"In The Life" 's 40th Anniversary

October of this year will mark the 40th anniversary of In the Life, the groundbreaking black gay anthology edited by Joseph Beam and published by Alyson Books in 1986.

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.

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."

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.

My Brief Interview With Playwright Assotto Saint

The following is from the transcript of an interview I did in 1989 with the late gay Haitian-American poet/essayist/playwright Assotto Saint (1957-1994).The interview was mainly about his theater piece, New Love Song, which was part two of a trilogy. (Part one was Rising to the Love We Need and part three was Nuclear Lovers.) He and others performed New Love Song in 1989 in a small theater in New York's Greenwich Village. Assotto Saint, whose birth name was Yves Lubin, died in 1994 of complications from AIDS.

Charles Michael Smith: Why did you decide to do multimedia?

Assotto Saint: I hate conventional plots and I usually don't have the patience to deal with that kind of situation. Multimedia*--nonlinear situations, dramatizations--works best for me because it becomes more immediate. Time is not sequential. The present is mixed with the future is mixed with the past. I jump in and out of sequence. That works best for me.

CMS: Are you worried about the audience's ability to follow what's going on?

AS: Actually, no. When theater started, it was also nonsequential. The roots of theater are based on rituals, which mixes the present with the past and the future and also a lot of theater that's being done these days is nonlinear. The whole theater of images that has gained so much popularity during the past ten years is nonlinear, is nonsequential. As black people, we have locked ourselves in so much realistic drama at times.

CMS: What are the sources of your work?

AS: The Yoruba and voodoo religions are very present in the pieces I do. I basically work in rituals. I'm trying to create rituals, black gay rituals in my work. I grew up in Haiti and I was surrounded by voodoo and I also grew up in a strong Catholic family. Therefore I was grounded in the rituals of the Catholic Church and the rituals of the voodoo ceremonies.

I wanted to go back to the roots. To move forward you look back and then you go on. Some people feel looking back is death. But for me, it is necessary at where you came from and you move on.

CMS: How would you describe the segments of this theater piece?

AS: Some are stories, some are monologues, some are essays. Everything I do is complex. (He laughs heartily.)

CMS: Tell me about your self-published books of poems. Why do you self-publish?

AS: As black gay people, we must always search for new ways to establish our own institutions and that way we empower ourselves and become autonomous. It's necessary. We can do it. The women's movement has been an example. They inspired me.

*Multimedia also includes music, film and video clips, sound effects, photo slides, artworks, narration (live and/or recorded).

My Interview With Richard Bruce Nugent

The following is from the transcript of my telephone interview in 1985 with the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987).* He was also known as Bruce Nugent. Parts of the interview were used for an article I wrote about Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance for Joseph Beam's In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology.

Charles Michael Smith: It was hinted that [the poet Countee] Cullen and [Harold] Jackman [a schoolteacher] were lovers. It's hinted at in everything.

Bruce Nugent: You see, there was no such thing as a closet, particularly then [the 1920s]. It's just that nobody spoke about it. They didn't speak about quote heterosexual unquote relationships either. But people kind of knew. You don't get on a rooftop and shout "I slept with my wife last night" either.

CMS: You were considered the most flamboyant then.

BN: I've always been flamboyant. There weren't many black bohemians, I gather, at the time. I didn't wear socks I guess because I didn't have them sometimes. Sometimes because I didn't feel like it. Like today, I don't have on any socks. When I want to or when I think about it, I put on socks.

[He told me he was "very fond of the name Michael," my middle name.]

["I almost find it difficult to become friends with people who call me Richard."]

["I dabbled in everything," e.g. poetry, painting. "I've never been as diverse in my abilities as people are now. I didn't know music. I was just familiar with it, but I didn't know it. Popular music of the day, jazz, so-called classical music. Somebody asked me, 'Do you like classical music?' The first thing I said was 'No. Sounds stuffy.' And yet everything that was played at concerts I already knew because Mother and Father used to play it and sing it at home."]

[Wrote the gay historian Eric Garber: "...Nugent dabbled successfully in painting, drawing, poetry, and dancing. He was self-consciously avant-garde and often had no permanent address. Preferring to drift from place to place. Nugent spent much of his time drawing erotic, often phallic, drawings." (The Advocate, May 13, 1982.)]

