I Bet You Didn't Know... (Part 2)

It would be impossible for me to compile a bibliography of the scholarly and literary work of black gay men without acknowledging perhaps one of, if not the most important, figure in the history of black gay men's literature and that is of course, Joseph F. Beam.

I first encountered Beam's landmark work, In the Life when I was 20. I no longer recall what led me to this volume. I felt myself pulled in the same way I imagine birds are pulled South in wintertime or the way the tide is pulled by the gravity of the moon, by some unknown force, some biological or ecological necessity.

In the Life was in a solid maroon binding with white block letters along the spine. It blended perfectly with every other book on the shelves of the University Library. Yet, to me, it was so clearly unlike any other book on the shelf. I remember being puzzled because I expected it to be difficult to find. I expected it to be hidden or under guard, like most other images of black gay men at the time.

I believe that any black gay man who truly desires to be both at the same time can only go so far and so long until his sanity requires him to look in a mirror, to see himself reflected back. It takes some much longer than others, some it takes no time at all and others still go all their lives unvexed by an absence of self.

There is no correct path. Each path we walk is the path we must take, there is no other. We are who we are supposed to be. So in my case, it was only a matter of time before I became so starved for the sound of another black gay man's voice and words that I would have walked much farther than I actually ended up having to.

I devoured the book like the first crust of bread to a famished mouth. In the Life was a communion and a welcome, an unequivocal acknowledgement that I was not a product of my own imagination and perhaps most importantly that, at least a far as black gay men are concerned, I was not and am not one of kind, a fiction I valiantly challenge everyday as a black gay man in 2011.

When I think about the enormous courage it must have taken for a black gay man to compile an anthology of the work of other black gay men in America in 1985, my spine stiffens a little toward my own work. I simply have to point people to information that, for the most part by now, has been thoroughly documented. I have Google. I have library databases accessible by computer. Beam and others created something from nothing in a more hostile social environment than, I pray, I will ever know.

In the aftermath of the overturning of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' in the U.S. Armed Forces and the legalization of gay marriage in New York state, we reach a summit many may have doubted we would ever reach. And while we rejoice in justice we must remain ever-vigilant. The summit of one mountain is the foot of another.

And in our vigilance we must also attend the ways justice is diffused along the fault lines of race and class and gender and sexuality.

Even as our world curves toward justice in the same way our planet's path is guided by gravity, I still must do this work. Because even as we live in a substantially more equitable world, indeed more equitable than many past worlds, I am still largely invisible.

I have learned to greet this truth with a shrug and keep my focus on my work, to take courage from from my forbears. I take courage from people who struggled against the same headwinds I do now, who managed to speak despite their fear their voices would be swallowed by the gale.

I owe many things to many people. I strive to exceed their expectations. The wisdom of Luke bangs in my head like a bell: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." (Luke 12:48)

I owe something to Joseph Beam, much in fact. I strive to exceed his expectations: for what will be possible for black gay men to do, say and become in the future and for the future of black men's literature.

I bet you didn't know that in 1986 the first ever anthology of black gay men's writing was published by a man named Joseph Beam.

That's right. Titled In the Life, published by Allyson Press the book was considered a cultural hallmark by the gay and lesbian community but nevertheless was completely ignored by African-American critics and institutions.

Beam was born in Philadelphia and attended Franklin College, a small liberal arts school roughly 20 miles outside of Indianapolis and prior to his undergrad work he primarily attended parochial schools as he was baptized Catholic.

After leaving Franklin in the middle of a Masters in Communication in the early 1980s, Beam returned to his childhood home and worked in Giovanni's Rooom, a bookstore catering to gay and lesbian interests in Philadelphia. Shortly after beginning work at Giovanni's Room Beam's articles and short stories began appearing the gay press. In 1985 he became a consultant for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, joined the Executive Committee of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and became editor of their then new, though now defunct, Black/Out Journal.

In 1986 Beam began collecting submissions for In the Life, with the goal of countering the absence of positive images of gay men of color in the media and their exclusion from the social justice efforts of white gay rights activists.

Beam was working on a sequel to In the Life at the time of his death from HIV related illness in 1989. The work was later completed by Beam's mother and Beam's long-time friend and collaborator, Essex Hemphill. The work was published in 1991 and titled Brother to Brother, after one of Hemphill's own poems.

So many things to do. So very little time. And of that time so much is spent deciding upon what to do and when to do it.

So much has changed since the year 1989 and yet the lease on many black men's lives remains short indeed. From beyond I heed the counsel of those gone before, artists, thinkers, leaders, doers one and all: whatever there is to say, say it now; whatever there is to write, write it now, whatever there is to do, do it now.

