The newly-founded Rainbow Repertory Theatre proudly bills itself as a company whose aim is to develop and promote the plays of gay and lesbian playwrights of color. However, its artistic director Reginald Jackson, himself a playwright, does not "want to just appeal to the gay community."
In fact, Rainbow Rep's first offerings--Kids and Enormous Insignificancies (both directed by Jackson)--have more straight characters in them than gay. "We [as gay people] really don't live in a vacuum," explained Jackson, "so I don't see any purpose in doing pieces in a vacuum."
Both one-act plays will be presented back to back March 6 and 13[1988], starting at 7 p.m., at the Alonzo Players Theatre, 317 Clermont Avenue, Brooklyn, under the umbrella title: "Kuumba: A Night of New Theatre." (Kuumba means "creativity" in Swahili.)
Kids, a play with music by Charles Pouncy, deals with self-identity and self-acceptance. The focus is on two adolescent brothers--Jacob, who is openly gay to the point of being effeminate and David, who, when confronted by his mother, denies his homosexuality. "This would be a wonderful piece for gay and lesbian youth of color to come to," said the 24-year-old director, a native of Queens, "because Kids is about them. It's about me, too. I've lived it. But they're living it now. They've got no sense of validation."
While Kids, with its musical soliloquies and humorous touches, can be quite entertaining, its companion piece, Enormous Insignificancies by Hector Lugo, about a Puerto Rican playwright dying of AIDS, can be very unsettling. "What do you want me to do," asks Gaston, the playwright (played by Lugo), as he lay on a psychiatric couch, "go up to this man, the only human being who has been kind to me, who I love, and say I've got--I'm going to die and maybe you've got it, too? I can't, I can't, I can't."
Enormous Insignificancies, recalled Jackson, "was originally done at City College for the one-act festival last year. I didn't see it, but I knew Hector. We were at the college together. [After reading the script], I told him if he was interested in rewriting it, I would consider doing it."
Although the playwrights involved with Rainbow Rep must be gay or lesbian, that rule does not apply when Jackson goes about the task of selecting the cast. "There are 11 people in the total production--five gays and six straights, at least that is their public image. I'm not going to pull people who are in the closet, out of the closet. My political stance is that I don't particularly condone being in the closet, but artistically it's irrelevant. As far as I'm concerned, the actors are asexual on stage. The audience shouldn't be trying to figure out who's gay and who's straight. That defeats the purpose."
A future project waiting in the wings is "a theatrical dialogue" between gay men and lesbians. "It'll be two different pieces," said Jackson,"running about 45 minutes each, comprised of poetry and prose exploring how we feel about each other, what are the myths, the stereotypes, the misconceptions, the questions, the fears that affect the whole relationship. I've got ideas on what I think will probably come up in it, but I have no idea what the overall gist or structure will be." That would be left up to the poets and playwrights "who would get together on a Saturday or a Sunday for three hours, four hours," continued Jackson, and "brainstorm" on how they would "create the written work into a theatre piece; linking the pieces and building a script."
This article was originally published in the Philadelphia Gay News (March 11, 1988).
Monday, November 26, 2012
Sunday, November 25, 2012
The AIDS Gravy Train
The Voice of the People
New York Daily News
450 West 33rd Street
New York, NY 10001
February 20, 1997
Dear Editor:
If a cure for AIDS is ever found, the result will be a lot of unemployed people. Since the onslaught of the disease in 1981, a cottage industry has mushroomed: organizations, periodicals, housing facilities, clinics, etc. And most, if not all, are recipients of public funds.
In every major American city there are probably more groups dealing with AIDS-related issues than there are for any other disease. These days everybody and his brother is hopping a ride on the AIDS gravy train.
Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith
This letter was published on March 15, 1997.
New York Daily News
450 West 33rd Street
New York, NY 10001
February 20, 1997
Dear Editor:
If a cure for AIDS is ever found, the result will be a lot of unemployed people. Since the onslaught of the disease in 1981, a cottage industry has mushroomed: organizations, periodicals, housing facilities, clinics, etc. And most, if not all, are recipients of public funds.
