Giving Credit Where It's Due

Todd Boyd in his theroot.com article discussed the demise of Vibe magazine. He called the hip-hop culture publication "the brainchild of Quincy Jones." I have no problem with that but he completely overlooked music journalist Scott Poulson-Bryant, a founding editor of the magazine. Poulson-Bryant, an openly gay man, stated in his book Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday, 2005) that "I named Vibe magazine Vibe." Hip-hop culture is notoriously homophobic and it would have been a good idea to acknowledge that a major publication devoted to it was named by a member of a much-maligned but influential group. Let's give credit where it's due.

An Affordable Manhattan Apartment, In 1965

I  recently found Park Avenue Summer by Renee Rosen (Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2019) in a Little Free Library kiosk in Harlem. This historical novel is set in New York City, in 1965, when a young woman fresh from Ohio named Alice Weiss comes to the big city with the dream of becoming a photographer. To her complete surprise, she ends up as the secretary to the editor Helen Gurley Brown, who, on the heels of publishing her bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, has been chosen by the Hearst Corporation to revive the half dead Cosmopolitan magazine.

When I read the paperback's storyline on the back, I instantly knew I had to take it home with me. Novels like this one and Pete Hamill's Tabloid City (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) that take the reader inside a media workplace rarely fail to fascinate me. So far I'm enjoying Park Avenue Summer.

There is one thing in the book I should note that caught my attention. It's a scene in which Alice finds a semi-furnished apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for $110 a month (paid for by a weekly paycheck of $55). The thought came to me that if rents in 2025 were that affordable, there would be almost no homelessness anywhere in New York City.

How A Gossip Column Provided An Opportunity

When the ultra-right wing New York Post's gossip column Page Six was actually on page 6, not page 12 or page 20, I saw an item that stated that the civil rights icon Andrew Young was running for mayor of Atlanta and was giving up his Los Angeles Times-syndicated opinion column. Since, it was reported, the paper was looking for replacement writers for the column, I immediately contacted the L. A. Times about their talent search. Soon after I was able to contribute three columns.

One of those columns was about homosexuality in the black community. The Oregon Journal in Portland published the article in August 1981 with the headline, "Gays Are Black, Too." The Times editor I submitted the article to begrudgingly sent it out, saying that Andrew Young would not have written about the subject. That was precisely why the column needed to be written. It gave attention to a segment of the black community that was stigmatized and rendered invisible and voiceless.

Unfortunately, Young's column was dropped by many newspapers because it was his opinions they were interested in publishing. To me, this attitude was short-sighted and foolish.  No one should expect one person to speak for all black people. You would've thought they would've been glad to have a multiplicity of black voices and perspectives on a variety of topics. I think it's a safe bet to say that some of those voices they weren't interested in hearing from might have been the next James Baldwin or the next Toni Morrison or the next Audre Lorde.

Anyway, this was the first, and only, time I ever got a job opportunity via a gossip column.

The Redesigned Rainbow Flag, Monstrously Ugly

Douglas Murray, a New York Post columnist, described the rainbow flag in his column (January 24, 2025) as "a perfectly pleasant symbol of gay liberation" that "has gotten more monstrously ugly with each year." Amen!

The flag designer Gilbert Baker's simple six-color horizontally striped flag can be put in the If-it-ain't- broke, don't-fix-it category. Redesigning the flag by adding, to quote Mr. Murray, "a triangle and a little circle" to make it more inclusive with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender makes no sense to me. The flag's colors have nothing to do with any of that because they stand for much broader meanings.

It's obvious Mr. Murray has no knowledge of those meanings when he says, "[I]f the colors of the flag were meant to represent different races, then who were the orange and red stripes meant to represent[?]. Was it gays with too much fake tan on? Or white lesbians who had been left out in the sun too long?"

He concludes this part of the column by saying, "Even thinking that the flag was about race was a demonstration of Olympic-level stupidity."  But then he fails to explain what each color symbolizes. That would have helped his readers to see the flag's universality.

 Since he doesn't seem to know about each color's meaning, I would suggest Mr. Murray get a copy of Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, published in 1995.

The brief entry on the flag, by Steve Vezeris, points out that the flag originally "had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit."

Indigo was later replaced by royal blue. And, according to the 2006 documentary Rainbow Pride, the colors hot pink and turquoise were dropped. The reason: those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

Printing Mishaps

In my many years as a freelance journalist I have experienced several printing errors that have appeared in articles I've written for newspapers.

Aside from the occasional misspelled word or factual error, or God forbid, the complete rewriting of an article by an imperious editor, I have experienced such mishaps as a mangled or missing byline, jumbled paragraphs (something that happened in a syndicated article I wrote about Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie), and the use of my words about the famed Cotton Club in someone else's article without attribution (otherwise known as plagiarism). The latter mishap would  have been hard for me to prove since the offending party would probably claim that the lack of attribution and quotation marks was a printer's error and not a deliberate theft from my article syndicated by the Los Angeles Times.