To those who are one thing and many things; to those do not know; to those who refuse to know; to those who take some sustenance in this profile of courage.

And to Joseph Beam: this is for you.

Excerpt from "Dispatch from a McDonald's in Brooklyn:" An Open Letter to My Mother

"..."

I know that your concern for me is also a concern for our communities. I share your concern. I share your concern for strong black men and your desire for them to take leadership in our communities alongside black women and youth.

But lately as I grow into what I am confident is a strong black man, I have reasoned that this is not specific enough a request for our homes and communities and families. A strong black man is a ‘what’ not a how or a why.

There is little discussion about how black men may find and achieve this strength for themselves beyond the cliché.

We expect this strong black man to appear fully formed from our collective hopes and our collective scars. We expect him to know precisely what to do and how to do it. We all reach for this bright star called ‘strong black man’ not realizing that constellations’ s positions in the night sky shift according to where they are perceived from the Earth.

We stretch our hands upward and outward toward what we believe is the same star only to learn that my version of ‘strong black man’ is essentially your version except skewed a little to the left or right. We talk about ‘strong black man’ as though it is a fixed point but really all any one of us has is an educated guess.

There have been many strong black men, many of whom were exactly that and yet others who have been liars, cheaters, traitors, thieves and villains who still managed to retain the mantle of ‘strong black man.’

There are those black men who, having a need for support the community cannot or will not attend, are forced to do an (im)balancing act of self against community.

And those who would, as James Baldwin says ‘go the way their blood beats,’ leave the community and the community loses valuable capital in this man.

And those who submerge their sense of individual identity beneath sense of community, thinking they can resist their ‘blood beat’ become ‘strong black man’s’ negation: weak black man.

This is the man who lies and deceives, who misleads and pretends and thereby endangers his community not because he would deliberately destroy it but because his love of his community is so great that, for him, rejection from that community is to cease to exist.

Alternatively this is the man whose toils are unnoticed, whose heroism is unsung and whose contributions are unacknowledged. This is the man who would gladly throw himself beneath the bus for his community. This is the black genius that is undercapitalized, never actualized or quietly exploited.

Avoiding reprisal and rejection (social consequences) are often worth courting the deadly and destructive physical consequences of HIV/AIDS for these black men. And the imprint that this high price for inclusion leaves on black men, women, families and communities is a depression that has too long gone unaddressed. And in the same way strong black men are created by strong black communities, weak black communities likewise create weak black men, and weak black men, in their various manifestations, are a blight on the physical and social infrastructure of black communities everywhere.

The moral ramifications of these men’s actions l leave to the men themselves, the people affected by these men’s actions, to the individual hearts and minds of black people everywhere and to God.

I only know that any concept of community, if it is to have any meaning at all, must include me as I am. Any other notion of community is a fabrication; it would be an inorganic community incapable of sustaining life. This community could only stifle life. This community could not cultivate expression and honesty; it could only restrain it.

And what of the strong black female, without whom the strong black male could not exist? Whatever concerns him must also concern her.

The future rushes at us all at once like a wave and breaks over us like sea foam. The future, always pregnant with possibility and always on a collision course with our present, gives us anxiety because we exercise as little control over it as the oncoming tide.

We are so dizzy with possibility that we think we see stars and we do.

Black men and women today are presented with hitherto unheard of and unimagined possibilities and the shifts or key changes we hear and feel in our culture and in our communities is the release of new creativities, the unlocking of new possibilities and the germination of imagination.

Many are worried because no one knows what all this will come to. But this is what it means to be alive and to live to see a new day.

There are many fatalists who fret over the destiny of black people but they do not give black men and women much credit.

Strong black women will keep finding strong black men but these unions will only mean anything if they are based upon honesty and integrity. I have a feeling that no matter what black men do black women will continue doing what they have always done: living the best way they know how by going the way their blood beats.

I do not believe, as some do, that black men loving other men, particularly black men, in affirming relationships encompasses a failure of community. If anything, this points toward a collective male psychic healing, a gradual breaking of massive ice floes that have isolated many men (not only black men) from their emotions and further offers a direct challenge to the enormously chauvinist and often sexist values of ‘black macho’ culture into question.

In a world where black men readily kill, maim and fight each other, their families and communities, we could use a few more examples of brothers loving brothers in both romantic and platonic capacities—if for no other reason than to remind ourselves of something we desperately need to remember: that we are capable of loving and being loved. And further, that love of community begins with self-love.

I do not believe, as some do, that black women should feel robbed of black men who build romantic partnerships with other men. Black women, pragmatic as they are, would likely find themselves incompatible with such men, should they become available.