In every major American city there are probably more groups dealing with AIDS-related issues than there are for any other disease. These days everybody and his brother is hopping a ride on the AIDS gravy train.
Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith
This letter was published on March 15, 1997.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Inside An Architect's Home
"As we look around today," said Percy Griffin, a Harlem-based African American architect, "we see a little of many different styles creeping into architecture: the Renaissance, the Gothic, Byzantine, and so on. We went to one period back in the '50s where we had steel and glass, the glass boxes." Many of these buildings can be found on Manhattan's Park Avenue, north of Grand Central Terminal. For example, the Lever Brothers Building. This style is called "modern" architecture. Now we're in the post-modern period in which architects borrow from other architectural styles. Said Griffin about post-modernism, or what he called "eclectic architecture": "It's like baking a cake. If you have the right ingredients, it will be tasty. So's architecture."
Griffin's home, in a four-story limestone building that he owns on West 144th Street in Harlem, is a mixture of different styles. (He lives there with his wife Sandra, an urban planner, and their seven-year-old daughter, Kammara.)
The Griffins occupy the basement, and the first two floors of the building. The upper two floors are rented out to three tenants.
The den, in the basement, where he and his wife spend most of their time, is described by Griffin as having a high-tech decor. It is furnished with a circular bar, a TV, a stereo, and a spinet piano.
The main floor containing the family area and the living room is eclectic. The walls are white. The living room has a built-in fireplace, a glass top coffee table, and paintings on the wall. (The paintings are his own work. They line the walls throughout the house.) The family area, adjacent to the kitchen, has a long wooden dining table, a couch, a bookshelf that he built, and a wall in which a rectangular opening has been cut inside of which are placed wooden ancient Roman columns on either side of the opening. A few feet away is another column,that is more modern, and painted blue to match a similar column in the living room.
The upstairs area is designed in Scandinavian light wood. The wall of his and his wife's bedroom which faces the stairs is made up of a series of small window panes to emit light when desired and is shielded from within by a Japanese shade. Down the hall is their daughter's bedroom furnished with a bed that is a few feet off the floor and is accessible by a ladder nearby. Underneath the bed is a row of shelves for various dolls, a birdcage with two parakeets, a dresser, and a TV set. Taped to that same wall are her drawings. Along the wall outside her bedroom are framed pictures of her.
This article was part of a much longer article about architect Percy Griffin. It was originally published in the Harlem Weekly in 1984.
Griffin's home, in a four-story limestone building that he owns on West 144th Street in Harlem, is a mixture of different styles. (He lives there with his wife Sandra, an urban planner, and their seven-year-old daughter, Kammara.)
The Griffins occupy the basement, and the first two floors of the building. The upper two floors are rented out to three tenants.
The den, in the basement, where he and his wife spend most of their time, is described by Griffin as having a high-tech decor. It is furnished with a circular bar, a TV, a stereo, and a spinet piano.
The main floor containing the family area and the living room is eclectic. The walls are white. The living room has a built-in fireplace, a glass top coffee table, and paintings on the wall. (The paintings are his own work. They line the walls throughout the house.) The family area, adjacent to the kitchen, has a long wooden dining table, a couch, a bookshelf that he built, and a wall in which a rectangular opening has been cut inside of which are placed wooden ancient Roman columns on either side of the opening. A few feet away is another column,that is more modern, and painted blue to match a similar column in the living room.
The upstairs area is designed in Scandinavian light wood. The wall of his and his wife's bedroom which faces the stairs is made up of a series of small window panes to emit light when desired and is shielded from within by a Japanese shade. Down the hall is their daughter's bedroom furnished with a bed that is a few feet off the floor and is accessible by a ladder nearby. Underneath the bed is a row of shelves for various dolls, a birdcage with two parakeets, a dresser, and a TV set. Taped to that same wall are her drawings. Along the wall outside her bedroom are framed pictures of her.
