September 1983. The date may not have much significance to many people but to Bruce Hall, a 29-year-old black gay man, it had profoundly changed his life, perhaps forever. That was when he went to his doctor with a temperature of 103 and throat thrush and was diagnosed as being among the 3,210 people with AIDS, a disease, says Leonard Brown, MD, of New York's Community Health Project, with a 40 percent mortality rate.
To Hall, a native of New York City, now living in Chicago, the diagnosis was unfair. Especially after years of abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and multiple sex partners. He had even quit smoking cigarettes. (Although during the interview in a Greenwich Village restaurant, Hall bought a pack of cigarettes and chain-smoked four of them. he attributed his smoking to nervousness caused by the interview. He later left the pack of unsmoked cigarettes on the table.) But none of that seemed to matter. He had to learn to live with a disease that not only debilitated its victim but also intensified homophobia and mass hysteria. These last two cost Hall his job.
He had known about AIDS for a long time. He just didn't think that he would get it. His black gay friends deluded themselves by thinking of AIDS as a white man's disease. They don't anymore.
However, Bruce Hall is a fighter. He says he doesn't want to live his life in a bubble, being afraid of everybody and everything. To counteract that feeling, he has put himself through a self-imposed physical fitness program involving bicycling 18 to 30 miles a day, lifting two 40-pound dumbbells up to one and a quarter hours a day, and much walking. He is also undergoing hypnosis, although he is not sure of its effectiveness against AIDS. In the past few months, Hall has seen a vast improvement in his weight and he has not caught any colds, he says, since the diagnosis.
Hall graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1977 with a B.A. in sociology. He is presently attending Loop College in Chicago where he is studying for a certificate that will enable him to counsel alcohol abusers.
Recently Hall delivered a presentation, with three other panelists, among them Dr. Brown, at an AIDS forum for the black gay community in the West Auditorium of Hunter College [in New York].
This excerpt is from an article about the late Bruce Hall. It was originally published in the New York Native in 1984.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Saturday, June 8, 2013
David Rothenberg, A Marathoner For Gays And Ex-Offenders
David Rothenberg, the openly gay founder and executive director of the New York-based Fortune Society, a self-help organization for ex-cons, was praised in Village Voice writer Jack Newfield's annual honor roll as "a marathoner for two of this city's most discriminated-against minorities--ex-prison inmates, and gays and lesbians." Many of Rothenberg's constituents could fall into both categories quite easily. And, in this society, to be black, gay, and an ex-con is to be triply stigmatized, triply persecuted.
The Fortune Society, says Rothenberg, reflects the population of the prisons, 80 percent black and Hispanic. Each year nearly 2,500 ex-inmates cross the Fortune Society's threshold in order to utilize its services: a job placement unit, a vocational training and educational program, and a juvenile unit, all run by a staff of 26 persons.
Rothenberg, 53, who grew up in middle-class comfort in New Jersey, and gave up a lucrative career as a Broadway press agent to run Fortune, has, writes Newfield, "continued to explain the casual relationship between crime and poverty."
Charles Michael Smith: Are prisons as they exist today anachronisms?
David Rothenberg: Yes, of course, they are anachronisms. But because they're old isn't why they're bad. They're bad because they don't work. The word "penitentiary" comes from [the word] "penitence." The idea of the penitentiary began with the Quakers who thought that if people had done bad or evil things, you lock them away. Then they would contemplate what they did. They would come out and be better. We've never really changed that concept. They don't become better, they become acclimated to that unnatural surrounding.
CMS: You've made the statement that there are bad acts, not bad people.
DR: I say that because i don't know who is to judge and rule out people from coming back into society. We have people who have come to the Fortune Society who have all the labels--beyond help, beyond redemption, incorrigible, career criminal--all of those labels that have been imposed on them by society. In a support system we've watched them change and grow, accept themselves and what they can do in society. Most of the people that work here are people who were written off by society at one point.
CMS: What about the relationship of poverty to crime?
DR: There are many poor people who don't commit crime. It's not the poorness, per se, that causes it but it creates the situation of child abuse, of neglect, of rage, of hunger, of denial, of resentment. Those are all the ingredients that work together. If you go through the prisons and you talk to people who are doing time there, you'll find out that overwhelmingly they are poor people. Which has a lot to do with the cost of justice as well. Street crime and person-to-person crime gets more severe punishment. That tends to be poor people. Whereas, what is called white collar crime tends to be more white people, more middle class and wealthy people. The reason for that is poor people don't have access to the books to do the embezzlement. A lot of our guys couldn't forge checks because they can't write. So they steal or what they mostly do is sell drugs.
CMS: Where do you stand on the death penalty issue?