And insofar as reparative therapy is possible, I wonder, given the cultural climate regarding black men with ‘irregular sex lives’ (?), what practical black woman of the 21st century would want to become involved with such a man? Would you, Mother? Really? What if you had a daughter? Would she?

I do not believe most black women would.

I do not believe, Mother, that in your creation of Miss Ebony Brown, the exemplar of black womanly virtue, you have created ‘strong black man’s complement: ‘strong black woman.’

What you have created, Mother, is a black woman who is a passive object in her own life, who must first and always wait on a black man to come along and complete her.

In the short term she must cleave to the Lord and wait. In the long term, if no black man appears to fill the niche black community has carved for black man to fill in black woman’s life, black woman must lead a life devoted to God but divorced from body and desire because her community demands she subordinate her desire to community. She must first and always wait and pray for a black man, even as the community that instructs her to do so fails to produce suitable men or create the conditions for their emergence.

This black woman, Mother, Miss Ebony Brown sounds like no ordinary woman. Indeed, she sounds like a nun.

This is the problem with prescriptive definitions of community: many needs go arbitrarily unmet and we are told only that this is wheel of fortune and that in life there are no guarantees.

I save the Lord for last in this discussion because he is the most expansive part of it: to talk about events, to talk about people and our lives on this planet is to talk about the creations and the thread connecting all things, quite naturally, is the Creator.

Standing on a hill and looking backward and downward we see the slope of history, a gradual coming up from an archaic spirituality to a modern definition of Christianity.

Things are not as they were in days of old and it is foolish to pretend as though they are. Yet God’s word is the same today, yesterday and forever more. And were any of us to hear God speak for himself I have no doubt we would all hear the ring of eternal verity in that voice.

Unfortunately we only hear God speak through people and thus it becomes impossible to distinguish the messenger from the message. Those who would hear the voice of God must question the conduit of that voice and pray for the wisdom to discern dilutions and impurities farther upstream.

In the end one must measure the truth of any proposition against one’s own heart and pray that one hear God’s voice for oneself.

God answers prayer.

Many have heard his voice and done his will.

Many have killed; many have burned; many have pillaged; many have ruined; many have destroyed; many have oppressed in the name of God and his will.

To be even an average student of history is to acknowledge that the will of God has variously justified everything from poverty and keeping the pulpit a men’s only club, to the enslavement of people across the globe, the disenfranchisement of women and black people to sundry plots of extermination by history’s most ruthless regimes.

I do not question that the men and women who participated in these atrocities did not hear some voice within. I question whether this voice was that of God. And absent any means to authenticate voice-of-God experiences, I will continue to attend not how loudly someone proclaims the righteousness of their cause or how many hours they spend in prayer but rather their actions and the consequences of those actions.

I do not believe it is God’s will that we be racists, sexists, classists, homophobes and xenophobes. I do not believe it is God’s will that we create societies in which we all scramble for a first class citizenship while cleaving to the right to oppress others we deem less deserving than ourselves. I believe that God is just and that his will bends toward justice.

If we can know anything it is that the voice of God is apt to take as many forms as our own voices and for each instance of that voice to be as different as our own voice is from our neighbors. The wisdom of Thessalonians sounds as a bugle: ‘Prove all things. Hold fast to what is true.' (Thessalonians 5:21)

But even to speak of truth as a fixed quantity is treacherous. Once upon a time the world was flat; now it isn’t.

The truth is as hard to know as the voice or the face of God. To experience it requires sensitivity and vigilance. This is what is meant by ‘watch and pray.’

To those who grapple with whether God truly wants an equal, just and loving society, it is, as always, a matter of choice. The is the meaning of ‘…choose this day whom you will serve.’ This is not merely an edict commanding us to choose whom we will serve but how we will serve and to what our service will be put: to love and justice or to hate and injustice.

As I close this letter I wonder if I’ve said it all, if all of it can even be said and above all, if I’ve said it right. I worry about who my audience is: myself, of course; I write to remind myself of things I need to remember but also for my family and my communities.

I wonder if they will understand. I wonder if they will understand wanting to be understood. But they must for much of the audience of this letter is black and to be black is to often be misunderstood.

In Sunday school we are instructed to let our little lights shine. This is easy when you are a child because children often shine all on their own. I’m beginning to think this song was written for adults.

In dark and loveless world, shining is a difficult thing to do. And since we all experience light differently, recall the last time someone tried to convince you something green was in fact blue, its often hard to know when those around us are shining and even harder to know when we are trying to block or cover that light.