This article was part of a much longer article about architect Percy Griffin. It was originally published in the Harlem Weekly in 1984.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Assessing The Dance World
In assessing the current New York dance scene, the four dance experts I interviewed saw very little, if any, trendsetting going on in modern dance or ballet.
The leaning in modern dance toward what Celia Ipiotis, the host of Channel 31's Eye on Dance, described as the blending of "elements from the world of theatre, music, and visual arts" is, said dance historian Joe Nash, "nothing new. Everything now is merely a continuation of what was started in the sixties." Although there is this cyclical aspect to modern dance, Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt pointed out that "whenever those things come out, they usually come back in a slightly different form."
Back in the sixties, recalled Jowitt, there was "a dance revolution" that took place. It was at this point, said Nash, "when modern dance entered a whole new phase." What the early pioneers such as Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham "established [was] a style, a technique, an approach to modern dance that was related to [a period] when people were trying to communicate about issues, about the human spirit." But, further explained Nash, who teaches dance history at the Alvin Ailey school, the choreographers who emerged from the Judson Movement in the sixties--named after the church performance space on the West Side of Manhattan--wanted to "establish their own principles of movement that ran counter to what was considered traditional. It gained in popularity as more people entered the field. Critics began to try to analyze and describe what they were seeing. They still don't know what they're seeing, but they describe it anyway."
In ballet, particularly with "the major companies," said New York Daily News critic Charles Jurrist, "it is really hard to spot trends." Jowitt attributed this to "the classical language staying the same." She detected, although, "a kind of aggression entering ballet. You can see a lot of aggressive, violent dance today in ballet and contemporary dance."
Said Jurrist, "The New York City Ballet has clearly still not decided where it's going after the death of [its founder and choreographer George] Balanchine. At ABT [American Ballet Theatre], they've mostly been involved in cleaning up the company which needed a lot of cleaning up--disciplining the corps de ballet and sort of weeding out the repertory, making it a more stylistically coherent company." Jurrist added that he "really couldn't say that I would spot a trend in either one of those two companies--as yet."
On the other hand, historian Nash saw the influence of modern dance, particularly the African American contribution to it, on contemporary ballet. "At the root of American dance is the black movement styles. What the African American brought to a whole field of dance was just total involvement of the body in dance. You now see twisting and contorting the body as you would do in jazz or ethnic dance. This is the contemporary trend. Contemporary ballets are really based upon the New Movement as opposed to classical tradition handed down from the 17th century--'Swan Lake', 'Giselle.' The choreographer takes those traditional five-position movements of the legs and arms and updates them and places them in a contemporary mold. More and more companies are using contemporary approaches to ballet production and that will continue."
Although Celia Ipiotis said that today the definition of dance is "fluid," the Daily News's Charles Jurrist thought that a lot of what passes for dance--such as "carrying a transistor radio onto the stage and turning it on"--should be labeled as performance art, which he himself admitted is a catchall phrase, much like the term "post-modern." In his mind, dance has "movement as its primary mode of expression. Otherwise, it's another form of theatre." Opined Joe Nash, "You will always have people engaged in multimedia because when you're lost for something to say through movement, you can always revert to words or [photo] slides."
This article was originally published in the West Side Spirit (December 19, 1988).
The leaning in modern dance toward what Celia Ipiotis, the host of Channel 31's Eye on Dance, described as the blending of "elements from the world of theatre, music, and visual arts" is, said dance historian Joe Nash, "nothing new. Everything now is merely a continuation of what was started in the sixties." Although there is this cyclical aspect to modern dance, Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt pointed out that "whenever those things come out, they usually come back in a slightly different form."
Back in the sixties, recalled Jowitt, there was "a dance revolution" that took place. It was at this point, said Nash, "when modern dance entered a whole new phase." What the early pioneers such as Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham "established [was] a style, a technique, an approach to modern dance that was related to [a period] when people were trying to communicate about issues, about the human spirit." But, further explained Nash, who teaches dance history at the Alvin Ailey school, the choreographers who emerged from the Judson Movement in the sixties--named after the church performance space on the West Side of Manhattan--wanted to "establish their own principles of movement that ran counter to what was considered traditional. It gained in popularity as more people entered the field. Critics began to try to analyze and describe what they were seeing. They still don't know what they're seeing, but they describe it anyway."