But the one thing that has not happened to me, and I pray it never does, is something I saw while going through an old issue of one of New York's daily newspapers. The whole bottom half of the page was so ink smeared, it was impossible to read what was printed. I felt sorry for the writers to whom this happened. I can only hope that the paper corrected the problem in later editions.

Urban Book Maven's Fifteenth Anniversary

December 18, 2023 will mark Urban Book Maven's fifteenth anniversary. Over the years, the blog has served as a soapbox, a source of information, and, for me, a writing stimulus.

I hope it will continue to be those things and much more in the coming years.

In the new year, I also hope to start a second blog that will have as its focus Harlem, my home community. I haven't decided on a name for it yet. When I do I want it to be something that's eye catching and memorable.

A Story Idea That Was Shot Down

In the early 1980s, I did a few taped interviews by phone or in-person for the Inquiry page of the newspaper USA Today. The Inquiry page used a Q and A format. Among the people I interviewed were Arthur Mitchell, the artistic director and co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the actress Cicely Tyson.

One person I wanted to interview was the African-American Life magazine photographer and film director Gordon Parks (1912-2006). Parks had written a series of autobiographies, beginning with A Choice of Weapons (1966). A subsequent book was called To Smile in Autumn (1979), which dealt with the latter years of his life.

In an interview, I wanted to focus on aging, not race or racial conflict. I pitched the idea by phone to Peter Prichard, an editor at USA Today. He wasn't interested.

If blogging had existed back then, I would have set up the interview and posted it. And today, in a society and at a time in which ageism has not receded, we would have had, I believe, a thought-provoking, life-affirming interview to add to the literature on gerontology.

Editorialists Are Also Journalists

The following letter-to-the-editor was submitted via e-mail to the New York Daily News's "Voice of the People" on December 6, 2016. As far as I know the letter was never published.

Re: Voicer Mark Felcon (December 4, 2016) who thinks editorialists are not journalists. In fact, they are as much journalists as are reporters. They just have a different function. Reporters give us the who, what, where, when, why, and how of events. Editorial writers and columnists, on the other hand, analyze this data and try to make sense of it for readers, knowing there will always be room for disagreement. It is up to each reader, when reading the news and editorial pages, to apply some critical thinking to the process, and to gather enough information from a variety of sources before drawing a conclusion about an issue. Sincerely yours, Charles Michael Smith.

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.

Rupert Murdoch's New York Compost

People today know the New York Post as a conservative tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul.

But in the 1940s, '50s, '60s, and '70s, the Post, under the ownership of Dorothy Schiff, was very liberal and published liberal names such as Pete Hamill, Harriet Van Horne, Max Lerner, Murray Kempton, and James A. Wechsler, the editorial page editor. (Ms. Schiff sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch sometime in the mid-1970s.)

According to Winchell (Doubleday), Bob Thomas's 1971 biography of Walter Winchell, the once powerful and controversial columnist and broadcaster (as well as the narrator for the TV crime drama The Untouchables), referred to the Post as "the New York Compost."

Today that label might be considered by the paper's left-wing detractors as a more suitable description of its current content and political views.

A Glaring Historical Error

There's a glaring historical error that I found in James McGrath Morris's otherwise interesting biography of journalist Ethel Payne, Eyes on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2015).

Morris, on the Acknowledgments page, praised Nancy Inglis for her "diligent copyediting and fact checking." Unfortunately, she neglected to fact check when the Watts riots in Los Angeles happened. The riots occurred in August 1965, not August 1964.

At the time, I was living in the nearby suburb of Compton, which experienced some of the looting and burning.

The Newseum In D.C. Is Closing

New York's WCBS Newsradio Eight-Eighty reported that the Newseum, an interactive museum in Washington, D.C. dedicated to the news gathering business, is slated to close its doors on December 31, 2019. The stated cause was financial difficulties which have plagued it over its eleven-year existence.

The museum, states Wikipedia, "promotes free expression and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, while tracing the evolution of communication" in a space that has seven levels, fifteen theatres, and twelve galleries.

I've never been to the museum. But if it had been located in New York, where I live, instead of Washington, D.C., I would've been a regular attendee since I'm a journalist and an avid reader of the press.

Such an important institution about journalism, an important profession, should not be allowed to disappear forever.

Maybe the Newseum can be saved and relocated to New York, where a lot of media companies are headquartered. Bloomberg, Murdoch, and other media moguls, are you listening?

Bill Whitaker, Newsman And Voter

This past Tuesday, November 6, I was a poll worker at one of the poll sites in my neighborhood. This was the seventh election that I worked. While sitting at my assigned table, Bill Whitaker of CBS's 60 Minutes newsmagazine show came to the table to sign the Voter Registration List. When I asked if he was Bill Whitaker the newsman, he quickly nodded and continued signing his name. One website noted that Whitaker "never stops to flaunt his media talent." That statement is very true.

