The Community Within The Black Community

There's an old saying, "Dead men tell no tales." How many wonderful and intriguing stories of black gay men and lesbians have been buried with their possessors? Stories that would give us a special perspective on black life and culture overall. Stories that the black press and academia have largely given short shrift to out of prejudice and ignorance.

I have long supported Black Studies. And in the last 20 plus years, I have developed an interest in the gay and lesbian aspect of it, "the community within the [black] community," as Lloyd Williams, a  Harlem civic leader, has described it on "The Gary Byrd Experience," a weekly talk show simulcast on WBLS and WLIB, two New York radio stations.

I hope to continue doing articles, interviews, and essays concerning this community via this blog and the print media.

Cleve Jones's Former Roommate

When I read gay activist Cleve Jones's riveting memoir,When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, I was surprised to learn that he and historian Eric Garber were roommates in San Francisco at one time.

In 1982, at New York's Hunter College, I attended Garber's slide lecture on the gay and lesbian aspect of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I later interviewed him for the New York Native, the now-defunct gay weekly newspaper.

Garber's research inspired me to do further reading on the gays and lesbians of the Harlem Renaissance like the artist/poet/novelist Richard Bruce Nugent, who I wrote about for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life.

Note: See my 1983 New York City News interview with Eric Garber that I posted on this blog on April 20, 2013.