In ballet, particularly with "the major companies," said New York Daily News critic Charles Jurrist, "it is really hard to spot trends." Jowitt attributed this to "the classical language staying the same." She detected, although, "a kind of aggression entering ballet. You can see a lot of aggressive, violent dance today in ballet and contemporary dance."
Said Jurrist, "The New York City Ballet has clearly still not decided where it's going after the death of [its founder and choreographer George] Balanchine. At ABT [American Ballet Theatre], they've mostly been involved in cleaning up the company which needed a lot of cleaning up--disciplining the corps de ballet and sort of weeding out the repertory, making it a more stylistically coherent company." Jurrist added that he "really couldn't say that I would spot a trend in either one of those two companies--as yet."
On the other hand, historian Nash saw the influence of modern dance, particularly the African American contribution to it, on contemporary ballet. "At the root of American dance is the black movement styles. What the African American brought to a whole field of dance was just total involvement of the body in dance. You now see twisting and contorting the body as you would do in jazz or ethnic dance. This is the contemporary trend. Contemporary ballets are really based upon the New Movement as opposed to classical tradition handed down from the 17th century--'Swan Lake', 'Giselle.' The choreographer takes those traditional five-position movements of the legs and arms and updates them and places them in a contemporary mold. More and more companies are using contemporary approaches to ballet production and that will continue."
Although Celia Ipiotis said that today the definition of dance is "fluid," the Daily News's Charles Jurrist thought that a lot of what passes for dance--such as "carrying a transistor radio onto the stage and turning it on"--should be labeled as performance art, which he himself admitted is a catchall phrase, much like the term "post-modern." In his mind, dance has "movement as its primary mode of expression. Otherwise, it's another form of theatre." Opined Joe Nash, "You will always have people engaged in multimedia because when you're lost for something to say through movement, you can always revert to words or [photo] slides."
This article was originally published in the West Side Spirit (December 19, 1988).
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Of Prima Donnas And Bisexual Men
Not a Day Goes By by E. Lynn Harris (Doubleday, 288 pp.)
Not a Day Goes By, whose chapters are mercifully short, tells the story of the ill-fated love affair of Basil Henderson, an ex-football star-turned-sports agent and Yancey Braxton, an extremely ambitious prima donna stage actress. Both characters, products of dysfunctional families, are planning to get married. But Basil has a lingering question: "[C]an a diva and a dude like me ever settle down?"
In the prologue Basil calls Yancey to inform her that their wedding is off for good. (This part of the story appears too early to create suspense.) Then it backtracks to the day of their love-at-first sight meeting at the skating rink in Rockefeller Center. From there subsequent events and revelations (one in particular--Basil's bisexuality--could hurt his chance of being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame) work to doom their marriage plans.
Although the macho, slightly homophobic Basil and the manipulative, self-centered Yancey are described in the dust jacket copy as "two very unforgettable characters," that label rightly belongs to Yancey's cold-blooded, man-grabbing femme fatale mother, Ava, herself an actress. Currently married to a wealthy computer whiz she met on a flight to Hawaii, Ava is ever on the prowl (she already snared the package delivery man) and will stop at nothing to get what, and who, she wants. And that includes acquiring a son-in-law so that Yancey can fleece him of his hard-earned wealth and then divorce him. If Harris had written, a noir novel, a la James M. Cain, Ava would be a standout. I wanted to hear more from her, and less from Basil and Yancey.
Harris's alternate use of first- and third-person narration is annoying and distracting. Basil's scenes are told in his voice, while Yancey's are told in the third person. It's as though Harris was not confident enough to write from a woman's point of view.