In this way we are all blind. All of us, equally, are never really quite sure we’re seeing what we’re seeing; our vision is impaired simply because we are human. How do we know the light of truth when we are in its presence? How do we know when we are seeing the true brilliance of those we love? The same way the truly blind know the light of the sun though they can’t see it, because of the energy of its presence, because of its ability to envelope us and penetrate us with its warmth.

Preface... (I Bet You Didn't Know) Part 1

What this blog has been for me, what it continues to be for me, is a charting of waters: sometimes black, sometimes gay, sometimes both but always water muddied by history and culture, always water struggling to maintain purity against pollutants dumped upstream.

But I worry. Even as I realize these thoughts and impressions are my stream, my cooling water, I worry that this place, this blog is not accessible.

We speak about the 'left', 'those on the left', 'leftists' as though this is a specific and defined point, rather than a whole region of identity.
There are many lefts, like the arms of the Hindu god Vishnu, we all swirl and blurr into one. But this is, of course, an illusion.

And when I descend into the specific, (the black, the gay, the whatever) I risk narrowing the ‘accessibility’ of this blog. ‘Accessibility’ here, as elsewhere, means the ability of this blog to be read and enjoyed by ‘everyone’ ‘everywhere.’

I have never seen how this could ever be possible but the ‘accessible’ and the ‘universal’ is what every artist is told, in one way or another, that they should strive for. The consequence of inaccessible, is people’s failure to ‘get it.’

If people don’t ‘get it’ then where would I be?

Well, in much the same place I started, silent, alone, angry and bereft of language. At least, I reason, in speaking my own language I can be understood by myself which is, at least, as important as being understood by anyone else.

So, as the adage goes, 'Everything ain’t for everybody.' And maybe this blog falls under that heading. And even if it does, that doesn’t mean it can’t do service for someone, even if that someone is me 10 years in the past, a young adult searching for meaning, a young man looking for his reflection, that would be enough.

This meditation is the preface to, perhaps, one of the most important projects in my young life: a selected bibliography of scholarly and literary work by black gay men. I take up this project because we are easy and yet hard to find, because we are spread out, because we are unique, because we are angry, self-loving and self-hating, because we straddle so many fences and borderlines and still find reasons to smile, because I have to hike way uptown, or to the Bronx, to find Joseph Beam’s In the Life, or find the time to descend into the non-circulating special collection of the Public Library on Forty-Second Street to find myself, because we are hidden, because we are silent, because we are worth knowing.


I bet you didn't know that a black gay man was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose work under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., raised the call for African-American equality to fever pitch, exemplified by King's 'I Have A Dream' speech.

His name was Bayard Rustin. Reared in western Pennsylvania and in both Quaker and AME traditions, Rustin played a fundamental role in the work of The Society of Friends, the Communist Party of the United States of America and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), all of whom had enormous stake in the struggles for equality undertaken by the African-American community in the United States in the mid-20th century.

In the late 1940s Rustin traveled to India to learn strategies of non-violent social change directly from leaders of the Ghandian movement, strategies on which he would later advise Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; in fact, it was Rustin who formally introduced the concept of non-violent resistance to the organizing efforts of Dr. King.

Because Rustin was, and remained, candid about his (homo)sexuality, the establishment African-American political leadership worried Rustin's sexuality and former Communist leanings would 'undermine' the US Civil Rights movement. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African-American man elected to the US House of Representatives from New York, forced Rustin to resign from the SCLC by threatening to discuss a 'morals' charge Rustin had plead guilty to in California. This maneuver ousted Rustin from a social justice organization he was instrumental in creating.

An FBI photo of Rustin talking with Dr. King while in the tub, obtained and publicized by Senator Strom Thurmond, led to allegations that King's and Rustin's relationship was (homo)sexual. Both men vehemently denied the allegations but Roy Wilkins, then chairman of the NAACP, wanted Rustin' to receive no credit for organizing the March on Washington.

Thus Bayard Rustin's name was, has been and continues to be stricken from the course of American history.

I did no reports on him during Sunday School in February. Nor do I hear Bayard Rustin trivia announced on R&B stations during Black History Month. I did not hear about him in my US History classes. I could be paranoid but I detect a note of conspiracy between rather unlikely bedfellows.

Bayard talks with youngsters before a demonstration.

What is perhaps most remarkable of all is that Rustin continued to be a voice for African-American equality after the historic march and for gay and lesbian equality during the latter part of the 20th century until his death in 1987, despite being variously marginalized by both the African-American and gay communities.

