Putting LGBT Harlem On The Map

The Sunday New York Times's Travel section for June 1, 2014 devoted several pages to LGBT travel. The one bit of information that especially caught my attention was that Fun Maps, a Maplewood, New Jersey-based company, was planning to publish a Harlem map, pinpointing all of the community's gay venues. As a longtime Harlem resident, I was delighted to learn about Fun Map's plan. The map would be similar to the company's other gay-oriented maps that focused on cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Toronto. Fun Map's slogan on its maps was "30 years mapping the gay and lesbian world." The Harlem map was scheduled for publication in the summer of 2014.

Not long after, the Fun Maps of various cities were no longer available at the places where I would pick them up--the Gay Community Center in Greenwich Village, Les Hommes bookstore on the Upper West Side of  Manhattan, and the Suite, a bar also on the Upper West Side.

I learned later, via the Internet, that Fun Maps was no longer in business. The phone number printed on the maps was out of service.

It's too bad that Fun Maps didn't do the Harlem map before its demise. It would now be a collector's item.

Maybe Harlem Pride,the seven-year-old LGBT organization, would be interested in undertaking such a worthwhile and important project.

A New Cotton Club Movie Is Needed

In the 1992-1993 edition of Rex Reed's Guide to Movies on TV & Video, he stated that "[a]ll my life I've been hearing about the Cotton Club, that Harlem bastion of glamour, sequins, and jazz." So when Reed viewed Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited 1984 film called The Cotton Club, he had one question, "[b]ut where is the Cotton Club?" His conclusion: "Somewhere on the cutting-room floor." Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide gave it two and a half stars and noted that "the movie isn't nearly as interesting as the published stories about its tumultuous production!"

When I saw the movie during its release, I too was greatly disappointed. Around that time I had written a syndicated article for the Los Angeles Times about the real Cotton Club. The article included interviews with those who had worked there as entertainers.

The movie's version, unfortunately, was too focused on the gangsters who owned and ran the nightspot. If there is ever a remake of The Cotton Club, the lives of and the backstage drama involving the black entertainers should be at the forefront of the story. After all, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, and Ethel Waters were among those who worked there and became household names. (Spike Lee, Lee Daniels, and other black filmmakers, are you listening?) Plus, the Cotton Club was a microcosm of race, class, and colorism. It was a place where blacks were welcome as entertainers, but not as patrons.