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.

Hollywood Confidential

Mike Rothmiller, a former LAPD detective and the co-author of the true crime book, Bombshell: The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Monroe (Ad Lib Publishers, 2021), said on a nationally broadcast radio talk show that the vice squad of the LAPD in the 1940s and 1950s kept detailed dossiers on Hollywood movie stars and others in the movie capital by order of the police chief. Those files, it would be safe to assume, probably surpassed anything Kenneth Anger revealed in his gossip-filled books, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II. Let's hope those dossiers (which probably included photographs) weren't destroyed because they would be of immense interest to historians, biographers, and movie fans. 

Higher Education And Black Gay Men

There's always talk about college enrollment among black men being outpaced by black women. No one breaks it down further by comparing black gay men to their black straight counterparts. I suspect that black gay men, being overachievers, account for the majority of black male enrollment and graduation. Most of my black gay friends and acquaintances are college grads. Am I off track on this or not?

Stanley Crouch's Breath

Several years ago, the journalist and social critic Stanley Crouch interviewed my upstairs neighbor, the late legendary jazz drummer (and a former president of my building's co-op board), Charli Persip, at Minton's Playhouse, considered the birthplace of bebop. It's located on West 118th Street in Harlem. (Both Crouch and Persip died a few weeks apart in 2020.)

I got to meet Crouch only one time around 1982 or 1983 when I was a proofreader at The Village Voice. He came over to where I was sitting, presumably to discuss the article of his that I had proofread. I don't recall what was said but what was most memorable as he stood over me was getting a whiff of his bad breath.

In subsequent years, I read his New York Daily News column and saw him being interviewed more than once on Charlie Rose's public TV show (I hope he used mouthwash before going on-camera). I also remember seeing him appear as one of the authoritative talking heads in Ken Burns's documentary series on jazz.

From then on, whenever I saw his name in print or saw him on TV, my mind would go back to the first time I encountered him and got assaulted by his breath.

Compton And Los Angeles Are Separate Cities

In the New York Times obituary (July 4, 2025) of the prolific hip hop choreographer for films and TV, Dave Scott, who grew up in Compton, California, and died in Las Vegas at age 52, Compton is described as "the city in South Central Los Angeles." I've lived and attended public schools in both places and know, if the obituary writer doesn't, that Compton is a city near Los Angeles, not in Los Angeles.

The obituary writer would have been on firmer ground if he or she or they had written that Compton is a city located in Los Angeles County.

How A Gossip Column Provided An Opportunity

When the ultra-right wing New York Post's gossip column Page Six was actually on page 6, not page 12 or page 20, I saw an item that stated that the civil rights icon Andrew Young was running for mayor of Atlanta and was giving up his Los Angeles Times-syndicated opinion column. Since, it was reported, the paper was looking for replacement writers for the column, I immediately contacted the L. A. Times about their talent search. Soon after I was able to contribute three columns.

One of those columns was about homosexuality in the black community. The Oregon Journal in Portland published the article in August 1981 with the headline, "Gays Are Black, Too." The Times editor I submitted the article to begrudgingly sent it out, saying that Andrew Young would not have written about the subject. That was precisely why the column needed to be written. It gave attention to a segment of the black community that was stigmatized and rendered invisible and voiceless.

Unfortunately, Young's column was dropped by many newspapers because it was his opinions they were interested in publishing. To me, this attitude was short-sighted and foolish.  No one should expect one person to speak for all black people. You would've thought they would've been glad to have a multiplicity of black voices and perspectives on a variety of topics. I think it's a safe bet to say that some of those voices they weren't interested in hearing from might have been the next James Baldwin or the next Toni Morrison or the next Audre Lorde.

Anyway, this was the first, and only, time I ever got a job opportunity via a gossip column.

Being Black And Gay In Los Angeles

"There was a time, my uncle Syl [a retired actor in Black Gay Hollywood] once told me, when gay men in Los Angeles lived as much, if not more, on the margins as black folks. But if things got too hot, white gays always had the option to go back into the closet, back to passing themselves off as masters of the universe. Not so their black counterparts, who at the end of the day were still black, still on the outside looking in."--LAPD detective Charlotte Justice (fictional character), from Inner City Blues by Paula L. Woods (W.W. Norton, 1999), Page 269.

