A Woody Allen Film At Mount Morris Baths?

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.

Malcolm X's Zip-Gun Ballpoint Pen

In the mid-1960s, my sister, her son, and I were invited to the Black Muslim mosque in Los Angeles to hear the boxing champion Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) speak. At the time he refused to be inducted into the army and possibly shipped off to Vietnam, to participate in a war he opposed.

We were invited to the mosque by a man who ran a TV-radio repair shop next door to my sister's house on Compton Boulevard in Compton and who was a member of the religious group. I remember him giving my sister a copy of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's book, Message to the Black Man.

When we got to the mosque, a member removed my retractable ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket and aimed it at me, clicking the top with his thumb several times. The late Afro-Caribbean writer Orde Coombs, in an essay in one of his books, reported a similar experience. At the time I didn't understand why that was done. It wasn't until I recently read a biography of the late black journalist, Louis Lomax, that it started to make sense.

Thomas Aiello, in his book The Life & Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity (Duke University Press, 2011), wrote that Lomax "claimed that during Malcolm [X]'s final trip to Los Angeles, he and a friend were followed by a black limousine and that Malcolm carried a 'zip-gun ball point pen' so as to take one of them with him when he went."

The Night The Ceiling Collapsed At Mount Morris Baths

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.

Creating A Personal Archive Is On My To-Do List

The New York Times a few years ago published an article about the death of the black dance historian Joe Nash whose Harlem apartment was filled with dance memorabilia. The article struck a chord with me. It reminded me that I should get my papers and artifacts together for submission to an archive.

It also reminded me that my late friend, the poet and playwright Assotto Saint, encouraged me and others to start organizing our materials while we were still able to. Unfortunately, I haven't done it yet but it's at the top of my to-do list.

In 1990, I interviewed Mr. Nash via telephone for an article in the New York Amsterdam News about the dance pioneer Pearl Primus. He had been a dancer in her company in the late nineteen-forties. I remember him thanking me for keeping her memory alive. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my article was included in his vast archive.

Unmade Black Projects

The following black experience-related film and stage projects proposed by black entertainers were mentioned in the press but so far they have not been made:

1. Spike Lee (director)--A biopic about the 1938 boxing rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling; A film adaptation of Porgy and Bess.

2. Barry Jenkins (director)--A biopic about the choreographer Alvin Ailey.

3. Jon Batiste (musician/composer)--A Broadway musical based on the life of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

4. Alicia Keys (singer/pianist)--A biopic about the biracial piano prodigy Philippa Schuyler, whose father was the Harlem Renaissance writer and critic George Schuyler.

5. Jesse L. Martin (actor)--A biopic about the R & B singer Marvin Gaye.

Hollywood Confidential

Mike Rothmiller, a former LAPD detective and the co-author of the true crime book, Bombshell: The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Monroe (Ad Lib Publishers, 2021), said on a nationally broadcast radio talk show that the vice squad of the LAPD in the 1940s and 1950s kept detailed dossiers on Hollywood movie stars and others in the movie capital by order of the police chief. Those files, it would be safe to assume, probably surpassed anything Kenneth Anger revealed in his gossip-filled books, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II. Let's hope those dossiers (which probably included photographs) weren't destroyed because they would be of immense interest to historians, biographers, and movie fans. 

Higher Education And Black Gay Men

There's always talk about college enrollment among black men being outpaced by black women. No one breaks it down further by comparing black gay men to their black straight counterparts. I suspect that black gay men, being overachievers, account for the majority of black male enrollment and graduation. Most of my black gay friends and acquaintances are college grads. Am I off track on this or not?