DR: I'm one of the most consistent and frequent spokespersons against the death penalty. The simple fact is that 99.9 percent of the crimes that take place, the death penalty wouldn't be an issue. In fact, when people commit violent, horrible crimes, they are irrational, violent acts. To think that a logical deterrent which would affect reasonably thinking people is going to deter the irrational is absurd. If you're really offended by murder, then you can't be in favor of the government being in the business. If people are really concerned about reducing victims, we should spend a little more energy on gun control and the manufacture of guns. That's the real issue.
This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the New York Native in ca. 1985 or 1986.
The Fortune Society, says Rothenberg, reflects the population of the prisons, 80 percent black and Hispanic. Each year nearly 2,500 ex-inmates cross the Fortune Society's threshold in order to utilize its services: a job placement unit, a vocational training and educational program, and a juvenile unit, all run by a staff of 26 persons.
Rothenberg, 53, who grew up in middle-class comfort in New Jersey, and gave up a lucrative career as a Broadway press agent to run Fortune, has, writes Newfield, "continued to explain the casual relationship between crime and poverty."
Charles Michael Smith: Are prisons as they exist today anachronisms?
David Rothenberg: Yes, of course, they are anachronisms. But because they're old isn't why they're bad. They're bad because they don't work. The word "penitentiary" comes from [the word] "penitence." The idea of the penitentiary began with the Quakers who thought that if people had done bad or evil things, you lock them away. Then they would contemplate what they did. They would come out and be better. We've never really changed that concept. They don't become better, they become acclimated to that unnatural surrounding.
CMS: You've made the statement that there are bad acts, not bad people.
DR: I say that because i don't know who is to judge and rule out people from coming back into society. We have people who have come to the Fortune Society who have all the labels--beyond help, beyond redemption, incorrigible, career criminal--all of those labels that have been imposed on them by society. In a support system we've watched them change and grow, accept themselves and what they can do in society. Most of the people that work here are people who were written off by society at one point.
CMS: What about the relationship of poverty to crime?
DR: There are many poor people who don't commit crime. It's not the poorness, per se, that causes it but it creates the situation of child abuse, of neglect, of rage, of hunger, of denial, of resentment. Those are all the ingredients that work together. If you go through the prisons and you talk to people who are doing time there, you'll find out that overwhelmingly they are poor people. Which has a lot to do with the cost of justice as well. Street crime and person-to-person crime gets more severe punishment. That tends to be poor people. Whereas, what is called white collar crime tends to be more white people, more middle class and wealthy people. The reason for that is poor people don't have access to the books to do the embezzlement. A lot of our guys couldn't forge checks because they can't write. So they steal or what they mostly do is sell drugs.
CMS: Where do you stand on the death penalty issue?
DR: I'm one of the most consistent and frequent spokespersons against the death penalty. The simple fact is that 99.9 percent of the crimes that take place, the death penalty wouldn't be an issue. In fact, when people commit violent, horrible crimes, they are irrational, violent acts. To think that a logical deterrent which would affect reasonably thinking people is going to deter the irrational is absurd. If you're really offended by murder, then you can't be in favor of the government being in the business. If people are really concerned about reducing victims, we should spend a little more energy on gun control and the manufacture of guns. That's the real issue.
This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the New York Native in ca. 1985 or 1986.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
A Leap Into Eternity
In the introduction to For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough (Magnus Books, 2012), the enjoyable anthology edited by Keith Boykin, he ponders about Tyler Clementi, the gay young man who leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. "As I drive across the George Washington Bridge one night from Manhattan to the CNBC World Headquarters in New Jersey, I looked down over the bridge and imagined what it must have felt like to jump 212 feet into the raging Hudson River below."
Fifty years earlier, James Baldwin no doubt had the same thoughts about his friend Eugene Worth who leaped from the same bridge in the late 1940s. Baldwin recreated that act in his 1962 novel Another Country. In that book, Baldwin had the character Rufus leap from the GWB at the end of Chapter One. Boykin could have put himself in the shoes of Clementi and Rufus as he read the following description by Baldwin: "...and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind,...."
I wanted to include these passages in my online review of For Colored Boys, but I couldn't see how to fit it in seamlessly.
Fifty years earlier, James Baldwin no doubt had the same thoughts about his friend Eugene Worth who leaped from the same bridge in the late 1940s. Baldwin recreated that act in his 1962 novel Another Country. In that book, Baldwin had the character Rufus leap from the GWB at the end of Chapter One. Boykin could have put himself in the shoes of Clementi and Rufus as he read the following description by Baldwin: "...and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind,...."
I wanted to include these passages in my online review of For Colored Boys, but I couldn't see how to fit it in seamlessly.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Fifteen Minutes Of Fame
Gary Morston
XXX West 141st Street
New York, NY 10031
May 10, 1995
Dear Gary:
I guess Andy Warhol was right--everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. That article about you in the June issue of Essence was your 15 minutes of fame. I was glad to see it. All these years I've been wondering what happened to you. The last time I remember seeing you, you were living in Brooklyn and working the counter at the Oscar Wilde bookstore.