I am always amazed that black women writers like Paula L. Woods and Gloria Naylor are more open to including black gay and lesbian characters in their fiction than many of their black male peers.

A Nuyorican Artist Whose Art Is "Evolving In All Different Areas"

The following unpublished interview with the artist Armando Alleyne (born in 1959) was done in 1984.

Over a cup each of unsweetened peppermint tea, Armando Alleyne, an Afro-Latino artist, and I sat facing each other in his tiny studio apartment on Convent Avenue in Harlem. We discussed his work, travels, and ideas. On the walls were paintings and wood sculptures he had exhibited at two local art shows.

Alleyne also created three paintings for inclusion in the art collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library system. "They're from the Cloud Series," he explained. "It is a series that deals with the sky and how it changes. They are abstract representations of the sky that would have other things blended into them." For example, continued Alleyne, one painting is "also a collage. There are stamp images of Martin Luther King stamped onto the sky. There are flowers and sometimes colors."

His gay artwork has appeared in the first and second issues of Blackheart, a black gay literary and graphic arts magazine, and in the New York Native, the gay weekly newspaper. In the summer of 1977, Fag Rag, published his poem, "Cute." Those publications no longer exist.

                                                Portrait of Nina Simone by Armando Alleyne (The Jazz Series).

                                                 

Alleyne, a graduate of the City College of New York, where he majored in painting, is of Puerto Rican/Barbadian heritage and is one of eleven children.

[Today, forty plus years later, Alleyne has received much recognition from the New York art world and has published A Few of My Favorites, a collection of artwork, photos, and poetry. The book was published in 2021 by the Swiss publisher, Edition Patrick Frey. Full disclosure: I was the book's proofreader.]

I asked him during the interview about his travels to other countries.

Armando Alleyne: I'm thinking of going to Mexico in January [1985] for a month or two to take some more lessons in ceramics. When I was in Africa, I was given a chance to study all these different wood sculptures. In Senegal I saw a lot of different wood carvings. I also went to Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania.

Charles Michael Smith: Did you feel connected to Africa in any way?

AA: Africa, I feel, has given me a more international scope of  black people, to see Africans, first of all. It showed me there's always space for learning new things about different people and different cultures. I enjoyed it.

Militarily, over there, around certain army bases, governmental buildings, they get very touchy. They don't want you to take pictures of the governmental areas, like the capital buildings, the palace where the president of the country lives. They figured you might try to do a bomb plot and that's what you might use the pictures for. The same rule is also true in Guinea-Bissau. I can understand that. That's how they feel. I still enjoyed myself. I took pictures of a lot of things. I took pictures of the churches and of different people, fishing and farming.  They basically lived off the land, either fishing or growing rice and plantains.

CMS: Where have you exhibited your work?

AA: I have already exhibited works from the Expectation Series at the Rainbow Studio Collective Anniversary Party art exhibit [June 16, 1984] and at the World Hispanic Fair [New York Coliseum, August 3, 4, and 5, 1984]. The exhibit had pieces from the Warrior Series and pieces from the Ancestral Series at that fair. It was a wonderful fair. There were 13, 14 artists altogether. They all had a sign saying the country that they were from. I had a sign saying "Nuyorican." I was going to put "Barbados" [on it] but they got into such a racket because they were saying Barbados is a British colony and "We don't want no British colony," quote unquote, "there." It doesn't matter to me. British or Spanish, it's the same colonial system.

CMS: The New York art world has, as you probably know, many gay artists in it.

AA: Yeah. I see myself as evolving in all different areas. I don't see necessarily the point of art only being placed in one particular area. I try to exhibit my art in whatever different areas I can. This is important because in a place like New York City, there are so many different audiences you can respond to and reach with your art.

The World Hispanic Fair was an excellent opportunity for me to share my work with other Latin artists as well as getting an aspect of all the different Latin countries performing and doing their thing and showing all the Indian-ness in their culture and the African-ness and the European-ness mixed into that culture.

