"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.

The Waning Days Of Harlem's Mount Morris Baths

While going through some old manila file folders, I found a handwritten draft of a letter-to-the-editor written on canary yellow paper and dated June 25, 2001. I don't recall what publication prompted me to write it. As far as I know, it was never published. Here's what I wrote (which includes my edits):

Dear Editor:

Re: The increase in HIV infection among black gay men. 

I recently worked part time as a towel attendant in a Harlem bathhouse. During the two months of my employment I witnessed

After working two months as a part-time towel attendant/porter, I can see in a Harlem bathhouse, I can see why there is an increase in HIV infection among young black gay men. During my employment, I found crack vials, poppers, and other evidence of drug abuse as well as carelessly discarded condoms.

On the flipside of the page was another handwritten (and presumably unpublished) undated draft. This is what I wrote:

While the rest of 125th Street [in Harlem] rebuilds or renovates its premises, the Mount Morris Baths remains dirty and rundown. In a 1999 issue of the New York Blade News [a gay newspaper], Walter Fitzer [the straight owner of the bathhouse] claimed that the Health Department had been "busting my chops for the past three years under [then mayor Rudolph] Giuliani." If that is true, it would seem justified.

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).

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.

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?

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.

Essex Hemphill, A Remembrance

I encountered the poet Essex Hemphill's writing in 1983. That was when I read his essay, "I am a Homosexual" in the November Men's Issue of Essence, a black women's magazine. (I later reprinted this piece in Fighting Words: Essays by Black Gay Men, an anthology I edited that was published in 1999 by Avon Books/HarperCollins.) I was very impressed  and moved by his straightforward and unapologetic stance on being a black  gay man. I immediately wrote to him at the address that appeared at the end of the essay. I requested an interview, possibly for publication in the New York Native, a weekly gay newspaper. Essex wrote back and included in the package two issues of the black culture magazine Nethula Journal, which he no longer co- published, and two limited-edition boxed chapbooks (Diamonds Was in the Kitty and Plums). Each chapbook came with a certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by Essex.

Although I never got to do the interview, I did get the opportunity to publish his poetry a short time  later, along with the work of four other poets, in a special black gay supplement in the Native called "Celebrating Ourselves." (The title was suggested by Melvin Dixon, one of the other poets in it.) The rest of the supplement consisted of essays by Joseph Beam, David Frechette, Craig G. Harris, and others, most of whom are now deceased. 

I also got the chance to hear Essex read his poetry in the flesh at Hunter College in New York and at the Friends Center in Philadelphia. At the New York reading (which I think he shared with the lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde), he went on stage after leaving a nearby men's room where he vomited up a tainted tuna sandwich he bought at the train station in D.C. A real trouper,  Essex gave, as always, a marvelous performance. 

At the Philadelphia reading in 1985, he shared the program with the black lesbian poet Pat Parker. As Essex read his poetry, he stood barefoot at the podium before a gathering of attentive, admiring listeners. His barefoot performance brought to mind those members of my mother's Pentecostal church in Harlem, who, feeling right at home, would walk around the church and among the pews in their stockinged feet. Another fond memory that night was his reading of "Black Beans," a celebration of romantic black gay love.

After the Philadelphia reading, which Joe Beam had invited me to, he led a group of us to a restaurant in nearby Chinatown. Those at the table were Joe; Colin Robinson, a New York writer of Trinidadian heritage; Essex; two other men; and myself. Later we went to a bar/disco called the Smart Place, which primarily catered to a black gay clientele. At the club Joe asked if I wanted to dance. I told him no. From there, the four of us went back to Joe's tiny apartment in the Center City section of Philadelphia. Joe told us that the area was called The Merry-Go-Round because of the constant gay cruising that went on at night. At the apartment, Essex, Colin, and I stayed overnight. Essex and Joe slept on one side of the room, Colin and I on the other.

The next day Essex and Colin left Philly for D.C. and New York respectively. I stayed in town a little while longer. That gave Joe enough time to introduce me to the owner of Giovanni's Room, the gay bookstore where he worked and discovered my writing in the pages of the New York Native. (The bookstore sold the Native each week.) When we got back to his apartment, he let me leaf through the manuscript of In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, to which I had contributed an article about the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent. I remember Joe, who was the book's editor, asking me before letting me touch the manuscript, "Are your hands clean?"

Before Essex and Colin left Philly, we ate at a nearby black-run restaurant. I had scrambled eggs and hash brown potatoes, which Colin paid for. I clearly remember Essex, upon hearing one of the women behind the counter singing, say appreciatively, "Go on and sing it, sister!" As we left the restaurant, Essex gave me a copy of his third chapbook Earth Life. I still have it. Alas, I neglected to have him sign it. But its importance to me has not been diminished.