Also, the sex scenes always involve Basil and Yancey. But if Basil is a bisexual, there should be a scene or two showing him with a man rather than having him reminisce about an old flame who "could deep-throat the jimmie like a fire-eating circus performer." Does Harris believe that too much detail about two men in bed would turn off female readers?
Overall, Not a Day Goes By is formulaic and is the literary equivalent of junk food. There is very little in it that is thought-provoking. And it certainly isn't stylistically innovative or challenging to the status quo.
This article was originally published in the New York Blade (August 11, 2000) and reprinted in the Washington Blade (September 1, 2000).
Not a Day Goes By, whose chapters are mercifully short, tells the story of the ill-fated love affair of Basil Henderson, an ex-football star-turned-sports agent and Yancey Braxton, an extremely ambitious prima donna stage actress. Both characters, products of dysfunctional families, are planning to get married. But Basil has a lingering question: "[C]an a diva and a dude like me ever settle down?"
In the prologue Basil calls Yancey to inform her that their wedding is off for good. (This part of the story appears too early to create suspense.) Then it backtracks to the day of their love-at-first sight meeting at the skating rink in Rockefeller Center. From there subsequent events and revelations (one in particular--Basil's bisexuality--could hurt his chance of being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame) work to doom their marriage plans.
Although the macho, slightly homophobic Basil and the manipulative, self-centered Yancey are described in the dust jacket copy as "two very unforgettable characters," that label rightly belongs to Yancey's cold-blooded, man-grabbing femme fatale mother, Ava, herself an actress. Currently married to a wealthy computer whiz she met on a flight to Hawaii, Ava is ever on the prowl (she already snared the package delivery man) and will stop at nothing to get what, and who, she wants. And that includes acquiring a son-in-law so that Yancey can fleece him of his hard-earned wealth and then divorce him. If Harris had written, a noir novel, a la James M. Cain, Ava would be a standout. I wanted to hear more from her, and less from Basil and Yancey.
Harris's alternate use of first- and third-person narration is annoying and distracting. Basil's scenes are told in his voice, while Yancey's are told in the third person. It's as though Harris was not confident enough to write from a woman's point of view.
Also, the sex scenes always involve Basil and Yancey. But if Basil is a bisexual, there should be a scene or two showing him with a man rather than having him reminisce about an old flame who "could deep-throat the jimmie like a fire-eating circus performer." Does Harris believe that too much detail about two men in bed would turn off female readers?
Overall, Not a Day Goes By is formulaic and is the literary equivalent of junk food. There is very little in it that is thought-provoking. And it certainly isn't stylistically innovative or challenging to the status quo.
This article was originally published in the New York Blade (August 11, 2000) and reprinted in the Washington Blade (September 1, 2000).
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Fighting Arson: An Interview With Dennis Smith, Author & Former Firefighter
Charles Michael Smith: What type of person becomes an arsonist?
Dennis Smith: I don't think you can make a generalization. There's been a great deal of research into children fire setters. They found out that the profile generally fits the profile of a young delinquent and that is generally from a broken home. People with serious education deficiencies, learning deficiencies, and severe personality problems. It's a couple of steps beyond juvenile delinquency in that it can become deadly.
CMS: When a fire is of suspicious origin what is the investigative procedure?
DS: It's a long procedure. There are certain ways that all firefighters are taught to proceed in the initial exposure to a fire. That is, if there are two different fires--one in one end of the building, one in the other--you know that it's arson. If you go in and see streamers anywhere--streamers meaning long strips of paper or other devices so that the fire will extend--you know that it's arson.
CMS: What is the role of the fire marshal?
DS: Fire marshals are called in some states fire investigators. In some states there are none and the police department is fully responsible for it. Their role is to determine the cause and the origin of all fires. It's only when the fire chief at the scene says a fire is suspicious that a fire marshal gets really involved.
CMS: What are the attitudes of firemen to the arson problem that you've been able to find out?
DS: I don't think that the concept of arson in its consequences looms very large in the firefighter's mind. All they know is that the building's on fire or that they've got to go out into the streets, into the building to put the fire out.