["I thought everybody was in the life" if he thought they were attractive. He was involved in a three-way fuck with Philander Thomas, who was "classically good-looking. By classically I mean that in Africa he would have been a  classically beautiful person. What they didn't know then was that Africans frequently had features like that, aquiline, Caucasian features. He was quite, quite beautiful. Philander didn't do anything. [He was] very much a playboy. He brought people together. That's what he liked to do. Not a matchmaker in that sense, but bedmates. [People who came to Harlem did so] to vent their pleasures and Harlem was the place to be and everybody thought they could, and Philander saw to it that they did. 

CMS: Did Philander have a sense of humor?

BN: Oh, yes [said with pleasure in his voice]. He was quite a man, quite a funny man. I loved Philander. I liked his random freedom. Real freedom. Very few people have it. I had it.

CMS: Do you know where Philander Thomas came from?

BN: I know very little about anybody's background. Apparently that's a failing of mine.

CMS: Did Philander live in Harlem?

BN: Oh, yes.

CMS: He didn't work for a living. He more or less put people together.

BN: He put together homosexual people. He liked to do it and I suppose it was a time when people made their money any way they could. [Nugent said Philander Thomas was "truly named."]

CMS: Was he an actor?

BN: Oh, yes.

CMS: How did you meet him?

BN: I met him in Porgy [a play based on the novel by DuBose Heyward. The play became the basis for Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin and his brother Ira]. He was much more outgoing than I.

CMS: What did you do to amuse yourself?

BN: Go to shows, go to parties.

CMS: How did gay men meet then?

BN: I'm always kind of thrown by that question because it seems to me people just meet people. Like it is now. I understand that there were gay bars, gay places. I never patronized [them] because I was not fond of the company of gay people. I still don't enjoy their company very much. They don't have anything to talk about.

["If I had a place of my own, I would much rather be the host than the guest. That's still true." He goes to parties, but "They're not my favorite form of entertainment." "I've never been one to gravitate towards gay bars, gay restaurants, gay this, gay that. Any more than I've wanted to go to black this, black that. I go to people bars.]

CMS: Was Langston Hughes a gay man?

BN: I have strange feelings about Langston as well as I knew him. And it has been said that except for [writer] Arna Bontemps, I was Langston's best friend. Certainly, I knew him longest. My personal feelings about Langston is that he was asexual. I had a big argument with Faith [Berry, a Hughes biographer] after that. She implied that he was homosexual. I said to her, "How do you know that?" As long as I've known him, I didn't know that. He had a longstanding friendship with a boy named Zell Ingram. There were people who felt that Zell and he were lovers. I don't know whether they were or not [sleeping together]. A lot of those kinds of things weren't important to me. I know it was unimportant to Langston what people thought about them.

CMS: Was Zell gay?

BN: I don't know.

CMS: What about traveling?

BN: I love Italy. I go whenever I can, which is very seldom. I used to go every summer. There are caste differences in Italy. People are divided from each other in Italy.

[He still has an eye for the boys? "Of course I do. My only objection is they don't have the eye for me (laughs). I have to wait for those peculiar people who like older men. They are very few and far between."]

[His father "knew I was going to be gay." "One day we were playing checkers and I kept winning games. My father said to me, 'It's time for me to die when you can beat me in checkers.' And he'd say, 'Never do anything you'd be ashamed of and never be ashamed of anything you do'."]

[He got married in 1953; 17 years (length of marriage); his wife died of cancer; "My love [for her] wasn't a physical love."]

[He was part of the staff of the short-lived magazine Fire!! as well as Harlem.]

CMS: You wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" for Fire!! It is considered the first short story to deal with black homosexuality.

BN: People began to say, "How could you write anything so gay in 1926? I didn't know it was gay when I wrote it.

CMS: The protagonist seemed to be bisexual. He was not an exclusively gay man. At the time you wrote the story, a lot of people were scandalized by it.

BN: He called the man beautiful, and I did it. I even named one Beauty.

CMS: You were rejected for a couple of days.

BN: I don't think they rejected me. I just think they were a little shocked and scandalized.

CMS: Why so many ellipses in "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade"?

BN: It was my device for having people [get the impression] that I was talking with them. When you talk, you have these periods, shorter and longer periods. It wasn't originally written with three dots between everything. Now three dots, now five dots, now two dots. But the printer said, "We can't be bothered with doing that. We don't have that many dots." I would still like to do it sometime with the proper dots.

