The true story behind Get Millie Black’s Gully Queens

Looking to explore Jamaica after falling in love with the country and the people in The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip – South Africa and Bob Marley: One Love? HBO neo-noir detective drama series Get Millie Black takes us from London to Kingston with detective Millie Jean-Black (Tamara Lawrance, Time S2), who leaves her job at Scotland Yard to chase a ghost from her childhood in Jamaica.

Binge Get Millie Black on Showmax now.

As a child, Millie’s (Emeka Onuora) playmate was her little brother, Orville (Zolé Onuora). But the family sent her away to England after Millie attacked their abusive mother (Shanique Brown) for beating Orville because he “acted gay”. Orville was also thrown out and had to go live in The Gully – the stormwater drains on the city’s outskirts where Kingston’s small community of queer and transgender people cling to life. 

When Millie was 15 years old, Mama told her that Orville went to hell after he died during a homophobic riot. But after her mother dies, Millie finds out that she lied (well, it was 90% a lie), and she travels to Kingston to reconnect with her family. And one year later she’s fixing up her mother’s old house while trying to drive out the memories of her childhood, and reconnecting with her new sister, Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen). 

Millie lands a new job working on missing persons cases in the Kingston police force. But as a cop, she has to look the other way to protect both Hibiscus and her cop partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) – who lives with his boyfriend, Daniel (Jomo Tafari Dixon) – under the shadow of Jamaica’s anti-homosexuality laws. Millie also has to turn a blind eye to Hibiscus’ illegal job as a sex worker, and take a live-and-let-live attitude to the underworld figures who have the information she needs – like club owner Hit Girl (reggae singer Dorothy “Patra” Smith). 

It’s a fragile balance that could overturn when Scotland Yard detective Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie, Game of Thrones Season 1-8) arrives to investigate a gang connected to a powerful local white family – who are linked to the disappearance of one of Millie’s missing girls. Millie is forced to fight to stay on the case, and keep the search going when it means treading on the toes of supposedly “good” families, or standing up to the authorities who’d like to prioritise Luke’s case at the expense of hers. 

From batty man to Booker Prize

Millie Black’s Booker Prize-winning writer-creator Marlon James is writing from the heart. He grew up in Jamaica, where both his parents worked on the police force. But he left the country shortly after graduating from the University of the West Indies to escape escalating anti-gay persecution and violence, having already been taunted as a “batty man” (homosexual) at his all-boys high school, and subjected to conversion therapy-like rituals that were meant to drive the gayness out of him. 

Marlon worked on his debut series as a screenwriter on and off for around 10 years. Now he’s proud to tell a Jamaican story from an inside perspective – with five of his characters taking over the story for an episode each. “This is the first major international TV show to put my home country, Jamaica, centre stage, so it’s beyond awesome to have actual world-class Jamaican talent both in front and behind the camera,” Marlon says. 

“My mother was one of the first policewomen in Jamaica to make detective. Storytelling has always struck me first and foremost as a mystery to be solved – which I’m sure I got from her. Millie, from the second she appeared in my imagination, was a brilliant, mercurial, hilarious, unpredictable force of nature; someone who was always there, just waiting for her story to be told. I didn’t create her, I found her,” he insists.

Gully Queens and Sunshine Ladies

Aside from growing up in a cop family, Marlon found a powerful, ready-to-tell story in the form of Get Millie Black’s Sunlight Ladies, who are based on Jamaica’s real-life Gully Queens – transgender and queer people who’ve formed a community in Jamaica’s stormwater drainage system after being kicked out of their homes and hounded in the street. 

After the Gully Queen community became the subject of the 2014 Vice documentary film, Young and Gay: Jamaica’s Gully Queens, British-Nigerian R&B singer RAY BLK cast four Gully Queens – Shadiamond, Mindy, Beyonka, and Sasha – in her 2016 music video for Chill Out. Unlike Millie, though, not all Jamaica’s cops were willing to turn a blind eye, and Vogue.com reported that shortly after filming the music video, Shadaimond and her friends were raided by the police, who burned all the designer clothes that they’d been given during the production. 

The Gully Queens also tend to lose their stormwater drain homes in extreme weather, making them vulnerable to hate crime on the street – like Mindy, who was attacked by men who threw acid in her face during Hurricane Matthew in 2016. 

Despite the constant persecution and violence, though, Get Millie Black shows the love and vibrancy of the community that Hibiscus refuses to leave behind, even when Millie offers her a safe home and protection. And Millie is going to have to connect the dots and solve that mystery before she’s truly able to lay the ghosts of their childhood to rest.

Binge Get Millie Black on Showmax now.