Different people would come over. Some people would give donations because they were impressed. Other people would ask me questions like "Where did you learn your skills?," "How long did you study your art?" Some people there were saying that my work was very strong, really strong enough to continue doing what I was doing.

CMS: What are your future plans?

AA: What I want to do is make my own designs using stencil for sweatshirts and sell them in the fall. I really feel I could make a lot of money doing that. I have all the equipment ready for it. I have the dyes ready. It's the type of dye that when you put it on cotton, and once the picture is dry, you just have to iron it and it's permanent. Within the next three years I see myself doing sculptures for buildings, doing murals for buildings and corporations and family home units while still working on my prints and ceramic work. And all the time doing paintings, at home or in the studio. I visualize myself as having a house. Moving from a loft space to a house.

Many American Dreams Deferred

"Young men and women roamed the desolate blocks--slowly going nowhere. Others hung out on corners with the trash swirling about their feet--hungry, jobless, and sullen with defeat. Harlem, a prison of crumbling squares, seemed to be sinking into itself. Its inhabitants were a long way from the promise of the American dream."--Gordon Parks, photographer/film director/author, from his book, To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 1979), Page 180.

The young people Gordon Parks witnessed in Harlem were among the many whose American dreams, if they had any, were deferred.

Norman Mailer's Thoughts On State Violence

"[T]here are two kinds of violence: individual violence and the violence of the state. The violence of the state is not just wars, it's also concentration camps...There can be violence in total censorship. Anything that cuts off expectations from people, possibilities from people, anything that compresses people by external government force is the violence of the state....Individual violence is very often the natural answer of people to the collective violence of the state." --Norman Mailer, from Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills (Empire Books, 1982), Page 36.

Watch Out For Miss Alice

Whenever my friend and upstairs neighbor Scotty Crawford (now deceased) referred to the police as "Miss Alice," I thought it was a humorous name he had made up. I learned later from a book about the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York's Greenwich Village that gay men back then called cops "Alice Blue Gown."

Earth Day 2025

Today is Earth Day, an annual event that was established in 1970. According  to The New York Times Almanac 2010, it "marks the birth of the modern environmental movement" and "is meant to encourage preservation of the environment."

Earth Day is a part of Earth Week, which also includes Arbor Day. Arbor Day is celebrated on the last Friday of April and has as its aim the preservation of trees. This year Arbor Day falls on April 25.

Donald Trump, An Ugly American

President Donald Trump is the quintessential Ugly American. The term is defined by the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as "an American who behaves offensively abroad." And, it should be added, at home, too.

Show Your Love For Jazz

April is Jazz Appreciation Month. It was created at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in 2001. According to Wikipedia, the aim of the celebration was "to be an annual event that would pay tribute to jazz as both a living and as a historic music."

Among the many ways to appreciate this American-born music, you can attend a jazz performance, buy or listen to a jazz recording, buy a jazz-related poster, support a jazz radio station like WBGO in the New York metropolitan area, wear a jazz-related T-shirt, watch a jazz video online, buy a jazz-related postcard, read a biography of a jazz musician.

A Phrase Book For Gay Travelers

For gay travelers and language students I recommend The Gay Phrase Book by Barry McKay (Cassell, 1995). The front cover advises the reader to "Get Your Man in Six Different Languages." Those languages, each having its own section, are French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese. Sprinkled throughout the book are beefcake photos.

Sarah Vaughan's Birthday Is Today

The extraordinary jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), known as "The Divine One," was born on this day. Vaughan, a native of Newark, New Jersey, where there is a street named for her, would have celebrated her 101st birthday.

A Hatemongering Pastor Runs For NYC Mayor

James David Manning, the pastor of the Atlah World Missionary Church in Harlem, has recently announced that he is running for mayor of New York, declaring that as mayor he would (unilaterally) eliminate local sales tax and raise the minimum wage to $27.

Over the years, the church's outdoor message board has posted numerous homophobic, racist, and false statements like the one that said, "YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA AND HE TURNED YOUR SONS GAY, TURNED HARLEM WHITE, EMPTIED CHURCHES, FILLED SHELTERS WITH WOMEN & CHILDREN."