CMS: You did it deliberately to shock the middle-class people.

BN: Wally [Thurman] and I thought that the magazine would get bigger sales if it was banned in Boston. So, we flipped a coin to see who wrote bannable material. And the only two things we could think of that was bannable were a story about streetwalkers or prostitutes and about gay people, homosexuality.

CMS: Thurman was a gay man himself and he had a problem around that.

BN: Oh, God. Everybody did.

CMS: He more so.

BN: Wally was a deeper thinker than I was. I didn't think very much. I wasn't a very cerebral person.

CMS: Was he fun to be around?

BN: We lived together. You don't think I'd live with somebody who wasn't fun to live with. Yes, Wally introduced me to so many, many, many facets, things. He was very widely read and that's all I can say about him. He was absolutely a fascinating person. And perhaps with the exception of maybe one person, George Schuyler, who was more brilliant than he.

The Blacker the Berry [Thurman's novel] is pretty bad. He wasn't a very good novelist. You have to be your characters when you write a novel. He tried to be a woman.

CMS: He was writing about himself.

BN: He was ambivalent about his color. He grew up in Salt Lake City, that Mormon place. I was from Washington, D.C. and in Washington, we didn't associate with people who were as dark as Wally. And Wally was pretty black. My description of him [in David Levering Lewis's book, When Harlem Was in Vogue]: black with a sneering nose. He was very self-conscious about being black.

CMS: Was he effeminate?

BN: He was not. As a matter of fact, when we were living together, people thought quote that he was the husband, and I was the wife. I'm sure they thought that. I was the one who had the gay reputation. People put their own interpretation to anything.

CMS: His novel, Infants of the Spring, was autobiographical?

BN: That was almost all autobiographical. I think he was more successful in that [novel].

CMS: You say your marriage was not a physical love.

BN: We were very much in love with each other. I spent two years trying to prevent her from marrying me because she was definitely a heterosexual woman and a very beautiful one. Men were after her all the time. I told her [I was gay] but I suppose she had that dream that makes them think they can change me. Gayness is just a phase, an adolescent phase, you outgrow it. [No children were produced from the marriage.] Anybody, people who saw us together at that time never would doubt why we married. We were so much in love. Taxicab drivers would stop [and say] "Were you flagging a cab?" We'd say, "No!!" So, he said, "Where are you going, I'll take you. I've never seen people so much in love."

CMS: When did you know you were gay? At age 12, 13?

BN: I discovered that I liked men long before that. Seven, eight, nine, before I had any sexual experience at all of any kind. There used to be a man, a Filipino. There's a strong prejudice as you probably know among American Negroes toward anything that's not American Negroes, be it African, Filipino, Puerto Rican, whatever. This boy's mother was not accepted into Washington Negro society. Mother befriended him. I was very fortunate in my parents. The only word for them was that they were bohemians. My mother played piano; my father sang. Mother played by ear. She was invaluable when [the mixed-race British composer Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor came to America. No one could play his music. Coleridge-Taylor's music was too complicated and too much very sundry other things. I remember Taylor would come past the house and talk with Mother and he would hum it [his music] for Mother and Mother would play it. Later on, she learned to read music, but at the time she didn't. So when [John Philip] Sousa's band couldn't play the music, my mother accompanied them.

I came from a middle-class Washington family. My mother studied to be a schoolteacher. She never taught. My father was a Pullman porter. It was very respected; one of the few ways to make money. At that time [his parents] were pillars of society in Washington, which meant fair [in complexion], quote good hair, all the other bullshit. As a matter of fact, it was because of all that crap that I left Washington.

CMS: Why did you move to Hoboken [in New Jersey]?

BN: I couldn't afford to live in New York. [He has lived in Hoboken for seven or eight years.] I have a habit of living wherever I happen to be.

CMS: What do you do now in your spare time?

BN: I still write and draw. I get Social Security and brunches on the goodwill of my friends.

Nugent spoke at a gathering of the members of Black and White Men Together/New York. He told them, "If you don't have the courage of your convictions, nobody is going to be able to give it to you. If you don't have enough love to share, you're not going to get it. You can't love anybody else if you don't yourself because what are you loving from? I've always felt like this. This is probably what makes me a bohemian. It's probably going to keep me alive another seventy-some years. If you can't take me the way I am, it's your problem. It's certainly not mine."

