was, like so many films, suspiciously void of any overtly gay content. The Broadway musical includes a love song between Celie and Shug, “What About Love?”, but many productions found a way to downplay the romantic aspect of that love.

So we are all, as a community, very hopeful that the new Color Purple musical film, debuting this holiday season in a theater near you, will in fact address the romantic love between Shug and Celie. At a special screening, screenwriter Marcus Gardley was asked about how he planned to address their relationship in the film, and according to Queerty, he had a pretty promising response:

“The romantic aspect between Celie and button pushing blues singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) “was very important,” added Gardley. “That’s part of the reason I got the job. My pitch led off with, ‘This is a love story between two women’. It was the most important thing to Alice Walker. In the original film, there was not enough of the romantic love between Celie and Shug. I wanted the love story to be prominent and didn’t want to brush over that these two women are in love.”

Here’s hoping!

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