 In the years since Essex's death in 1995, his name has popped up in several books. One of those books is a Felice Picano novel called The Book of Lies. It's loosely based on the members of the Violet Quill, a real-life white gay literary group that included Picano. In the novel, a character recalled the time in the 1980s when "Essex Hemphill had come up from DC" to do a reading at the Gay Community Center in New York. The character also stated that at the reading "Essex was still doing his fire and brimstone act." Picano's characterization does Essex's memory a disservice. It makes Essex sound like a demagogue, an approach that would have turned off many black gay men. Instead, his eloquent, healing words boosted the morale and self-esteem of black gay men, thereby making him the foremost black gay poet in America, whose work has been widely anthologized and celebrated.

Note: I wrote this essay for Art Mugs the Reaper, an unpublished anthology of literary and visual work by gay men who had died of AIDS. Each individual's work was to be accompanied by a biographical essay. Unfortunately, the editor of the collection, Jeffrey Lilly, a gay San Francisco poet, who had battled health challenges over the years, died in 2019.

This essay, written in December 2000, appears here with several changes to the original text.

How I Became An "In The Life" Contributor

How I came to write about the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life, is an interesting story.

Joe, who worked at a gay bookstore in Philadelphia called Giovanni's Room, wrote me a fan letter and sent it in care of the New York Native, a weekly gay paper that I wrote for in a freelance capacity in the early eighties.

The bookstore carried the Native which Joe told me he only read if it had an article in it by me. He was admittedly hungry for articles about other black gay men of which there was not that much, particularly in the gay press.

A short time later, Joe asked me to write an article about Bruce Nugent and gave me his phone number in Hoboken, New Jersey. Looking back, Joe probably got the number from Tom Wirth, Nugent's friend and literary executor, who reissued the controversial journal, Fire!!, that Nugent, Langston Hughes, and others put out in the 1920s.

Up to that point, I knew nothing about Nugent. But I took on the assignment and wrote an article in which I tried to put Nugent's life and career within a larger context of what was happening in Harlem and elsewhere, artistically and otherwise.

Years after In the Life came out, I discovered that I'd  been in error when I said that Bruce Nugent was the last living member of the Harlem Renaissance. He wasn't. Dorothy West, also a writer, was still alive when I interviewed him.

A New Black Gay Literary Voice

Yesterday (May 12), I heard a very interesting interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross (heard in the New York area on WNYC AM and FM). The interview was with a young African-American writer named Michael Arceneaux (pronounced Ar-sin-noh), who in 2018 published a best selling collection of personal essays, I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyonce.

Arceneaux, who is openly gay, has published a new collection of essays called I Don't Want to Die Poor, which he discussed for nearly an hour on Fresh Air.

A 2007 graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and now residing in West Harlem, Arceneaux's latest book is about his uphill battle to pay off his student loan of $100,000.

These two books by a new literary voice are ones I plan to look for.

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.

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.

"Moonlight" Should Be On Broadway Or Off-Broadway,Too

Moonlight, released in 2016, and the Best-Picture Oscar winner earlier this year, is a beautifully made movie about the coming-of-age of a young black gay man living in Liberty City, Miami's inner-city area.

The movie, directed by Barry Jenkins, is based on fellow Miami native Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. The play to date has never been produced. I hope all the accolades bestowed on Moonlight will encourage a Broadway or Off-Broadway producer to bring the movie's source to a New York stage. A radio production on NPR or a live telecast on one of the TV networks would also be worth doing. No doubt the gay community, especially the black gay community, would support these efforts.

The one thing we don't need is a Broadway musical version of the movie or the play.

A Letter To A Book Editor

The following letter, dated July 13, 2015, was sent to Jennifer Brehl, an editor at HarperCollins. She replaced Charlotte Abbott, the editor who acquired Fighting Words for Avon Books in 1997. Fighting Words is an anthology of essays by black gay men that I edited. It was published in 1999. At the time of the acquisition,  Avon Books was owned by the Hearst Corporation. It was later sold to HarperCollins, which is part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.


Jennifer Brehl, Editor
HarperCollins Publishers
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007

Dear Jennifer:

On January 9, 2015, you left me a voice mail message in which you stated that the outline I submitted for a book about the gay and lesbian aspect of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s was turned down. The reasons given were that the sales for Fighting Words "were not as robust as we'd like to see" and that the outline was "not right for William Morrow [a HarperCollins imprint] at this time.We're not doing as much of that type of nonfiction paperback original."

I want to point out that despite Fighting Words's lack of "robust sales," it has been cited in the endnotes of other books. In fact, the late author E. Lynn Harris included Donald K. Jackson's essay, "The Letter," in the anthology he edited called Freedom in This Village.

Also, the Copyright Clearance Center has sent me requests from professors at such places as Dartmouth for permission to make copies of essays from the book for distribution and use in their classrooms.

Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD) not too long ago had an exhibition at the Schomburg Center in Harlem to commemorate the 20th or 25th anniversary of the organization. I was very pleased to see a copy of Fighting Words in a display case featuring other books with a GMAD connection. A few GMAD members, among them Robert E. Penn and Kevin McGruder, were contributors to my anthology.

So you see, even though Fighting Words was not a big seller, it has made an impact in other ways.

Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith

Note: I neglected to mention in the letter that Fighting Words was one of the nominees for the 1999 Lambda Literary Award in the Anthologies/Nonfiction category.