But one fire to a firefighter is generally thought of in the same way as any other fire. It doesn't matter how it started really. The thing is once you're there how do you extinguish the fire. Do your job, save whatever lives need to be saved and do it as safely as possible without getting yourself killed or severely injured.
CMS: How many kinds of arson are there?
DS: There are three kinds of arson that are major problems in America? The first kind is the traditional maladjusted mental personality who is traditionally called a pyromaniac. The second kind of arson is arson as social protest and that was a huge problem during the late sixties and through the seventies. The third kind of arson is the most serious one facing us now. Although the amounts of arson incidents have declined in the last year it seems. We're not really sure but it does seem that way for the statistics gathering people. So while we have fewer arson fires, the costs are greater which means that the third biggest arson problem, which is arson for economic profit, is the one now that is in the long run the most dangerous to us as a society. That is, people are finding it in tough economic times as we've had in the last four or five years in business that it's an easy answer to recouping an unsound business investment as to burn it down.
CMS: What can a private citizen do to help alert firemen of arson?
DS: One has a great duty to report that. For this reason, when one goes about setting a fire one time in all likelihood they're going to set a fire another time and another time and develop a pattern of setting fires. And if it's a member of the family or friend then that person ought to be helped and also reported to the fire department. The fire department would almost certainly in the bigger cities have some program in place that would be helpful to such a person. Arson kills people. More than a thousand people we estimate at least in America last year.
CMS: What penalties would you like to see enacted in arson cases?
DS: It's interesting that the penalties vary depending on what time the arson takes place. I'm not a lawyer but there is a code of penalties that judges can go by for very specific crimes. If arson occurs during the nighttime hours from 11 o'clock until 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock in the morning, then the penalty ought to be much greater than an arson that occurs at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The rationale being that while somebody's sleeping, arson is a much more serious problem.
Part of this Q and A interview appeared on the Inquiry Page of USA Today (August 30, 1983).
Note: Dennis Smith is a former New York City firefighter. His books include Report from Engine Co. 82, Dennis Smith's History of Firefighting in America, and Report from Ground Zero. This interview took place in 1983 at Firehouse magazine in Manhattan where he was the publisher and editor-in-chief.
Dennis Smith: I don't think you can make a generalization. There's been a great deal of research into children fire setters. They found out that the profile generally fits the profile of a young delinquent and that is generally from a broken home. People with serious education deficiencies, learning deficiencies, and severe personality problems. It's a couple of steps beyond juvenile delinquency in that it can become deadly.
CMS: When a fire is of suspicious origin what is the investigative procedure?
DS: It's a long procedure. There are certain ways that all firefighters are taught to proceed in the initial exposure to a fire. That is, if there are two different fires--one in one end of the building, one in the other--you know that it's arson. If you go in and see streamers anywhere--streamers meaning long strips of paper or other devices so that the fire will extend--you know that it's arson.
CMS: What is the role of the fire marshal?
DS: Fire marshals are called in some states fire investigators. In some states there are none and the police department is fully responsible for it. Their role is to determine the cause and the origin of all fires. It's only when the fire chief at the scene says a fire is suspicious that a fire marshal gets really involved.
CMS: What are the attitudes of firemen to the arson problem that you've been able to find out?
DS: I don't think that the concept of arson in its consequences looms very large in the firefighter's mind. All they know is that the building's on fire or that they've got to go out into the streets, into the building to put the fire out.
But one fire to a firefighter is generally thought of in the same way as any other fire. It doesn't matter how it started really. The thing is once you're there how do you extinguish the fire. Do your job, save whatever lives need to be saved and do it as safely as possible without getting yourself killed or severely injured.
CMS: How many kinds of arson are there?