*Three artworks by Nugent, including a self-portrait, are on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in a show called "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism." It closes on July 28, 2024.

AIDS Hysteria In The 1980s

I recently leafed through the June 25, 1988 issue of TV Guide (when it was pocket-size and cost 75 cents). Before tossing it out, I tore out the "Cheers 'N' Jeers" column and put it in a folder marked "LGBTQ." Under "Jeers" was an item about how the openly gay AIDS activist Michael Callen, now deceased, was treated, or more accurately put, mistreated by the staff members at a New York television station where he was scheduled to be interviewed about being a person with AIDS.

According to TV Guide, based on information from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), "a technician tossed him a microphone and refused to help him adjust it" and "the make-up artists refused to work on Callen."

I wonder if he pointed out this bad behavior to his interviewer when he went on-camera. If he didn't, he should have. There was a lot of misinformation and fearmongering in the media and elsewhere back then about how AIDS was transmitted.

When I met and spoke with Michael Callen at an AIDS forum held at Hunter College here in New York, I gladly and fearlessly shook his hand. This was back in the early nineties. After that handshake, I've lived to tell the story.

What was their problem?

Note: This blog post originally appeared on my Facebook page on March 27, 2023. I've made a few minor changes.

Influential People In The LGBTQ+ Community

The free daily newspaper, amNew York Metro, published in its June 29, 2022 issue an alphabetically arranged guide called "LGBTQ+ Power Players." The guide gives a thumbnail sketch of several outstanding members of the LGBTQ+ community in the New York metropolitan area. For me, as a journalist and blogger, it serves as a useful resource.

Among those included are Greg Newton and Donnie Jochum, the co-founders of the Bureau of General Services--Queer Division, the bookstore and cultural center located inside the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan; Rob Byrnes, a Lammy Award-winning author and the president of the East Midtown Partnership; Dwight McBride, president of The New School as well as the co-editor of The James Baldwin Review; and Justin T. Brown, executive director of the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York.

Arthur T. Wilson, An Afro-Renaissance Man

The following excerpt is from a telephone interview I did with Arthur T. Wilson around 1984. Wilson, who is African-American, born in  Newark, New Jersey, could be considered a Renaissance man because of his many achievements as an actor, playwright, poet, educator, dance critic, and co-editor and publisher of Attitude, a monthly magazine devoted to the dance world.

On gays in dance:

"A majority of them [dancers] are [gay] but not exclusively. [New York City Ballet choreographer] George Balanchine was not and he dealt with some of the most beautiful bodies in the world over his 60, 70 years. But he was not gay at all, at all, period. [He had been] married to several beautiful women through his career. There's [choreographer] Jacques D'Amboise, who has a family. There's even [choreographer/dancer/actor] Geoffrey [Holder] himself, who's married to [dancer] Carmen de Lavallade. It just depends."

On the acclaimed Jubilation! Dance Company, founded in 1979 in Brooklyn, New York, by the African-American choreographer Kevin Jeff:

"[Jubilation! appeals] to a cross-section of those who go to dance concerts, period. Going across age. Also [it] appeals very highly to a college crowd. A cross-section of New York State citizenry. That's no different than any other fucking good arts troupe."

On sexuality's importance in creating a dance:

"That issue [homosexuality] is never important. It's the art that's important. Your bedroom politics doesn't make your painting better or your violin chirp any sweeter. Someone's sexual life really plays very little on what they do in terms of  how the audience gets it. Now in terms of your sexual life and all that represents you in relationship to how you then create your art, approach your art, yes, it does have something directly to do with it. But not in reference to the curtain goes up and the audience is either entertained or not."

The September/October 1983 issue of Attitude, a dance magazine of which Arthur T. Wilson was an editorial staff member.

Does Conversion Therapy Change Only Gays?

The thing about conversion therapy that people don't seem to acknowledge is that if it's possible to change someone from being gay or bisexual to being heterosexual, wouldn't reverse conversion therapy apply to straight people? I don't think conversion therapy, if it's possible, is a one-way street. Just a thought.

A Black Gay Poet Struggles Against Adversity

 Pressin' My Way (Shady Facts, $10) is a self-published book by Lawrence DeWyatt Abrams containing honest, vivid, and brave poems about what it means to be a double threat in contemporary America--black and gay.