You may remember that we first met through a personal ad your friends placed in the New York Native. That was in 1983. I later ran into you at that year's Gay Pride Parade on, I believe, Weehawken Street [in Greenwich Village].
The strange thing about the article is that it never mentions you as a gay man, which is how I remember you identifying yourself. In the article you're quoted as saying "not many women have shied away when they learn I'm a single dad." Maybe you were bisexual all the time. Maybe you didn't want to out yourself in a national magazine. Anyway, I'm glad you're alive and well and parenting.
I hope we can stay in touch (my number is on the reverse side, which is a copy of a call for submissions flyer for a book of essays that will be published in the fall of this year. I started editing the book two years ago. [The book was Fighting Words, which was published in 1999 by Avon Books.] I always enjoyed our phone conversations, especially about education. [Gary was a schoolteacher.] The name Piaget (correct spelling?), the guy who was an education theorist, always brings you to mind because you were the first one who told me about him.
Say hello to your son Corinthian for me.
Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith
XXX West 141st Street
New York, NY 10031
May 10, 1995
Dear Gary:
I guess Andy Warhol was right--everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. That article about you in the June issue of Essence was your 15 minutes of fame. I was glad to see it. All these years I've been wondering what happened to you. The last time I remember seeing you, you were living in Brooklyn and working the counter at the Oscar Wilde bookstore.
You may remember that we first met through a personal ad your friends placed in the New York Native. That was in 1983. I later ran into you at that year's Gay Pride Parade on, I believe, Weehawken Street [in Greenwich Village].
The strange thing about the article is that it never mentions you as a gay man, which is how I remember you identifying yourself. In the article you're quoted as saying "not many women have shied away when they learn I'm a single dad." Maybe you were bisexual all the time. Maybe you didn't want to out yourself in a national magazine. Anyway, I'm glad you're alive and well and parenting.
I hope we can stay in touch (my number is on the reverse side, which is a copy of a call for submissions flyer for a book of essays that will be published in the fall of this year. I started editing the book two years ago. [The book was Fighting Words, which was published in 1999 by Avon Books.] I always enjoyed our phone conversations, especially about education. [Gary was a schoolteacher.] The name Piaget (correct spelling?), the guy who was an education theorist, always brings you to mind because you were the first one who told me about him.
Say hello to your son Corinthian for me.
Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
On The Outside Looking In
Letters to the Editor
Time Out New York
475 10th Avenue, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10018
August 11, 2006
Dear Editor:
In her letter, Jennifer Gilchrist accuses TONY of racially stereotyping the residents of Bed-Stuy along racial lines (white wealth vs. black poverty). But Gilchrist herself is guilty of stereotyping. She writes that in "the wealthiest areas of Bed-Stuy...the vast majority of residents are middle-class and upper-middle-class African-Americans." First of all, being middle-class does not mean that one is wealthy. Secondly, she's on the outside looking in. How many of those "wealthy" African-Americans are struggling to maintain a middle-class life for themselves and their families? How many of them are living paycheck to paycheck attempting to keep up with many financial obligations (credit card debt, car payments, mortgages, school tuition, medical expenses, etc.) while at the same time trying to save enough for a comfortable retirement? As the saying goes, looks can be deceiving.
Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith
This letter was not published.
Time Out New York
475 10th Avenue, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10018
August 11, 2006
Dear Editor:
In her letter, Jennifer Gilchrist accuses TONY of racially stereotyping the residents of Bed-Stuy along racial lines (white wealth vs. black poverty). But Gilchrist herself is guilty of stereotyping. She writes that in "the wealthiest areas of Bed-Stuy...the vast majority of residents are middle-class and upper-middle-class African-Americans." First of all, being middle-class does not mean that one is wealthy. Secondly, she's on the outside looking in. How many of those "wealthy" African-Americans are struggling to maintain a middle-class life for themselves and their families? How many of them are living paycheck to paycheck attempting to keep up with many financial obligations (credit card debt, car payments, mortgages, school tuition, medical expenses, etc.) while at the same time trying to save enough for a comfortable retirement? As the saying goes, looks can be deceiving.
Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith
This letter was not published.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
The Meaning Of Schmo
Here's an interesting word that's worth adding to your vocabulary--schmo, which means a boob or a jerk.
"Al Capp (born Caplan), the cartoonist and originator of the Li'l Abner comic strip, created the schmoo: a lovable creature who adores being kicked and gives milk as a reward for being abused."--from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish (2000).
"Al Capp (born Caplan), the cartoonist and originator of the Li'l Abner comic strip, created the schmoo: a lovable creature who adores being kicked and gives milk as a reward for being abused."--from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish (2000).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