In many ways the experience of Rustin as gay person of color presages our current difficulties discarding the fallacy of a single and fixed identities. The failure to attend various overlapping regions, border zones and pluralities, cultural, sexual, racial, political and otherwise, continues to stymie legitimate attempts to transform our societies into more just and equitable places to live.

Multiplicities nearly always encompass our blind spots, our afterthoughts: those things which are not immediately, if ever, considered in social justice thinking. In fact, these blind spots are often indexes of how we, those who be the world-changers, must also change in order to effect the healing we all desperately need and claim to want.

To those who are one thing and many things; to those do not know; to those who refuse to know; to those who take some sustenance in this profile of courage.

And to Bayard Rustin: this is for you.

For further reading by or about Bayard Rustin see the titles below:

• Down The Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
  Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1971
• From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement
  New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1965
• Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
  San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003

Power Plays

He spoke of anger and isolation.

He thought perhaps his friends were right--that he blew things out of proportion, that he and not oppression was the problem.

"If you can take a dick, you can take a joke," --Anonymous Straight Man

He confessed finding no haven among gay friends who, largely, echoed the same clarion call of straight jokesters and jeerers to 'ligthen up.'

And perhaps he could lighten up, if he was not so confident that if he did, he would be destroyed. But he is smarter than that. He knows that his every breath and step and word is an act of defiance and challenge. His existence, his body is a realm of constantly contested space. These contests are (in no particular order):

• over whether he was born as he is or recruited;
• whether he deserves equal protection under the laws of his nation;
• whether he ought to enjoy the same liberties to the same extent as his straight fellows;
• whether he is a threat to our most cherished (?) social and cultural institutions;
• whether he should exist or been seen or heard at all....

But he is smarter than that. For he knows if he left the question of his personhood and individual liberty to straight people he would surely die. He would suffer cultural erasure, his name and body stricken from the course of history. Or perhaps he would simply be murdered.

So the only choice is to endure: to be as relentless as violence, relentless as fear, relentless as bigotry for they do not sleep. This is why he looks so tired.

But to be a tireless counter to violence and oppression is to be gnat swooping at the forehead of Goliath. It is to be a buzzkill. Because to be a tireless counter to violence and oppression is to never let us forget that there is always a choice to consent or to protest that same violence and oppression. Moreover, it is to remind us that we are all marked by our modes of seeing, being and knowing and there is no meridian separating ourselves from our culture.

There are no good people and there are no bad people. There are only those who participate. Sitting on the sidelines does not make us any less part of the game; abstinence offers us no spiritual absolution from the sins of our day.

'They need a course in gay politics,' he moaned. 'All they want is to be straight....'

Perhaps it was true that his less enlightened gay brethren, in the end, merely wanted to be straight. But first shouldn't we ask: if you are a gay person anywhere on the face of the planet, is wanting to be straight such a terrible thing?

There are a million things wrong with this proposition of course. A gay man 'wanting to be straight' has many meanings. However, this statement illustrates the way status is conflated with behavior in our society. Heterosexuality, and inversely homosexuality, describes behavior but both are perceived as status.

If to be straight is to not have to think about it, then a gay person 'wanting to be straight' at the most basic level means wanting that fearlessness, that unchallenged and assumed right to exist that gay people experience as straightness.

Indeed gay people everywhere might 'need' a course in politics but what balm could mere politics be to our individual and collective scars?

"...For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high [places]." --Ephesians 6:12

Ido not believe the answer to our problems, these are the problems of the day not just the gay ones, is in any sense political. Material changes in our society: in institutions, legal systems and norms reflect the desire to remove the visible barriers to a freer, more open, loving and equitable society. Recall: we do not wrestle with flesh and blood but with principalities, with the realm of the immaterial. It's easy to integrate your lunch counter, less so to integrate your mind.

The legal landscape alters according to who is in what office or who sits on the bench. The history of law, indeed of humankind, is as much progress as retrogression. Legal solutions are necessary but, by themselves, insufficient to change our world on the elemental level at which it needs changing.

Whether two gay men want to live in the suburbs, have a two car garage, a dishwasher and 2.5 children and live largely apolitical lives, is neither my business nor my concern.

Everyone deserves the lives they want. What is worrisome for me is that everyone, whether privileged or oppressed, is conditioned to respect the prevailing vector of power. What is worrisome for me is that I can be told by straight men and gay men to bend over for homophobia.

I am reminded of a story I heard from a straight friend whose brother who is gay.

Steve was hanging out with his fiancee's father in NYC. The father, from small town Kentucky, thought it cute to walk the streets of Chelsea and point out all the 'fags' to my friend. (As if it would be that difficult in any case.)