I hope he plans to write a memoir of his world travels as a journalist. It would be compelling reading. Meanwhile, I'm following him on Twitter.

Chris Brown And Souljah Boy, Two Palookas

It was reported by Rachael Clemmons in her gossip column "The Word"(Metro New York, January 11, 2017) via the website TMZ that rappers Chris Brown and Soulja Boy dislike each other so much that they have decided to "duke it out" in a boxing ring in Dubai. "Chris Brown is being trained by Mike Tyson," writes Clemmons,"while Soulja Boy is being trained by Floyd Mayweather."

Could it be that the two rappers--described by Clemmons as"man-children" --have record sales that are so low and have a craving for attention that is so high that they need to challenge each other in the ring in order to fill up their bank accounts?

Since both rappers like to post full-frontal nude selfies of themselves on the Internet, maybe they can boost ticket sales by boxing in their birthday suits.

November, National Blog Posting Month

The two things I learned via a discarded copy of the Chief/Civil Service Leader, a weekly newspaper (November 18, 2016): (1) November is National Blog Posting Month and (2) the Social Security
Administration has a blog called Social Security Matters.

A Book For Foodies

I recently found a hardcover book entitled Holiday Book of Food and Drink (Hermitage House, 1952), a collection of articles that were originally published in Holiday magazine in the 1940s and 1950s. While browsing through the book's 22 chapters, I found articles on such food items as coffee, pasta, beer, cheeses, and ice cream. A few of the contributors to this anthology are familiar names to me--Budd Schulberg, Roger Angell, and Elizabeth Janeway.

The book contains a few recipes, food history, and food facts. Although I'm sure some of the information is outdated that shouldn't be a huge barrier to enjoying what the writers have to say or make it insignificant from an historical standpoint.

I'm looking forward to reading the book from cover to cover and writing a review of it for this blog.

A Gay Gossip Columnist

One book I plan to read for the second time is Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip by Val Holley (McFarland & Co., 2003).

Connolly, a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, was a political conservative and a staunch anti-Communist. He was also a gay man.

It's been a few years since I last read the book but I vaguely recall the author depicting Connolly as closeted and homophobic towards other gay men, especially those in Hollywood who were in the public eye like actor Rock Hudson and director George Cukor. Those traits would not be too far off the mark for a gay man living and working during those extremely closeted and homophobic times.

I would love to see a documentary film  made about the life and times of Mike Connolly. It would give us a behind-the-scenes look at gay Hollywood back then, warts and all, told from many different points of view, gay and straight.

The Village Voice Is 60

The Village Voice celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. The weekly New York-based alternative newspaper, which was once the editorial home of such notables as political columnists Nat Hentoff and Alexander Cockburn, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, film critic Andrew Sarris, and others, was co-founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer.

Disclosure: I worked there as a freelance proofreader in 1980 and again from 1982 to 1983.

When I worked at the Village Voice, a reader could buy it at a newsstand. Today, it's available for free every Wednesday in large red plastic curbside boxes all around the city. (In Harlem, I have often seen these boxes turned on their sides and used as seats by neighborhood men.)

Happy 60th anniversary, Village Voice! May you continue publishing for another sixty years.

A Tale Of Three Quarrels

In the Notes section of James McGrath Morris's Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2015), he quotes from an article that was part of a series called "Industry USA" that Payne wrote for the Chicago Defender in 1951. The series regarded postwar employment of African Americans in Chicago.

A plant manager (presumably white) is quoted as saying, "When two white people have a quarrel, it's just a quarrel. If two Negroes quarrel, it's a disturbance; but if a white person and a Negro quarrel, it becomes an 'incident.'"

Sad to say, more than sixty years later, that statement still applies.

Bill Clinton, Gentrifier?

In Edward Klein's riveting nonfiction book, The Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (Regnery Publishing, 2014), he wrote that when Obama campaign advisors David Axelrod and Jim Messina visited Clinton's Harlem office to get his support in reelecting Obama, Clinton "pointed out that Harlem had experienced a renaissance since he moved his post-presidential office there, and that he was largely responsible for Harlem's revived economy and gentrification."

The truth of the matter is that gentrification in Harlem was happening long before Clinton set foot there or in the White House.

New York magazine, in its July 23, 1979 issue, ran a story by James Mannion called "Who Will Inhabit Harlem?" The article stated that "as middle-class blacks have come to Harlem, so too have whites. Bankers and realtors report that over the past three years, young white families have begun buying homes in Harlem."

Furthermore, "Harlemites are asking themselves how many more whites are going to move in and what that will mean for the most visible black community in America."

For Bill Clinton to puff out his chest and claim that his presence in Harlem brought about its economic prosperity and gentrification is nothing more than hubris.