Such wild and misleading statements have prompted others in the community to tie handwritten signs to the church's fence that said, " Hate Is Not A Community Value" and "Hate Breeds Violence," and to organize a picket line whose participants represented the city's diversity.

It's hard to see anyone taking Pastor Manning's run for mayor seriously. It's also hard to believe anyone who calls themselves a true Christian being a member of this hatemongering church.

Black Brotherly Love

"I think it is absolutely necessary that black men regroup as black men; until they can talk to each other, cry with each other, hug and kiss each other, they will never know how to do those things with me. I know whole black men exist, and I want to see and enjoy them."--Alice Walker, "What That Day Was Like for Me: The Million Man March October 16, 1995," from her book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (Random House, 1997).

The Redesigned Rainbow Flag, Monstrously Ugly

Douglas Murray, a New York Post columnist, described the rainbow flag in his column (January 24, 2025) as "a perfectly pleasant symbol of gay liberation" that "has gotten more monstrously ugly with each year." Amen!

The flag designer Gilbert Baker's simple six-color horizontally striped flag can be put in the If-it-ain't- broke, don't-fix-it category. Redesigning the flag by adding, to quote Mr. Murray, "a triangle and a little circle" to make it more inclusive with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender makes no sense to me. The flag's colors have nothing to do with any of that because they stand for much broader meanings.

It's obvious Mr. Murray has no knowledge of those meanings when he says, "[I]f the colors of the flag were meant to represent different races, then who were the orange and red stripes meant to represent[?]. Was it gays with too much fake tan on? Or white lesbians who had been left out in the sun too long?"

He concludes this part of the column by saying, "Even thinking that the flag was about race was a demonstration of Olympic-level stupidity."  But then he fails to explain what each color symbolizes. That would have helped his readers to see the flag's universality.

 Since he doesn't seem to know about each color's meaning, I would suggest Mr. Murray get a copy of Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, published in 1995.

The brief entry on the flag, by Steve Vezeris, points out that the flag originally "had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit."

Indigo was later replaced by royal blue. And, according to the 2006 documentary Rainbow Pride, the colors hot pink and turquoise were dropped. The reason: those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

Do You Have An Artist In The Family?

"Today, no American family can be secure against the danger that one of its children may decide to become an artist." --Garrison Keillor (born 1942), host of A Prairie Home Companion on public radio. (Quoted in The Theatre Quotation Book: A Treasury of Insights and Insults, collected and edited by Russell Vandenbroucke, Limelight Editions, 2001.)

Linguistic Pet Peeves

Everyone has words, phrases, or expressions that can be called pet peeves. I have two of them. The first pet peeve is one you often see printed in newspaper obituaries: "So-and-so died surrounded by family and friends." It irks me because, one, it probably isn't true, and two, it makes those who knew the person sound like a bunch of vultures eagerly waiting for death to come so they can begin the reading of the will or to grab as many family heirlooms as they can. Plus, how would they know the exact moment of death? Was a doctor or undertaker present at the bedside beforehand?

The second pet peeve is "So-and-so is 95 years young." If you're 95, you're not young. Saying someone is 95 years young, instead of 95 years old, stigmatizes old age and is another example of ageism.

Printing Mishaps

In my many years as a freelance journalist I have experienced several printing errors that have appeared in articles I've written for newspapers.

Aside from the occasional misspelled word or factual error, or God forbid, the complete rewriting of an article by an imperious editor, I have experienced such mishaps as a mangled or missing byline, jumbled paragraphs (something that happened in a syndicated article I wrote about Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie), and the use of my words about the famed Cotton Club in someone else's article without attribution (otherwise known as plagiarism). The latter mishap would  have been hard for me to prove since the offending party would probably claim that the lack of attribution and quotation marks was a printer's error and not a deliberate theft from my article syndicated by the Los Angeles Times.

But the one thing that has not happened to me, and I pray it never does, is something I saw while going through an old issue of one of New York's daily newspapers. The whole bottom half of the page was so ink smeared, it was impossible to read what was printed. I felt sorry for the writers to whom this happened. I can only hope that the paper corrected the problem in later editions.