Now my friend, a straight man, nice guy, and with a gay brother, was offended but his future father-in-law persisted in his afternoon 'fag-spotting.'

'And what did you do?' I asked.

'I didn't do anything,' he said. 'I probably should have said something, right?'

If there is, as I am often told, some great arc of oppression with the multiply subordinated (the gay, the black, the female,) at some point on the extremities, then Steve, whether he wishes to be or not, is situated at its center.

Here is a white straight man,incensed by this narrative of abuse toward all gay people and his brother specifically, still paralyzed by a need to respect homophobia as 'culture' writ large.

If indeed Steve is at the center of the arc, what was he so afraid of?

The vague answer is: a confrontation. Like most civil people we are taught not to rock the boat. We are taught to respect culture, if that culture is violent, intolerant or greedy it is irrelevant.And no matter what face on the spinning coin of oppression we occupy (privilege or oppression), no matter what our intentions or our politics, we are taught to respect the prevailing vector of power.

We have all been very good students.

We're taught to respect big over small

male over female

rich over poor

white over black

straight over gay

bigotry over sensitivity, compassion, love and brotherhood.

In this opportunity for resistance, how could Steve, as a good student of culture, see love as a legitimate challenge to homophobia? How could any of us?

"...we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language...while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us." --Audre Lorde

It begins and ends with a choice of what to respect: love or fear, which is the opposite of love.

It was a hot day in June and I had taken him to the Long Island City waterfront. We looked across the East River as Manhattan glittered in the afternoon heat. I wanted to kiss him but there was a slightly overweight woman eating her lunch some fifty yards away who watched us very closely. And there were two construction workers about thirty yards away from us down the pier. And a woman pushing a stroller. And a group of co-workers chatting idly on the way back to the office. And a group of tourists taking pictures against the Manhattan skyline. And there were no shadows, no trees or shade to abscond to. Just the blue sky. And the bright sun.

And the woman eating lunch who watched us very closely. In that moment I too was paralyzed by my desire to show this man affection and my fear of what would happen if I did. Would the construction workers sneer, jeer? Would the lady confront us? Would all or any of them? Who else might see and be repulsed? Have their day ruined by two fags kissing on the waterfront in broad daylight? Who might perform their civic duty to police us? And would I be able to resist?

In the end I chose to respect love more than fear and kissed him. And that moment was heady and electric with danger, as most genuine moments of resistance, as many instances of gay life. To be gay is to live on the edge of so many knife-points, yet somehow have life retain its goodness.

In the end this is the only choice for all of us: that of love over fear. Many will laugh. This is because they have been good students, because they have learned that love is an inadequate challenge to nearly everything. And to the extent that they continue to teach these lessons to themselves and others, they will continue to be hemmed in by fear; there will be a bogeyman behind every door and there will be no escape.

Existence

I think I know what the problem is. The problem is: I'm suddenly this thing called a 'black gay man' and this doesn't seem like it should be news but it is and that is the problem.

Theproblem is that I do not exist. This is confusing. I understand. I was confused. For a while at least.

But how can that which does not exist express?

How indeed?

Let's call me a specter, rather, an optical illusion: that trick of light that exists only when we experience it.

That is what I am--now you see me; now you don't. Now I see me; now I don't.

I am as invisible to myself as I am to you.

Briefly consider a moment: a thing which does not exist which cannot see itself and cannot be seen until it is experienced.

And then you would not need to ask me questions because then you would know what it is to be me.

I will put it to you again: black gay man. If you cannot conceive of such a thing, I do not blame you. It has taken me close to 30 years to arrive at what a black man is; it may take me another 30 years to arrive at what a gay man is.

Maybe when I am 90 I will arrive at what a black gay man is, an exquisite union that is like Kool Aid perfectly mixed, and look back from that hill at life seeing all that I only glimpsed or vaguely understood, guessed at or imagined.

I will put it to you a third time: black gay man. Have you seen one? Did you take a picture? Get an autograph? Did you commemorate this encounter? If yours is an untrained eye you may not likely see one again.

Is a black gay man your friend? Really? Your brother, cousin, son, uncle, nephew or grandson? What is the shape and texture of his life? Have you bothered to ask? Have you stopped to wonder? Or are you busy being an accomplice to his (en)forced invisibility at funerals, family reunions and church homecomings? Muttering 'there's no such thing as ghosts,' as you blankly ask what he's been up to?

Is a black gay man your lover? Was he a black gay man when you met him? Before or after you first made love?

Black gay man. Say it aloud. Hold it in your mouth. Swish it around like listerene until it burns you with its acid specificity.