DS: There are three kinds of arson that are major problems in America? The first kind is the traditional maladjusted mental personality who is traditionally called a pyromaniac. The second kind of arson is arson as social protest and that was a huge problem during the late sixties and through the seventies. The third kind of arson is the most serious one facing us now. Although the amounts of arson incidents have declined in the last year it seems. We're not really sure but it does seem that way for the statistics gathering people. So while we have fewer arson fires, the costs are greater which means that the third biggest arson problem, which is arson for economic profit, is the one now that is in the long run the most dangerous to us as a society. That is, people are finding it in tough economic times as we've had in the last four or five years in business that it's an easy answer to recouping an unsound business investment as to burn it down.
CMS: What can a private citizen do to help alert firemen of arson?
DS: One has a great duty to report that. For this reason, when one goes about setting a fire one time in all likelihood they're going to set a fire another time and another time and develop a pattern of setting fires. And if it's a member of the family or friend then that person ought to be helped and also reported to the fire department. The fire department would almost certainly in the bigger cities have some program in place that would be helpful to such a person. Arson kills people. More than a thousand people we estimate at least in America last year.
CMS: What penalties would you like to see enacted in arson cases?
DS: It's interesting that the penalties vary depending on what time the arson takes place. I'm not a lawyer but there is a code of penalties that judges can go by for very specific crimes. If arson occurs during the nighttime hours from 11 o'clock until 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock in the morning, then the penalty ought to be much greater than an arson that occurs at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The rationale being that while somebody's sleeping, arson is a much more serious problem.
Part of this Q and A interview appeared on the Inquiry Page of USA Today (August 30, 1983).
Note: Dennis Smith is a former New York City firefighter. His books include Report from Engine Co. 82, Dennis Smith's History of Firefighting in America, and Report from Ground Zero. This interview took place in 1983 at Firehouse magazine in Manhattan where he was the publisher and editor-in-chief.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
A Black Gay Man's Personal Odyssey
The End of Innocence: A Journey Into the Life by Alaric Wendell Blair (South Bend, Indiana: Mirage Publishing Co., 249 pp, paperback)
While aboard a Greyhound bus enroute to his native city of Chicago, Fitzgerald Washington, the "scholarly, articulate, and light-skinned" black gay protagonist in Alaric Wendell Blair's debut novel The End of Innocence: A Journey Into the Life, pulls out a copy of his favorite book Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. "This would be my sixth time reading the book since I got it," he declares.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about The End of Innocence. One reading is enough for me.
Unlike Baldwin's classic novel which seriously deals with sexual identity and the ramifications of love, Blair's novel has a nineties TV sit-com approach to these subjects, with punchlines, catty remarks, and pop culture references (e.g. Joan Collins, Patti Labelle, Oprah, et cetera) to boot.
I'm disappointed that Blair, "an educator, journalist, and activist in the Indiana community where he resides" (according to the back jacket copy) hasn't produced a novel worthy of his background--something that is complex and intellectually stimulating, a la Baldwin or Toni Morrison.
The End of Innocence is one of these tiresome coming-out novels. Following Fitzgerald from a summer camp "for bored ghetto children" to high school to predominantly white Harmon College to his enlistment in the navy, it reads more like an autobiography or memoir than it does a work of fiction.
As far as young Fitzgerald is concerned, despite his sassy snap diva demeanor, he is very insecure and naive (particularly about gay life). I found it hard to believe that a young gay man living in the 1980s, in Chicago, would not know about the rainbow flag and the pink triangle. (A black lesbian student at the college educates him about the symbols.) If the story had been set in the 1940s or 1950s, and the main character was from the sticks, it would be more believable. but at a time when gay life is visible on TV, in the movies, on national magazine covers, I don't think so. I don't even think straight people are that uniformed about American gay culture.
Also, all or most of the gay male characters (black and white), Fitzgerald included, are depicted as very effeminate, or as Fitzgerald would put it, act "more than a woman," saying things like "[y]ou young girls tickle me." Even in the mid-80s black gay men were caught up in what Michelangelo Signorile, the gay writer, would call the cult of masculinity and would frown at and avoid socializing with effeminate men. Fitzgerald conversely suffers very little negativity as a result of his admittedly "flamboyant behavior" in an increasingly macho gay environment.