In the lengthy introduction (which could use considerable cutting), a 27-year-old Harlem resident, writes that "it has been my words that have provided a healing salve for my most wounded spaces" and "very often [poetry] is the only thing that stands between me and insanity."

This rising young poet, who heads Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), has created a book about spirituality, sexual identity, and love.

Among the best poems in Pressin' My Way are the comical "Fairy Queen" ("Take off those high heels/go in the bathroom/find some ivory/and wash your face/'cause blue is not your color."); the terrifying "Edge" ("Razor blade, you and I are old friends"); and "Somewhere Under the Bridge," the beautifully written homage to the late African-American poet Donald W. Woods, Abrams's mentor.

Despite adversity in its many guises, Larry Abrams reveals in this very slim volume (53 pages) that he is more than willing and able to continue to press his way.

Note: This article was originally published in the Manhattan Spirit newspaper on March 15, 1996  as part of its monthly Manhattan Pride lesbian and gay supplement.

We Shouldn't Cherry-Pick History

 The News Briefs column in the January 17-23, 2003 issue of the Gay City News had an item headlined "We Don't Want Him." The him being referred to is none other than Adolf Hitler. The news brief, written by Andy Humm, announced that HBO was "developing a documentary called The Pink Fuhrer" that explored "whether or not Adolf Hitler was homosexual." 

Seventeen years later, the film, which I have not seen, should by now be available on DVD. I would like to see it to judge for myself if what is discussed is credible.

The thing that interests me more is the headline--"We Don't Want Him" instead of "Was Hitler Gay?" I can understand the urge to reject Hitler because of his genocidal, anti-Semitic pronouncements and behavior. But if he was a closeted homosexual, then he becomes part of gay history, like it or not.

Gay history has the tendency to celebrate only those deemed the good guys while ignoring those identified as villains like J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Cecil Rhodes, and the murderers Leopold and Loeb.

If we're going to study gay history, it should be studied like all other histories, warts and all; the good, the bad, and the ugly; the sacred and the profane. By sanitizing and cherry-picking history, it becomes distorted and valueless. Looking at history in its fullness makes it possible for us to more accurately analyze and evaluate people, attitudes, actions, and events.

We can't do that if we hide the historical record. The history exists and we have to deal with it.

A Long-Forgotten Pre-Stonewall Novel

One of my Facebook friends, Michael Schiavi, the biographer of the late gay film historian Vito Russo, posted a photo of the front cover of a book called The Gay Year by M de F (originally published in 1949) and described on the cover as "The revealing novel of two men and a forbidden passion."

The book is probably out of print but I would love to read it. The Strand bookstore in the Chelsea section of Manhattan might have a copy or two in its miles and miles of books.

It would be interesting to see if homosexuality is depicted as sordid, perverse, wicked, and psychotic. If it does, The Gay Year would reflect the attitudes prevalent back then.

I'm hoping the novel was way ahead of its time by showing a more progressive, enlightened view. We'll see.

Photos Of Harlem's Mount Morris Baths After It Closed

I have color photos of the now-defunct Mount Morris Baths in Harlem that I took about three or four years after it closed in August 2003. There were five men staying there (two co-workers and three customers) in anticipation of the bathhouse reopening, which it never did. Their presence gave me access to the premises.

Unfortunately, I took the pictures with a single-use camera so the number of shots were limited. If I had had a phone camera, I could have taken hundreds of pictures, covering every nook and cranny of the place. But I'm glad I have what I have.

At some point I'd like to use these photos as part of a photo essay in commemoration of the only black gay bathhouse in Harlem. As far as I know, I'm the only person who took pictures of Mount Morris Baths after it went out of business. These pictures, I think, are of historical importance and documents what it looked like sans customers.

Stonewall 50 Commemoration At The New York Public Library

The Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50 exhibition is slated for viewing at the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, from February 14 to July 14, 2019. It will be on the third floor, in the Rayner Special Collections Wing & Print Gallery.

"This exhibition," announced the New York Public Library Now magazine (Winter/Spring 2019)," illustrates this history [of gay liberation] through the photographs of Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies, who captured the pivotal events of this era and changed the ways that LGBTQ people perceived themselves."

Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50 will also, continued Now, the library publication, feature "other items from the Library's vast archival holdings in LGBTQ history, including ephemera, periodicals, and more."