If it feels like you are being beaten over the head its because you are. It's only fair. I am beaten over the head with Helzberg diamonds and sacred straight marriages. I am beaten over the head with gay as deviancy, disease, perversion or unfit to exist. I am beaten over the head with skinny melon breasted white women in Victoria's Secret as the gold standard of feminine beauty and pearly toothed muscle queens as the gay identity. I am beaten over the head with why my cell phone has an inadequate number of Gs and how now, for a limited time only, I can get two phones for the price of one!

I will beat you over the head with my gay blackness. I will hammer it into your skull like glowing metal. Because like a good person you have invited me into your mind and I have a small window in which to scratchitti my name in your grey matter so you do not forget me. This is our only chance.

Yes our.

For we are in this thing together.

My desire to be seen is not sufficient to make me appear to you.

You must make a choice. I am offering it to you now. And I am scared for you because you may not have this opportunity again.

Here goes.

I would like to know you. And I would like you to know me. We could share things: secret things, not-so-secret-things, jokes, recipes, meals, pieces of fruit. Perhaps we might become lovers; perhaps we might become friends. In either case we would both regain a sixpence of our humanity. For have all been robbed of this wealth, are being robbed of it everyday--not just me. If you did not know this, if this is news to you, then you are nearly bankrupt already and, perhaps, in more trouble than I.

But what I would like most from our acquaintance is for you to believe in me so that I may exist for you and you for me and thereby we may enrich each other. For what I crave most, as a starving man for a crust of bread, is a sense of reality.

There it ends.

You are blessed and cursed. Few are afforded this opportunity. Everything henceforward, everything proceeding from this moment is indisputably your choice.

Now you cannot say: 'I did not know,' 'I was never asked,' 'No one told me,' 'I have never seen.'

Many can say this though and relish the saying as an incantation to ward off the bogeymen.

This is understandable. There are many bogeymen. This is not, however, excusable.

I expect more from you. I have to. You are my only hope.

If you have the privilege (yes, privilege) of knowing or loving a black gay man, hug him. This is not therapy; it is called love.

When you hug him, hug him deeply--press yourself into his blackness. Do not be afraid. If you are lucky some of him will rub off on you. If he is lucky some of you will rub off on him. If we are all lucky this friction will ignite electric echoes of healing around the world.

If you have the privilege (yes, privilege) of knowing or loving a black gay man, if he is your friend and you are drinking beer or wine, if he is your lover and you are laying in the dark or it is Tuesday morning and he is patting himself down after a shower, look at him: and for no reason (or for every reason in the world) say 'Black is beautiful.' This is not therapy. It is called love.

He will laugh quizzically. Your job, friend or lover, is simply to smile broadly at him and let this truth wash over you like a tide.

He needs to hear this, ever if he doesn't know it;I know it and that is enough. Because for all the things he may have been beaten over the head with, he hasn't been beaten nearly enough with that.

Status Update from Goethe....

Until one is committed
There is hesitancy, the chance to draw back
Always ineffectiveness.


Concerning all acts of initiative (and Creation)
There is one elementary truth
The ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

That the moment that one definitely commits ones self
Then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one
That would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision
Raising in one’s favor all manner
Of unforeseen incidents and meetings
And material assistance
Which no man could have dreamt
Would have come his way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Begin it now.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Mutations

it must be loneliness
that is the common thought
the suns and seasons of my regret
chasing themselves
like wild dogs

in the snow of my failure I
write my name
trace my path to bury

this is the dream I have
at day I see my face
rise and burn above me
diffuse & used up what
has all my life remained
half hidden half
seen

the face harbors
itself like a criminal
what damage it suffers
cannot be undone

Two Liberation Conversations

The topic was social justice. And whether the prophecy of real-estate developers Long Island City would ever manifest: if the neighborhood would indeed, come up.

We shrugged and decided in the end they would keep building half-million dollar condos there and everywhere whether the neighborhood in question had any redeeming qualities.

Half-million dollar condos are their own justification.

Is this what is meant by 'If you build it they will come?'

The topic was social justice.And whose backs you had to massage if you were a massage therapist who wanted a half-million dollar condo in Long Island City.

He told me a story of a classroom of budding massage therapists: many of them queer or black or brown or poor—all of them the members of the new underclass: overeducated and under-employed—and how each of them, for better or worse fancied themselves the masseur or masseuse of some old white lady from Park Avenue, a raisiny body smelling of Chanel No. 5 and talcum powder.

She walks the dog each morning and makes polite conversation with the doorman, who is a nice doorman in spite of his saucy Latino patois. Her conversations with the doorman who brings her mangoes sometimes means that she 'doesn't have a problem with them' and thinks 'they're great' and wouldn't mind giving them amnesty if 'they'' all became nice doormen like 'oh-what-was-his-name?'