Moreover, aside from his naivete ("I wonder if Rockwell or Kevin is gay. Mel could be, but I don't think so because he's fat"), his attitude about what is "real sex" have a Clintonian ring. For example, early in the book, after a sexual encounter (his first ever) with Denise, a promiscuous neighbor two years his senior, he still thinks of himself as "still a virgin because I hadn't achieved an orgasm with her." A later gay tryst doesn't rate as real sex either because it involved oral, not anal, sex.
The most interesting, and most promising, part of The End of Innocence are the last seven chapters. In these chapters, Fitzgerald joins the navy, goes through the naval equivalent of boot camp, and gets kicked out for being gay just as his naval career is beginning. Here is a missed opportunity. Blair could have expanded this section into a book-length indictment against the mistreatment of gay men in the military. It certainly is a topical and controversial issue that Blair could have used to give voice to those very rarely heard from in the media--black gay men in uniform.
This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (March 1999).
While aboard a Greyhound bus enroute to his native city of Chicago, Fitzgerald Washington, the "scholarly, articulate, and light-skinned" black gay protagonist in Alaric Wendell Blair's debut novel The End of Innocence: A Journey Into the Life, pulls out a copy of his favorite book Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. "This would be my sixth time reading the book since I got it," he declares.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about The End of Innocence. One reading is enough for me.
Unlike Baldwin's classic novel which seriously deals with sexual identity and the ramifications of love, Blair's novel has a nineties TV sit-com approach to these subjects, with punchlines, catty remarks, and pop culture references (e.g. Joan Collins, Patti Labelle, Oprah, et cetera) to boot.
I'm disappointed that Blair, "an educator, journalist, and activist in the Indiana community where he resides" (according to the back jacket copy) hasn't produced a novel worthy of his background--something that is complex and intellectually stimulating, a la Baldwin or Toni Morrison.
The End of Innocence is one of these tiresome coming-out novels. Following Fitzgerald from a summer camp "for bored ghetto children" to high school to predominantly white Harmon College to his enlistment in the navy, it reads more like an autobiography or memoir than it does a work of fiction.
As far as young Fitzgerald is concerned, despite his sassy snap diva demeanor, he is very insecure and naive (particularly about gay life). I found it hard to believe that a young gay man living in the 1980s, in Chicago, would not know about the rainbow flag and the pink triangle. (A black lesbian student at the college educates him about the symbols.) If the story had been set in the 1940s or 1950s, and the main character was from the sticks, it would be more believable. but at a time when gay life is visible on TV, in the movies, on national magazine covers, I don't think so. I don't even think straight people are that uniformed about American gay culture.
Also, all or most of the gay male characters (black and white), Fitzgerald included, are depicted as very effeminate, or as Fitzgerald would put it, act "more than a woman," saying things like "[y]ou young girls tickle me." Even in the mid-80s black gay men were caught up in what Michelangelo Signorile, the gay writer, would call the cult of masculinity and would frown at and avoid socializing with effeminate men. Fitzgerald conversely suffers very little negativity as a result of his admittedly "flamboyant behavior" in an increasingly macho gay environment.
Moreover, aside from his naivete ("I wonder if Rockwell or Kevin is gay. Mel could be, but I don't think so because he's fat"), his attitude about what is "real sex" have a Clintonian ring. For example, early in the book, after a sexual encounter (his first ever) with Denise, a promiscuous neighbor two years his senior, he still thinks of himself as "still a virgin because I hadn't achieved an orgasm with her." A later gay tryst doesn't rate as real sex either because it involved oral, not anal, sex.
The most interesting, and most promising, part of The End of Innocence are the last seven chapters. In these chapters, Fitzgerald joins the navy, goes through the naval equivalent of boot camp, and gets kicked out for being gay just as his naval career is beginning. Here is a missed opportunity. Blair could have expanded this section into a book-length indictment against the mistreatment of gay men in the military. It certainly is a topical and controversial issue that Blair could have used to give voice to those very rarely heard from in the media--black gay men in uniform.
This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (March 1999).
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