There Is No Disgrace Having A Gay Child

During this summer's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in the Greenwich Village section of New York, there should be banners printed with the following quotation:

"I want other parents to see that it is no disgrace having a gay child. The disgrace is when you try to put it [the child's homosexuality] in the closet. Your children are coming out, now it is your turn to come out."--Dorothy Beam, writer/anthology editor Joseph Beam's mother (1924-2018), quoted in The Washington Post, August 1991.

A Street-Corner Escort Ad In Harlem

In Harlem, I've seen handbills attached to lampposts, mail boxes, storefront windows, and even on trees for a variety of reasons--to announce a death, to offer a reward for the return of a lost pet or wallet, steering people to employment opportunities or apartments for rent, etc. But I have never seen a handbill soliciting clients for an escort/massage service. This particular handbill was pasted to a lamppost at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 121st Street. The advertiser was a handsome young man named Jayson, age 19, of black/Puerto Rican heritage. At the bottom of the page was his phone number, in the 914 area code (presumably he was from Westchester County). His photo was at the top.

A few days after I saw Jayson's ad, someone--a homophobe, no doubt--came along and scratched out the phone number with a key or something sharp. This was in 2012. I recently checked that location. There is no trace of the handbill.

The closest  thing to this ad that I've seen was when I worked at the Mount Morris Baths in Harlem.
Some of the customers would write their name and phone number on the back of the door of the room they occupied.

Now that Harlem has become more gentrified and many more gays (and lesbians) are moving in (to the disapproval of the homophobic Atlah Church, down the street from where I saw the handbill), I expect to see more such advertising on lampposts, bus shelters, and on the side of buildings.

Labeling And Segregating LGBTQ Books In Iowa

According to an article published on the Los Angeles Times's website (February 26, 2018), there are people in Orange City, Iowa (population 5,582, per Michelin Road Atlas, 2012 edition), near the Iowa-Nebraska border, who want to label and segregate LGBTQ books in the public library. These are probably the same people who want to ban classic literature like The Color Purple because they believe these books contain characters, scenes, and passages that are objectionable therefore unfit for young eyes.

Get Ready For Stonewall 50!!

June 2019 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York. Like the rainbow flag, the riots have a symbolic meaning within the LGBT community.

No doubt every cultural institution in the city will be doing their part to celebrate that momentous event considered by many to be the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. And no doubt the Gay Pride Parade will be super, super long in commemorating Stonewall.

About a year ago, I decided to visit the Stonewall Inn for the first time. I knew that the interior of the bar wouldn't resemble what it looked like in 1969 but that didn't matter.What was important was the fact that I was standing in an historic place that had brought about historic consequences. To me, being there was very satisfying and gave me the opportunity to pay tribute to those who stood up against police mistreatment of LGBT people.

James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" Had An All-White Cast

In Rosalind Rosenberg's otherwise fascinating biography of black writer, lawyer, and women's rights activist Pauli Murray*, Jane Crow (Oxford University Press, 2017), there is one bit of information I disagree with. Ms. Rosenberg describes James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room as "an explicitly bi-sexual, bi-racial novel." The bisexual aspect is correct since David, the novel's protagonist, had a romantic relationship with a female and Giovanni,who was, if I recall correctly, a bartender in Paris. But the book is not biracial because all the characters in it are white, the only such book that Baldwin wrote.

Christopher Bram, in his equally fascinating book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed  America (Twelve, 2012), writes that "Baldwin had several reasons for writing a novel with all-white characters. He wanted to escape the label of 'Negro novelist,' which was not only artistically limiting, it was commercially restrictive."  "Changing the race," continues Bram, "also enabled Baldwin to put distance between himself and his story: he wasn't writing about his life, he was writing about other lives. It gave his imagination more breathing room. In addition, there must have been bitter pleasure in putting himself inside a privileged white skin."

*Pauli Murray (1910-1985) believed herself to be a man trapped inside a female body, a belief others thought was a sign of some form of mental illness.

"Jane Crow" was the term Murray coined for gender discrimination. She saw it as a partner to "Jim Crow," the label for race discrimination. Black women were the victims of both forms of discrimination.





Note: Once again, Happy New Year, everyone! Let's hope 2018 will be a healthy, happy, productive, and prosperous year for all of us!