She and her husband--an investment banker named Bud would argue about it: amnesty, what the doorman's name was, whether the doorman was an illegal.

She never takes off her pearls for a massage. Being naked under the towel, simple black Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress draped someplace behind her, being here with someone nondescriptly clothed who was--well--middle class—she requires a badge of her identity. Her pearls always stays on.

This was who the budding massage therapists—all of them members of the new underclass—thought they had to work for in order to be successful.

Not successful. Put it baldly: rich.

To them wealth was a rose bush. Pretty to look at, painful to touch. They all thought about justice. They all had worked, were working or would work in non-profits with noble missions.
They all were...put it baldly: broke.

It is hard to be a thinking feeling person and not have a thorny relationship with wealth.
Often if you have wealth and you are a thinking feeling person you spend time feeling ashamed, denying you have it or pretending it doesn't matter.

Often if you don't have wealth and you are a thinking feeling person, you've probably never had it and spent your life beneath a penumbra of privation.

You develop a cynical attitude toward money because this is the intelligent attitude to have:but you still want it.

But you still don't want it because of the injustice, filth and waste often associated with it.

Sitting in a nondescript Long Island City bar drinking Miller High Life and musing about justice reminded me of undergrad and of a more imaginative self.The strategy at 18 or 21 was: subvert the dominant paradigm at all cost.That the dominant paradigm could be subverted was not an open question.

The epiphany at 27 or 30 was: get with the program; you are not a child; this is the way of the world; welcome to the jungle.

I expected to die this death.I just didn't expect to die it so soon.

I was reminded of another justice conversation I had had recently. With another liberal queer. In another nondescript bar.

I need to get new friends or drink faster.

The conversation spiraled like the curve of a nautilus shell, folding into a tighter and tighter coil.

I would always be among the most wretched of the earth as a gay black man and above me the yoke of oppression lightened in stair step fashion until one reached the plateau of the omniscient white straight male.

I remember stifling a yawn and thinking that this paradigm didn't reflect very inspired or imaginative thinking: that societies would forever be at tug of war with the whites/straights/moneyed/males having the upper-hand and at the opposite end of the rope everybody else heaving with all their might but nevertheless two tugs away from the mosh-pit of misery?

It was disheartening to hear this class of budding massage therapists—many of them queer or black or brown or poor—had hardly paused to consider a paradigm of wealth other than Park Avenue.

Somehow in this cosmic tug of war, we 'everybody elses' remain suspended in the moment just before that last great pull from the rearguard: muscles taut, teeth clenched, our heels carving canals in the soft lip of the pit.

But it never seems like we all put our backs into it. Not really.

We can only conceive of liberation in terms of oppression.If we are imprisoned in a dungeon with four walls and a door, what of creating another door? A 5th or 6th dimension which renders doors--and walls for that matter—useless? Growing new sets of arms, legs and heads, becoming revolutionary arachnids and Gorgons who laugh at chains and stockades?

We expect to subvert the institutions that oppress us by subscribing to a definition of power which only serves these institutions. We expect to respect (and thereby re-inscribe) the paradigms we fight against yet overcome them?

It does not serve a revolutionary to do or exchange power in a currency or on a marketplace not of his choosing; this is senseless.

Too often liberation has meant becoming conscious only to our oppressions and stopping short of our possibilities.What is worse is when oppressions are made to compete with one another for priority (?), as though one justified redress more than the other.

By the dawn of the 21st century one would hope we have deconstructed our oppressions to their lowest common denominator: we have all been hurt, hurt deeply.

Now may we begin?

Solutions? Anyone?

The principal thing to remember is: that we are the answer to our oppressions not merely an instance of them. I am the answer to racism and homophobia, much as I am marked by them. We are each the counter-voice, the counter-narrative, the counter-argument to those who would claim we do not exist, that we are no different, that our pain is imagined.

What each of us is not, however, is reducible to our individual or collective oppressions: to believe this is to validate the machinery that created niggers, faggots, cunts and others.

To create new languages, new tools, new weapons, new paradigms, new powers is to deconstruct the dungeon from within—to claw at rock and mortar for a purchase till our bloodied fingers pluck the first stone from the wall. From the space that opens, a sooty light pours into the dark.

Good Morning, Everyone...

"They fed their hearts on fantasies
And their hearts have become savage"

George Oppen, I think; a bastardization of Yeats's:

"We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare."

Good morning, fresh Bloggersphere!

Good Evening, Everyone....

"Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely..."
-- Lorraine Hansberry