John R. Gordon (born 1964) is a British writer. His work – novels, plays, screenplays and biography - deals with the intersections of race, sexuality and class. With Rikki Beadle-Blair he founded and runs queer-of-colour-centric indie press Team Angelica. Although he was a "white person from a white suburb", according to Gordon, in the 1980s he became deeply interested in black cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, and they have influenced his work ever since.
Early work
Between 1993 and 2001 Gordon published three groundbreaking novels of Black gay British life, Black Butterflies, Skin Deep, and Warriors & Outlaws (the first two with Gay Men's Press, the third with Millivres/Prowler). In 1995 he directed his play Wheels of Steel, about a closeted young thug paralysed in a joyriding accident and his flamboyant male nurse, at the Gate Theatre, London. It starred Rikki Beadle-Blair and Karl Collins, who went on to play each other's estranged husbands in Beadle-Blair's Channel 4 series Metrosexuality. He wrote a 1999 sitcom pilot The Melting Pot about a macho black British man (Felix Dexter) coming to terms with his long-lost Jamaican brother's homosexuality. Although it never made it beyond Channel 4's Sitcom Festival to television, The Independent praised it for offering innovative characters and situations. It also starred Terry Alderton.
Noah's Arc
Gordon script-edited two seasons of Patrik-Ian Polk's television show Noah's Arc (2005–6) for the US cable channel Logo. He wrote two episodes of the second season,(Desperado and Under Pressure), and across 2007 co-storylined (with Polk and Q. Allan Brocka) the spin-off feature-film, subsequently co-writing the screenplay with Polk. The film, Noah's Arc: Jumping The Broom, was given a limited release in six American cities, where it played to sold-out houses at the end of October 2008 and recouped $500,000 in ticket sales alone. The "Jumping The Broom" script that Gordon and Polk wrote was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, as was the film itself in the Best Independent Feature category. In April 2009 the film won the GLAAD Best (limited release) Feature Film Award. In 2020 he co-executive produced Noah's Arc: The "Rona Chronicles", a reunion episode written and directed by Polk, and presented by Gilead Sciences on 5 July. It starred all original cast members and included a feature cameo by Wanda Sykes as Noah's mother, for which she was nominated for a 2021 Emmy for Outstanding Guest Performer in a Daytime Fiction Program. In January 2021 it was awarded a GLAAD Special Recognition Award.
Souljah (short film) His 10-minute short film Souljah – about a gay African former child soldier (B3/Angelica Entertainments 2007), and directed by Rikki Beadle-Blair – premiered at the London Film Festival on 30 October 2007. In July 2008 Souljah won the award for Best Short Film at the Rushes Soho Shorts Film Festival. April 2009 it won Best International Short at the Toronto Reelworld Film Festival. It was directed by Rikki Beadle-Blair for Team Angelica Productions and produced by Beadle-Blair, Gordon and Carleen Beadle.
As publisher
In 2011, with Rikki Beadle-Blair he established the radical queer-of-colour-focused imprint Team Angelica Publishing. Its first book was Beadle-Blair's What I Learned Today. In 2013 they published the well-received and groundbreaking short-story collection Fairytales for Lost Children by gay Somali author Diriye Osman. On 8 October 2014 Fairytales for Lost Children won the Polari First Book Prize. In 2015 they published Roz Kaveney's novel, Tiny Pieces of Skull, which went on to win the 2016 Best Trans Fiction Lambda Literary Award. In November 2017 they published the first ever gay African memoir, Lives of Great Men by Chike Frankie Edozien. It was favourably reviewed in the London Financial Times and won the Best Gay Memoir/Non Fiction Lambda Literary Award in 2018. It went on to be republished by Jacana Books in South Africa, in July 2018, and by Ouida Books in Nigeria. In February 2018 they published Sista!, an anthology of writings by same-gender-loving women of African/Caribbean descent with a UK connection, edited by Gordon, Beadle-Blair and UK Black Pride co-founder Phyll Opoku-Gyimah; it included writers such as Yrsa Daley-Ward and was shortlisted for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award.
In 2020 he and Beadle-Blair contracted iconic gay African-American author Larry Duplechan to write a memoir of his love of film, Movies That Made Me Gay: it was published October 2nd 2023.