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On the flipside of the page was another handwritten (and presumably unpublished) undated draft.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Summer of Soul, released in 2021, is a movie I hope to see on a DVD. It's a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. Among the performers who appeared on stage were Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, B. B. King, and Mahalia Jackson. The above wall mural appeared on the side of a building that's located on the corner of West 124th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The building is one block from Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park), where the historic event took place.
Not for one minute did I suspect they were a harbinger of gentrification, like a Starbucks or a Whole Foods store moving into a vacant commercial space or the construction of luxury housing.
To me, these book kiosks existed solely as a celebration and promotion of good literature by people like me, dyed-in-the-wool bookworms.
That was my thought until I read Jack Flemming's online Los Angeles Times real estate article, "Black-Trimmed Homes, Tiny Libraries, And Other Signs Your Neighborhood Is About To Be Gentrified" (December 7, 2023).
Flemming, a staff writer at the paper, assures the reader that the kiosks "don't cause gentrification." Instead they are "a product of gentrification" and that they "usually" appear "where home prices are rising and well-to-do residents are moving in."
And, he further notes, most of the books he has seen in these kiosks "generally seem to be stocked exclusively with James Patterson novels and unreadable how-to books."
Fortunately, the book kiosks in Harlem offer more diverse selections than the ones in the L.A. area. I have found children's books, black history books, reference books, travel guides, cookbooks, and novels by Octavia Butler, Michael Connelly, Amy Tan, Nadine Gordimer, Marlon James, to name a few. ( I have also donated many books, DVDs, and CDs.)
These kiosks may be a "product of gentrification," but I'm glad they're in my neighborhood, where there are no longer any bookstores. They, and the local branch libraries, are making literature available to everyone.
Like the community fridges that allow people to donate and take food, the Little Free Library kiosks have become community assets.
Prior to seeing Francis Ford Coppola's film, The Cotton Club in 1984, I had interviewed several people who had either worked at the nightclub or knew someone who did. The interviews were for a syndicated article I was writing about the upcoming movie.
Like the film critic Rex Reed, in his Guide to Movies on TV & Video, 1992-1993 Edition (Warner Books, 1992), I had heard a lot about this "Harlem bastion of glamour, sequins, and jazz that characterized the Roaring Twenties in New York night life."
So when I went to see the film I was full of excitement and high expectations. For the first time I would be seeing the fabled night spot on the big screen, and see an exploration of the lives and working conditions of the black performers who worked there in a Jim Crow environment, in, of all places, Harlem.
And, like Reed, I was disappointed. "[W]here," he asked, "is the Cotton Club? Somewhere on the cutting-room floor."
The movie was more focused on the white gangsters who owned the place than it was on the black performers who were its backbone. This was a missed opportunity to explore the racial and socio-economic aspects of the period. Instead of watching this movie, "You [will] learn more about the Cotton Club," wrote Reed, "and the people who made it famous just by listening to old records by Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Waters." Amen.
In the hands of Spike Lee, Kasi Lemmons, Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, or another capable black director the movie would have been more riveting, more incisive, and more thoughtful. It certainly would have been more black-centered.
If there is one movie that deserves a remake, The Cotton Club is it.
Note: I wrote a similar blog post in February 2015.
The 1984 article I wrote was published in this blog as "Exotic Negroes at the Cotton Club " on February 12, 2013.
If there were such a thing as a time machine, I would gladly get in it and travel to the 1920s, to my favorite historical period, the Harlem Renaissance.
It would be a thrill to brush shoulders with the likes of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and sundry other writers, musicians, painters, and sculptors. Since that's not possible, the next best thing would be to visit the upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, slated to run next year from February 25 to July 28. It will be called "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism."
According to an article in the Arts section of the New York Times ("Met Announces Harlem Renaissance Show," August 23, 2023), the show will be "New York's first major survey in nearly 40 years dedicated to one of the most influential artistic movements to have originated in the United States."
The Met will display artworks by African-American artists that will be on loan from historically black colleges and universities such as Clark Atlanta University and Howard University.
Included in the exhibition will be photographs by another Harlem Renaissance notable, James Van Der Zee.
I'm excited about this event. God willing, I don't plan to miss it.
Prior to hearing an interview Sidik Fofana did with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition, I had never heard of him. The young African-American writer was on the show to discuss his debut collection of short stories called Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (Scribner/Simon & Schuster). The stories are set in a Harlem high-rise apartment building named Banneker Terrace, whose inhabitants are being confronted with a rent increase, gentrification, and eviction, very timely subjects.
After hearing the interview, I read a review of the book in the New York Times Book Review, which led me to short video clips of Fofana discussing the collection on the Internet and then a Q & A interview with the website Literary Hub.
Asked by Jane Ciabattari, in an e-mail interview for Literary Hub, who inspired him as a writer, Fofana offers a lengthy list, some of whom I've read (Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Alan McPherson, Jamaica Kincaid, Langston Hughes, Truman Capote), others I have not (Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colson Whitehead, Sandra Cisneros), but plan to.
The recent media attention has made Fofana, who has an MFA in creative writing from New York University and is a high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York, an emerging writer to watch.
How long before one of his stories is featured on NPR's Selected Shorts? It's safe to bet that it will be very, very soon.
One of the many books from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that I need to read is George Schuyler's Black No More. It is described as a satirical novel in which, writes historian David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue (Vintage Books, 1982), "Dr. Junius Crookman, an Afro-American scientist, invents a process--'by electrical nutrition and glandular control'--which turns dark skin white and crinkly hair straight."
The book was recently adapted into an off-Broadway musical, complete with choreography by the renowned Bill T. Jones.
Schuyler, a black conservative, and his white wife, were the parents of a biracial child, Philippa, who became a piano prodigy. Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker magazine wrote two lengthy profiles of Philippa in the 1940s when she was still a child. In 1967, covering the Vietnam War as a photojournalist, she was killed in a helicopter crash.
For a time there was talk of turning her life story into a feature-length movie, with singer Alicia Keys, herself a piano prodigy, portraying Philippa.
