A Lack Of Self-Love Among Some Black Gay Men

I recently found a letter I forgot I wrote to the editor of the now-defunct New York Native, a weekly gay newspaper. At the time the letter was written, I had edited a black gay supplement for the paper. It was called "Celebrating Ourselves," a title suggested by the poet and novelist Melvin Dixon.

The letter, a response to a reader's letter about Dave Frechette's article, appears to have been written as a draft (with a few editing marks made by me). I'm not sure whether or not it was sent or if it was published.

I started keeping a record of my submissions in a logbook that dates back to February 1987. Anything published before that date would not have been recorded in the book.

If the letter was published, it might be in one of my scrapbooks kept on a high shelf in the backroom closet of my apartment. I'll have to check when I have time. In the meantime, here is the letter as written with the minor edits included. 

18 December 1984

Dear Editor:

J. R. Finney II accuses Dave Frechette (Native 105) of doing the very thing he himself does in his letter-to-the-editor--distorting the truth. Frechette, in his article (Native 101) about the Black and White Men Together** convention in Atlanta, does not, as Finney would have us believe, label as Uncle Toms those blacks who have not heard of the ragtime composer Scott Joplin. (It is possible, J.R., to be an Uncle Tom and know everything there is to know about Joplin.) What Frechette did say--and Finney should re-read the article if he doubts this--is that "a significant segment of the black gay community" sees BWMT "as a breeding ground for Uncle Toms who've rejected their own culture." (The emphasis is mine.)

I have been to several BWMT meetings and one or two social events and I found many of the blacks in the group to be very cold to other blacks while grinning in the face of any white man they found half-way attractive. It seems to me that most, if not all, of the black BWMT members are more apt to be white-identified. They haven't learned that there is no crime or shame in being black or loving other blacks.

Getting back to J.R., I don't know where he got the information that 65% of the black population is unfamiliar with Scott Joplin's name. Did he go door-to-door with a clipboard and a pen asking people, "Have you ever heard of Scott Joplin?" Did he do some kind of "scientific" telephone survey? Perhaps Finney should have said that 65% of blacks in BWMT have never heard of Joplin. That might have been closer to the truth.

In recent years there was a network TV movie about Scott Joplin, starring Billy Dee Williams and a postage stamp commemorating his life and career. Dave Frechette's reference to the 30-year-old  black man was not to berate him for being ignorant about Joplin but to illustrate his disbelief that anyone that old could somehow, in this day of telecommunications, not be exposed to these things. It is indeed a mystery.

Sincerely yours,

Charles Michael Smith

Manhattan

**The group is known today as Men of All Colors Together (MACT).

An Affordable Manhattan Apartment, In 1965

I  recently found Park Avenue Summer by Renee Rosen (Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2019) in a Little Free Library kiosk in Harlem. This historical novel is set in New York City, in 1965, when a young woman fresh from Ohio named Alice Weiss comes to the big city with the dream of becoming a photographer. To her complete surprise, she ends up as the secretary to the editor Helen Gurley Brown, who, on the heels of publishing her bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, has been chosen by the Hearst Corporation to revive the half dead Cosmopolitan magazine.

When I read the paperback's storyline on the back, I instantly knew I had to take it home with me. Novels like this one and Pete Hamill's Tabloid City (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) that take the reader inside a media workplace rarely fail to fascinate me. So far I'm enjoying Park Avenue Summer.

There is one thing in the book I should note that caught my attention. It's a scene in which Alice finds a semi-furnished apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for $110 a month (paid for by a weekly paycheck of $55). The thought came to me that if rents in 2025 were that affordable, there would be almost no homelessness anywhere in New York City.

A Woody Allen Film At Mount Morris Baths?

About four or five years before I was an employee at Mount Morris Baths in Harlem, I went there to interview the owner Walter Fitzer and his son for an article I planned to write for a gay publication about the bathhouse and its history. That article, unfortunately, never got written.* From that interview I remember Walter telling me that the filmmaker Woody Allen (or someone in his production company) approached him about shooting a scene or scenes in the bathhouse. Walter told me that he declined the offer. If what he said was true, he passed up a great opportunity to immortalize the bathhouse on film and  get paid for the use of the premises.

*I recently published an article in the Gay City News (April 17, 2025) about my two and a half years working there.

Malcolm X's Zip-Gun Ballpoint Pen

In the mid-1960s, my sister, her son, and I were invited to the Black Muslim mosque in Los Angeles to hear the boxing champion Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) speak. At the time he refused to be inducted into the army and possibly shipped off to Vietnam, to participate in a war he opposed.

We were invited to the mosque by a man who ran a TV-radio repair shop next door to my sister's house on Compton Boulevard in Compton and who was a member of the religious group. I remember him giving my sister a copy of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's book, Message to the Black Man.

When we got to the mosque, a member removed my retractable ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket and aimed it at me, clicking the top with his thumb several times. The late Afro-Caribbean writer Orde Coombs, in an essay in one of his books, reported a similar experience. At the time I didn't understand why that was done. It wasn't until I recently read a biography of the late black journalist, Louis Lomax, that it started to make sense.

Thomas Aiello, in his book The Life & Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity (Duke University Press, 2011), wrote that Lomax "claimed that during Malcolm [X]'s final trip to Los Angeles, he and a friend were followed by a black limousine and that Malcolm carried a 'zip-gun ball point pen' so as to take one of them with him when he went."

The Night The Ceiling Collapsed At Mount Morris Baths

For the April 17, 2025 issue of the Gay City News, I wrote an article about what it was like to work at the Mount Morris Baths in Harlem. One of the many things there wasn't space to mention was the night a piece of the ceiling fell. A customer, asleep on the top portion of a bunk bed in the dormitory section, turned his head on the pillow and at that exact moment a piece of concrete from the ceiling landed where his head had been. He miraculously escaped being killed or badly injured.

My Sri Lankan co-worker, Sumi, often told me that Walter, the owner, said I should sleep over in the dormitory. I'm glad I didn't. I might have ended up with a dent in my head or much worse.

Creating A Personal Archive Is On My To-Do List

The New York Times a few years ago published an article about the death of the black dance historian Joe Nash whose Harlem apartment was filled with dance memorabilia. The article struck a chord with me. It reminded me that I should get my papers and artifacts together for submission to an archive.

It also reminded me that my late friend, the poet and playwright Assotto Saint, encouraged me and others to start organizing our materials while we were still able to. Unfortunately, I haven't done it yet but it's at the top of my to-do list.

In 1990, I interviewed Mr. Nash via telephone for an article in the New York Amsterdam News about the dance pioneer Pearl Primus. He had been a dancer in her company in the late nineteen-forties. I remember him thanking me for keeping her memory alive. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my article was included in his vast archive.

Unmade Black Projects

The following black experience-related film and stage projects proposed by black entertainers were mentioned in the press but so far they have not been made:

1. Spike Lee (director)--A biopic about the 1938 boxing rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling; A film adaptation of Porgy and Bess.

2. Barry Jenkins (director)--A biopic about the choreographer Alvin Ailey.

3. Jon Batiste (musician/composer)--A Broadway musical based on the life of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

4. Alicia Keys (singer/pianist)--A biopic about the biracial piano prodigy Philippa Schuyler, whose father was the Harlem Renaissance writer and critic George Schuyler.

5. Jesse L. Martin (actor)--A biopic about the R & B singer Marvin Gaye.