My First Trip To Philadelphia, 1985

It was thirty years ago this past September that I was invited by Joe Beam to a poetry reading in Philadelphia featuring Essex Hemphill and Pat Parker (both, like Joe, now deceased). It was my first trip to Philadelphia (I got there via Amtrak). It was also at this time that Joe showed me the typescript of his groundbreaking anthology about black gay men, In the Life. I became a contributor to the book.

A year or so earlier, Joe sent me the book's Introduction. He wanted me to read it and make any suggestions. I remember it being very long. I'm sure I made several suggestions but the only one that sticks out is my suggestion that he begin the Introduction at a particular point in the text. He took my advice which is why the Intro begins where it does.

The Men Of The Vale

I'm looking forward to obtaining a copy of Thomas Roma's In the Vale of Cashmere (powerHouse Books, $30), a collection of photos of the landscape in the Vale of Cashmere in Brooklyn's Prospect Park as well as the black and Hispanic gay and bisexual men who frequent this popular cruising area.

I first learned of this book (and the Vale of Cashmere) when I saw a photo essay by Roma called "The Men of the Vale" that appeared in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times (October 11, 2015).

Roma, the director of the photography program at the Columbia University School of the Arts and a heterosexual, stated in his essay that he "photographed the landscape between 2008 and 2011 and introduced myself to the men I encountered. I'd ask them if I could make a portrait for a possible book....Many declined, but many said yes, and I was grateful every time they did."

In the Vale of Cashmere is Roma's tribute to his friend Carl, who died of AIDS in 1991 and was a frequent visitor to that section of the park.


An exhibition of Thomas Roma's photos can be viewed at the Steven Kasher Gallery, 515 West 26th Street, Manhattan, until December 19, 2015.

A Letter Of Recommendation

The following is a letter of recommendation that I wrote in 1995 regarding the Oakland, California-based writer Kheven LaGrone when he was applying for the graduate program at Emerson College in Boston.

Dear Applicant Reviewer:

I am the editor of an essay anthology Words of Fire [later renamed Fighting Words] to which Kheven Lee LaGrone is a contributor. His essay, "Beneath the Veneer," which explores the issues of sexual and racial identity, is  a combination of Mr. LaGrone's experiences and readings. It exhibits his ability to deal with complex ideas and understand how they interconnect with other ideas and issues.

His essay will be one of the highlights of the book because it holds no punches as it sheds light on its subject.

I originally saw this article in an issue of SBC, a Los Angeles-based magazine, about three years ao. The issues discussed stayed with me. I would love to see this essay made into a good, controversial short subject film about sexual and racial identity.

I have had the opportunity to read other pieces by him and see the great promise he has as a media professional. Mr. LaGrone's writings reveal someone who has great potential as a hard-hitting journalist and as a profound thinker. We need more like him who can go beneath the surface of current events.

I believe Mr. LaGrone will be an asset to your graduate program in particular and mass media in general.

Sincerely yours,

Charles Michael Smith

A Gay American In Paris

The format of the following script was based on CBS News' American Treasury 60-second between-daytime-program spots that were broadcast in the late 1980s. They highlighted famous American men and women and Americana.

I wrote this script and one other nearly ten years ago with the then-new gay channel LOGO in mind. I don't recall if I actually submitted  them to the cable channel. I do recall talking to someone at LOGO's California offices via phone about writing such scripts.

LOGO like CBS is owned by Viacom.

American Outlooks--Program 2

Writer: Charles M. Smith

June 18, 2005

OPENING LOGO AND THEME:

            (CELEBRITY NAME):

             I'm______with American Outlooks. His book be-                                                                                    came the first of its kind by a black American author.

             Who he was, after this.

COMMERCIAL: 15 SECS:

            (CELEBRITY NAME): CONTD:

           James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is the story of two 

           gay lovers, one American, the other Italian, in post-war

           Paris. Baldwin was advised not to publish the ground-

           breaking novel for fear that its homosexual theme 

           would ruin his career. Baldwin ignored the advice and                                                                            the book, published in 1956, became a gay American

           classic.

CLOSING LOGO: :02 SECS:                  
            Learn more about James Baldwin in your local 

            library.

Note: I had to change the formatting of the script to make it more readable on the blog.

                                                                            

A Literary Voice That's Gone, But Not Forgotten

This year would have marked Joseph Beam's 60th birthday. Sadly, in 1988, we lost one of the most eloquent and powerful literary voices, not only in the gay community but also in the black community.

When Love's Flame Burns Out

Going through some old newspapers, I came across an article by Steven  G. Fullwood, a black gay man, called "Love, Interrupted," (New York Blade News, March 1, 2002).

Fullwood details the night, two days after Christmas, when his then 23-year-old boyfriend decided to break off their relationship in the most public of places, Times Square. Fullwood, an archivist at the Schomburg Library in Harlem, was age 35 at the time.

After reading the piece, it made me wonder if Fullwood's ex-boyfriend, now in his 30s, met a similar fate doled out by a much younger lover.